by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Why are the influencers who said ‘black lives matter’ shamefully silent on the black lives lost in Sudan?
They’re actually calling it ‘the forgotten war’. Following the fall of Khartoum to the Sudanese army last week, the global commentariat has been wringing its hands over this ‘overlooked’ tragedy. They’re inviting us, finally, to ponder Sudan’s ‘forgotten crisis’, to reflect on what some refer to as the world’s worst humanitarian calamity. Our reporters found ‘fear, loss and hope in Sudan’s ruined capital’, said the BBC this week. To which the only reasonable reply is: what kept them? This war’s been raging for years and only now do you deign to cover it?
It is an act of incalculable gall for the media elites to call Sudan’s suffering ‘the forgotten war’. For this war wasn’t forgotten, it was erased – by them. It was ruthlessly relegated down the hierarchy of human suffering by a media class so drunk on its obsession and animus with Israel’s war in Gaza that it became blind to every other horror on Earth. It wasn’t forgetfulness that led the West’s cultural establishments to so pitilessly neglect the suffering of the Sudanese people – it was Israelophobia.