No Jews, no news: the hypocrisy of global outrage

While the world looks away, I’ve spent the past months writing about Sudan as a comparison. Still, silence. 

After Hamas’s brutal pogrom of October 7, 2023, Israel launched its war against the terror organization in Gaza. The reaction was immediate: streets from London to Los Angeles filled with protesters, waving flags, chanting slogans, demanding boycotts, sanctions, tribunals. Israel was branded an “apartheid state,” a “colonial power,” a “genocidal regime.” Politicians rushed to microphones, universities convened emergency meetings, artists severed ties, students dropped out in protest. The moral fire was global. 

Two years later, in Darfur, an entire population is being exterminated — and the world says nothing. No rallies, no marches, no Greta Thunberg wrapped in a scarf of solidarity. Only mass graves, starved children, raped women, and burned villages. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are cutting a path of blood through Sudan, village by village, in one of the most brutal ethnic cleansings of our time. The black population of Darfur is being wiped out by Arab militias who share the language of Islam and the profits of gold. And the world? Silent. 

Israel was accused of “genocidal conduct” while fighting a terrorist organization that hides behind its own civilians. In Darfur, genocide is not a metaphor — it is the daily reality. Whole communities are being erased for their skin color and their faith. Tens of thousands died in Gaza’s brutal war; in Darfur, a people is vanishing. Yet the streets of London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Brussels remain empty. 

No weekly protests. 

No boycotts of Sudan’s regime. 

No students withdrawing from universities because Khartoum sells its gold to Dubai. 

No UN commissions denouncing “systemic racial oppression” in Darfur. 

No hashtags. No moral frenzy. 

What happened in Gaza was horrific. But while Israel was treated as the embodiment of evil, Sudan’s killers are financed and shielded by Russia, Saudi Arabia, and likely Turkey. Egypt, ever pragmatic, helps move Darfur’s blood-gold to market — the same gold that funds the RSF’s killing machine. The starvation Israel was accused of imposing is, in Darfur, a deliberate weapon: food convoys blocked, aid workers shot, hospitals looted. Hunger as policy, rape as strategy, ethnicity as death sentence. 

Where are the self-proclaimed champions of human rights? Where is Greta Thunberg, who finds her voice when Israel bombs Hamas targets, but loses it when black Christians are slaughtered by Islamist militias? 

Where are the academic boycotts of Sudanese universities, he cancelled art residencies, the calls to dismantle “Arab colonialism” in Africa? Nowhere. 

The hypocrisy is total. 

When Israel fights, the world wakes up, when Arab Moslim militias kill, it goes back to sleep. 

We were told Gaza was “the worst humanitarian crisis of the century.” Yet Darfur is dying not because the UN lacks grain, but because armed men block the trucks. Babies starve not because of sanctions, but because bullets force the aid workers to turn back. The difference? Israel is visible, Darfur is not. Israel is white and Jewish enough to hate: no Jews, no news. Africa is too black, Darfur is too Christian, to care about. 

The United Nations, which adopted resolution after resolution against Israel, can barely muster a murmur over Sudan. No sanctions, no embargo, no global outrage. Moral passion seems reserved for those who speak English and appear on Western television. 

The West has two moral scales. 

Those who boycott Israel but stay silent about Darfur are not moral activists — they are moral performers. 

Those who call Israel an apartheid state but say nothing about the Arab racial hierarchy written in Darfur’s blood are not idealists — they are hypocrites. 

The truth is harsh: Israel fought a terrorist army that butchered its civilians. In Darfur, there is no Hamas — only Arab Moslim militias exterminating black, Christian, civilians, backed by powers that profit from chaos and gold. Yet in the Western imagination, Israel remains the devil, and Darfur an afterthought. 

Maybe it’s because there are no cameras in Darfur. No CNN helmets, no footage of crying children under rubble, no live feeds of airstrikes. No ready-made emotion for Instagram. And so — no engagement. 

It is the moral bankruptcy of our age. 

The world has a selective conscience. 

A Palestinian corpse counts ten times more than a Sudanese one. 

An Israeli bomb shocks more than a Sudanese machete. 

When history looks back on these years, it will not only remember the wars themselves, but the silence that surrounded them. The silence of a world that lost its voice when the cameras stopped rolling. The activists who confused morality with marketing. 

Darfur is worse than Gaza, but without hashtags. 

A genocide without boycotts. 

A real crisis without cameras. 

And that silence — that deafening silence — condemns us all.