Posted by wslh 5 days ago
The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world. Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.” It appears the world only pays attention when Jews are involved.
An estimated 500,000 children have died from malnutrition alone since the Sudan conflict began in 2023[0]. Do you see people in Paris, Washington, or New York demanding an end to that conflict? We have not even accounted for deaths caused directly by the fighting.
Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties, yet all condemnation is directed at the IDF, which attempts to avoid civilian deaths, including by dropping leaflets before airstrikes[2]. No one seems to care that Hamas—the elected government of Gaza—is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way in a war it initiated. Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Sudan_(2024%E2%80%93...
[1]: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....
[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/16/middleeast/israel-leaflet...
That's a lie. It was front page news for a week in every major western newspaper. Just use the Wayback Machine to look at the headlines for that day.
> The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world.
Verifiably false.
> Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.”
Because we've seen time and time again the brutal methods the IDF uses to retaliate against the entire population of Gaza, employing collective punishment against innocents. And the protesters were sadly proven very right yet again.
> Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties [...] Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.
Surely even you realize that bombing a building when you know there are human shields held within is a bad thing, right? If you know there are innocent people in the blast radius of your bomb and you still fire the bomb, you are the villain in this story. The IDF has killed more civilians than Hamas has and it's not even remotely close, a difference of tens of thousands at minimum.
There is always a choice! The choice the RSF made today is entirely on them. Don’t try to deflect that.
Not completely and not for everything, but largely it is at least recognized. I mean, I learned about it and how bad it all was in a ordinary european school. What you say implies it is like in turkey, where they don't tell students in school what happened in Armenia. Or like in china, where even the knowledge gets removed. (I think Japan also largely choose not to reevaluate its glorious bloody empire past)
So blaming every war in Africa on the colonial past is maybe not helpful, when there have been wars before european involvement. And especially here, to me it seems a inner muslim/arab war. Different factions backed by different arabic states. UAE and Quatar. What exactly is the european involvment here?
Should we go through the history of India, China, Cambodia...
The UK can’t blame Brexit on the Romans.
You're reaching thousands of years ago and missing the much more significant event of the Norman conquest. And I would say that the Normans actually did influence Brexit to the extent that there's a confusion about continental vs. English identity that's only expanded over time.
1,000 years is no time at all, in the age of writing.
Influenced, yes. Can be blamed for, no, much less their descendants today (who aren’t British).
I agree!
This is different than saying the British are responsible for many current day conflicts (e.g., India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine) which is much less controversial.
Hamas intentionally created the situation where the IDF will kill women and children to accomplish their objective.
The IDF incursion is also a response to an attack by Hamas that targeted non-combatantants for murder, rape and abduction.
I don't think any of that is a controversial but correct me if I'm wrong.
In Sudan the US is not clearly propping up one side.
People are reasonably more mad in the US about Gaza since their taxes directly fund it and the US seemingly could exert influence on Israel if there was political will.
It is not clear how the US would improve Sudan without wading into some massive peacekeeping / reconstruction mission - which no one has the appetite for.
Yes, this is terrible, but atrocities like this happen all over Africa on a daily basis for innumerable reasons, and Sudan specifically has been in civil wars longer than I have been alive. The piece's structure: 'look at how terrible this is, don't you just feel soooo bad?' + 'by the way the UAE has been accused of facilitating this' signals to me that the writer is primarily motivated by a desire to make the UAE and all muslims by comparison look bad. Notice how they focus on the atrocities by the RSF, ignoring the fact that all sides in this war are complicit in slaughter.
America, Europe, Russia, China, and their satellite countries have been starting and fueling wars in Africa since before these countries became independent.
They deliberately draw borders that cut ethnic populations and religious groups in half.
They flood these regions with weapons and mercenaries.
They replace incentives to develop stable societies, robust agricultural industries, and infrastructure with 'just good enough to survive' aid.
They bribe local warlords with collective billions of dollars.
Global power blocs have effectively enforced a continent of lawlessness where you're only safe from war in the immediate vicinity of resource extraction sites, and lucky for you those sites are the kinds of places small children handle mercury without PPE and die of exhaustion and chemical burns. All of this to give you fiber optic cables.
Yes, the UAE is complicit, but so are you if you're reading this. This is not a 'muslim' problem. This is not a 'UAE' problem. This is a structural problem driven primarily by increasing population, materialist consumer habits, and the geopolitical reality that if any bloc stopped doing all of this horrible stuff the only outcome would be that the other blocs get a bigger share.
This article is not written with the intention of solving these problems, it is written with the intention of keeping you just angry enough to do what they tell you, without making you so angry that you replace the ones making these decisions.
This is so incredibly dumb.
The UAE is a spigot of oil and money. (Secondarily, a massive buyer of American goods, services, weapons and financial assets.) Sudan isn’t on our to-do list because it doesn’t directly affect American voters. Oil prices and capital do.
> Do you think the money that the UAE offer precludes all other incentives to ignore mass slaughter?
Precludes? No. Politically balanced. Absolutely. You’re not going to win votes promising higher oil prices and stalled construction projects to plant a moral flag in Africa so the guys backed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey win. Abu Dhabi is more than just geopolitically convenient.
Why? I get nothing from views, and much of our foreign policy is based around Israel, which serves the needs of our state in almost uncountable ways. Is it not just as dumb to ignore this? Acting as if our relationships with foreign countries appear in a vacuum seems.... absurd, to put it charitably.
Factors such as ethnicity or religion are never the reason for these conflicts. Those are simply the excuse. It’s what’s used to fuel the fire.
The heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold that’s laundered via Dubai then Switzerland.
The culpability of Western powers including the US cannot be ignored either. The RSF is supplied with diverted arms shipments from the West to the UAE.
Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call.
Polite western society has become so disconnected from what earnest religious belief feels like that they have become unable to comprehend the world around them, which hasn’t. They project their own materialism onto the own world and conclude that sectarian hatred is overblown because after all, who could really get that worked up about some dusty book? The idea that the Sudanese are just innocent victims of big evil powers fighting over gold is the kind of thing that makes a good theme in English class. We’re now dealing with an entire generation that was only taught this “counter-narrative”, and simply pattern matches it to every single thing. Yes, you can always construct sentences that recast any bad world events as being caused by our own callous indifference to the beleaguered and noble savage. No, that is not an automatic shortcut to truth and wisdom. The West does not have a monopoly on making terrible, short-sighted, violent choices.
But putting aside the diminishing of African agency, even if you do focus on the involvement of outside forces, the Sudanese civil war is notably characterized by the involvement of _middle_ powers, and not particularly Western ones. They are there for varying reasons, all of them nihilistic but only some of them materialistic. Ukrainians are there, for instance, because Russians are there, and it’s a lawless place where you can kill Russians. That’s a lot of things, but a simplistic gold grab it is not.
Earnest religious belief means nothing without material support. You can hate someone all you want for whatever religious reasons you want but it doesn't matter unless somebody gives you guns, bombs, tanks and planes. And why would someone do that? Because of material interests.
Why did the Crusades happens (multiple times)? Because of material interests. How did those who materially benefit get ordinary people to fight? By fomenting religious fervor and hatred. Why did they do that? To further their material interests.
You mention Ukraine. Perfect example. Russia took Crimea to get a port on the Black Sea in 2014 and also to control resources in that area. Why did Russia invade in 2021? Because maintaining what is essentially an oblast (like Kaliningrad) became too expensive. Ukraine had cut off the water. So Russia ideally wanted to despose the government and install another Lukachenko puppet government (like they have in Belarus) but, failing that, they wanted to secure a land bridge to Crimea. Just look at a map.
One could say the exact same thing you do about "African agency" about the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine but that's just an excuse. Putin doesn't care about that. He cares about the land they live on. And we've seen this exact playbook many times over. For example, Hitler used to annex Austria and the Sudetenland to ostensibly re-unite German-speaking people but again, that wasn't the point.
Now you might say in any of these places the people are motivated to kill for ethnic and/or religios interests. They may genuinely believe in this (but again, ask yourself why) but there are also a ton of opportunists. An absolute perfect example of this is Maria Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, who opposed Maduro in Venezuela and her two biggest goals are to privatize Venezuelan industries (previously nationalized) and to further support Israel. She may as well put out a press release saying she's open to the backing her in a coup. Privatizing national industries for Western companies to profit? Sounds a whole lot like material interests to me.
Go back in history and ask yourself why the borders of Sudan are what they are, just like we could for Rwanda and a host of other civil wars. Why exactly are these different ethnic groups in the same country? Well, that's a colonizer special, perfected by the British Empire, to sow division in the locals so the colonizer can profit. Once again, material interests.
That no doubt does make understanding things seem easier.
Economics motivates. But these divisions dominate in determining magnitude. You don’t need genocide to control mines, farms and oil fields. (You need labour.)
The dial turns from enslavement to extermination when there is deep-rooted fury. That sort of fury can really only be channeled on divisions of race and religion. (You need a way for poorly-trained, uneducated troops to mostly reliably identify the enemy.)
> heart of this conflict is Sudan’s gold
Why not oil, too?
> Just like in Gaza the US could stop this at any time with a phone call
This hubris fuels our forever wars, both in trade and militarily.
We don’t have that influence. If we tried restricting both Qatar and the UAE in Africa, we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about enough that our leaders have even less free rein than our geopolitical limits circumscribe.
True but if your goal is the control of resources, you don't really care if your proxy ends up engaging in these and other war crimes. That's just the cost of doing business.
Take as example when Saddam Hussein used nerve gas on the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Well that's a war crime. Did the US care? Not until 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. Up until then Saddam was a foil against Iran, who was only really an enemy after religious fundamentalists overthrew the US puppet regime of the Shah in 1979. Then in the 1990s, the US retroactively started caring about Halabja.
So did the US need Saddam to use nerve gas on the Kurds? No, of course not. Did they care? Absolutely not. Again, it was the cost of doing business.
> We don’t have that influence.
Yes we absolutely do. You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to. We have many weapons that we could wield against allies in particular. What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in? If you say the US can't make laws in other countries, I'll just laugh. The US still has control of the global financial system and can declare that any bank wanting access to the US financial system has to not trade in Sudanese gold.
Currently, the UAE gets away with this by essentially laundering Sudanese gold. The system allows them to do this. Well the UAE produces no gold so what if any gold exports from Dubai had to come with certificates showing from where it was imported?
If you don't think that can be done, look no further than the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds [1].
> ... we’d put serious economic and military interests at stake. Interests American voters care about ...
I'm curious what African (or even Middle Eastern) interests you think voters care about? I say this because American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all. Also, foreign policy is notably uniparty. The war in AFghanistan went through 4 administrations, 2 Republican, 2 Democrat. Vietnam went through 5 administrations (2 Democrat, 3 Republican) as well (ie Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford).
Granted. The UAE is not involved due to animus. But this analysis renders everyone in Sudan as NPCs. The reason the conflict is an opportunity for meddling, the reason it has turned into a genocide, these causes are found more in culture and politics than pure economics.
> You get that power when you supply the weapons and can choose who to supply them to
America withholding arms from Sudan wouldn’t change much.
If we started dictating Emirati foreign policy based on withholding arms, they should drop us as a security guarantor. (And can. And eventually would.)
We’d lose a reliable ally and investor and oil producer in exchange for foreign policy control in a region Americans are sick of being involved in.
> What if the US declared that gold sourced from Sudan was illegal to trade in?
Nothing. Like actually nothing. Maybe domestic gold prices would bump up a bit, but less than they have with tariffs and the deficit explosion.
If we tried to get the UAE to stop trading Sudanese gold, on the other hand, that would mean applying diplomatic and possibly economic pressure. That could result in costs to American voters we don’t care to pay.
> the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme ("KPCS") for conflict-free diamonds
Yet blood diamonds still sell.
Gold is tracked and traded based on provenance—high-end mints will produce more expensive bars. The difference is there is a larger buyer pool for conflict gold than there is for diamonds. (And much more for oil.)
> American voters pretty famously don't really care about foreign policy at all
This is what I meant. American leaders are constrained in acting on foreign policy lines that result in domestic pain. Alienating the Gulf would result in domestic pain.
The US could drop a nuke on UAE and tell them to stop funding colonialist expansion. The war against evil is never ending playing nice is a fools game.