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.
Sudan has been ravaged by war since 15 April 2023. Yes, we will shortly arrive at the second anniversary of this brutal conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and yet which so few people in the West are aware of. The war pitted the army of Sudan against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary force that has its origins in the Janjaweed militia that carried out unspeakable atrocities during the ‘Darfur crisis’ of 2003 to 2020. The Sudanese army and the RSF were allies once. They ruled Sudan on a joint military council following the populist ousting of Sudan’s dictatorial president, Omar al-Bashir, in 2019. But tensions between them grew and a merciless war for sole power exploded in 2023.
The consequences for the people of Sudan have been horrendous. It is thought that 150,000 people have perished. Twelve million have been forced to flee their homes – the worst episode of human displacement of the 21st century so far. More than half of the population – 30million souls – now require humanitarian assistance to survive. As Germany’s Deutsche Welle put it last month, the dimensions of Sudan’s tragedy surpass ‘those in Ukraine, Gaza and Somalia combined’. And yet it barely registers on the global conscience. The people of Sudan die in darkness.
Humanity’s ignorance of Sudan’s suffering is unforgivable. A YouGov poll in October 2023 found that 75 per cent of Americans felt they had little or no understanding of events in Sudan. Last year, a YouGov / CAFOD poll found that just five per cent of Brits believed Sudan was experiencing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Guess where they thought the worst humanitarian crisis was really unfolding? Gaza. Forty-two per cent said Gaza was humanity’s grimmest catastrophe, despite the fact its death toll, its levels of hunger and its crisis of displacement are all smaller than Sudan’s.
We all know what’s happening here: this is the warping effect of the Israel myopia of the West’s opinion-forming classes. It is the twisted consequence of the cultural elites’ defamatory treatment of Israel’s war on Hamas as so uniquely murderous that it blots out all else. Sudanese people know this, too. Sudanese migrants in the UK set up a campaign group – London for Sudan – precisely to plead with the media ‘to take notice of the conflict’. Distressed that the war in their homeland had ‘largely gone ignored compared with the war in Gaza’, they hit the streets essentially to beg for media attention. Please stop minimising ‘the significance’ of our people’s pain, they said.
This image of Sudanese migrants crying out for coverage shames our media elites. Media influencers who spent the past five years saying ‘black lives matter’ seem staggeringly blasé about the 150,000 black lives lost in Sudan. Worse, they zone out from this human agony for entirely self-serving reasons. Wary of anything that might undermine their Israelophobic morality tale, their feverish insistence that the Jewish nation is the most murderous nation and that they are its morally unimpeachable foes, they block out all inconvenient truths. Such as the inconvenient truth of 150,000 dead Sudanese. Those ‘black lives’ are a fly in the ointment of the cultural elites’ moral prestige, which is increasingly derived from their maniacal loathing for Israel’s ‘genocide’.
In essence, Sudan’s tragedy has been sacrificed to the vanity of cultural influencers whose claims to moral supremacy now rest on the lie that Israel is a uniquely barbarous nation that all good people must oppose. Nothing can be allowed to interfere with this self-regarding narrative, including dead Africans. Anti-Israel leftists say actually they focus on Israel’s actions because it’s a Western ally backed by our own governments. Who’s buying this? For a start, many close Western allies are implicated in the war in Sudan. Turkey and Egypt, both backed by the US, have supported the Sudanese army, while our ‘friend’ the United Arab Emirates has supported the RSF.
But more to the point: since when was solidarity with human beings swept up in the vortex of war dependent on the political authorship of that war? The idea that Western observers’ salacious obsession with every civilian death in Gaza alongside their shameful silence on civilian deaths in Sudan is born from a simple political calculation, from an honourable desire to hold their own governments to account, is a transparent fantasy. To some of us, this glaring disparity of care smacks of something far more cynical – of an attitude to world affairs where human suffering considered morally beneficial to the clerisies of the West is elevated over human suffering that is seen as too complicated, too potentially distracting. Black lives matter, except where they threaten to interfere with the elites’ galvanising religion of Israelophobia.
Animus for Israel is such a powerful drug among our cultural establishments that it now has real, material consequences in global affairs. For good or ill, we live in a world where media attention can lead to action. As London for Sudan says, media focus on Sudan’s troubles might have generated greater ‘humanitarian efforts’ and ‘government action’. We also know that dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, then ruler of Syria, ‘capitalis[ed] on the world’s focus on Gaza’ to intensify their assaults on Ukraine and Syrian dissidents respectively. The Israel myopia of the influential of the West has proved a boon for the world’s warmongers, and a disaster for the world’s oppressed. Israelophobia is more than a moral irritation – it kills.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
