WHY NO TENT PROTESTS FOR SUDAN?
by Rafael Medoff
A major editorial in the New York Times last Sunday was headlined “The World Must Wake Up to the Horror in Sudan.” The week is now almost over, and the world is still sleeping.
The Sudanese group known as the Rapid Support Forces already has “committed acts of genocide” and is now besieging the city of El Obeid, where 600,000 civilians are suffering from “severe shortages of food, water and medicine,” the editors of the Times wrote.
To the Times’s credit, its editorial acknowledged that the RSF is “a predominantly Arab group,” and its atrocities are genocidal because it specifically targets “members of non-Arab ethnic groups.” That is a crucial fact which Times news articles in the past often buried or even omitted.
Sunday’s Times editorial called on “the world” to “make a bigger effort to halt the killing and mass displacement in Sudan.” It urged “the world” to “urgently take action” to protest the genocide.
The Times didn’t say so, but the most obvious part of “the world” that should be protesting is the community of activists who were so vocal in recent years when they thought genocide was being committed in Gaza. Now that there is a real genocide going on in Sudan, why aren’t angry protesters marching in America’s streets and taking over university campuses?
Where are all the idealistic student protesters gone? Why are their tents folded up and their bullhorns silent?
Where are the humanitarians with their placards demanding “Stop the Arab Genocide” and “Free Sudan”?
Where are the passionate op-eds and the politicians pointing accusing fingers?
Sudan is a test. If the Gaza protesters were genuinely concerned about genocide, they will now raise their voices against the actual genocide in Sudan. If they remain silent about Sudan, that will suggest the only time they genuinely care about human suffering is when they can blame it on Israel.
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(Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.)