From Dublin to Rome, hundreds of thousands of Europeans took to the streets across Western Europe last weekend to protest Israel‘s supposed genocide of Palestinians. In Amsterdam, 250,000 people —equivalent to nearly one-quarter of the city’s population — marched in support of Palestinians and to condemn Israel’s war against Hamas. Most of the participants on the Global Sumud Flotilla, meant to bypass the Israeli security cordon around Gaza, were European activists or politicians. At the United Nations General Assembly, European presidents and prime ministers used their speeches to recognize a Palestinian state and condemn the so-called genocide.
European hypocrisy has rarely been on greater display.
The bloodiest conflict in the world right now is not in Gaza nor even in Ukraine: it is in Sudan. While European newspapers splash photographs of cerebral palsy victims and allege starvation, it is crickets for the half million Sudanese children dead because of malnutrition. The difference is not only Hamas’s cynical manipulation of the press and journalists’ conscious willingness to play along. Race is the elephant in the room. That half a million black Sudanese children can die and merit no serious front page mention suggests that Western officials value black life less than others.
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Indeed, this is the rule rather than the exception.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb perhaps represents the worst of European hypocrisy. “The deepening humanitarian crisis has reached unbearable levels and represents a failure of the international system,” Stubb thundered from the U.N. General Assembly podium. He then suggested the U.N. strip the United States of its veto power for failing to abide by Europe’s decision that Israel is a pariah state.
What Stubb did not mention, though, was that his government imprisoned Simon Ekpa, the leader of Biafra, a largely Christian region of Nigeria that the Nigerian government subjected to genocide between 1967 and 1970, killing 2 million people in a deliberate famine. In recent years, the Nigerian government has resumed its killing machine in the region, leading Biafrans to take up arms to defend themselves. Stubb’s decision to imprison Ekpa — allegedly for inciting terrorism — comes at the request of a Nigerian government that appears to have linked Finnish action to trade and contracts. While Stubb essentially blesses Hamas atrocities and accepts the calumny that Palestinian resistance is legitimate, he conspires with a true genocidal regime when the money for Helsinki is right and the color of the victims is black.
Ditto Norway, whose government remains at the forefront of Israel condemnation, yet, just over a year ago, arrested Lucas Ayaba Cho, who seeks freedom for Ambazonia, the Anglophone region of Cameroon, where fighting has displaced as many people as in Gaza. It is a conflict that Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store met with silence.
Indeed, for all the European talk of human rights, Europe today is one of the most dangerous places to be a dissident. To appease Turkey and get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to lift his de facto veto on Sweden’s NATO membership, the Swedish government deported a Kurdish dissident back to Turkey on flimsy grounds, guaranteeing his torture and imprisonment. If European leaders were consistent, they would recognize Kurdistan, assign its border retroactively, and then demand sanctions on Turkey.
The European hypocrisy and prioritization of money over principle is even more stark when it comes to European silence on Cyprus, a fellow European Union member whose northern third Turkey has occupied for more than half a century. Frankly, Cypriots might even accept silence if it were not for European leaders’ backchannel pressure upon Cyprus to make concessions to Turkey to win Turkish compliance on unrelated issues.
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Activists might shrug off criticism by denouncing “Whataboutism.” Obsession with Israel and uncritical acceptance of a false genocide narrative matter, though, especially when European elites ignore and enable real genocides. When shrill denunciation follows Israel, but black victims are met with silence, it is hard not to conclude the real problem motivating Europe is not principle but antisemitism and racism.
Likewise, it increasingly seems that humanitarian rights motivate European leaders to act far less than do contracts and donations, be it from Nigeria, Turkey, or Qatar. It is time Europeans look in the mirror and recognize that they have changed very little since a century ago.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.