No news is good news

Editorial

The summertime is notoriously a slow news period. Not this week. The humanitarian crisis in Darfur – largely ignored by European and American leaders – is finally getting the global attention it deserves, thanks to new French President Nicholas Sarkozy. On Monday, Sarkozy's statement that "silence is killing" Darfurians – and his positioning of France in a leadership role in resolving the conflict – garnered worldwide press coverage.

Also getting attention this week was Iran (surprise!), which is in the throes of a fundamentalist crackdown. Plus, the people who brought you the Debacle at Durban are preparing for another "human rights" conference, and you won't believe who's hosting. Then there is the small issue of the fate of Israel and Palestinians, which is hanging in the balance.

In Iran, the already crazed theocrats have become, if possible, more enthusiastic in their devotion to the enforcement of an extremist social order. As many as 150,000 Iranians were arrested in a spring clean-up of anyone dressing or otherwise behaving in a manner perceived as insufficiently Islamic. Punishment is redolent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with victims paraded through the streets and humiliated as a warning to others. Student leaders have disappeared. Thirty advocates of women's rights were arrested in one day in March, the New York Times reports, crediting Human Rights Watch. The theocracy has strengthened its enforcement of media control, forbidding any reference to anything that could be perceived as negative to the government or state.

The Darfur situation is particularly horrifying. One-third of the population is displaced, 200,000 have been killed, there is constant terror among the citizens, violent crimes are being committed that are probably worse than death for the victims. From the usual suspects, whose concern for human dignity and the rights of the displaced is so verbose in the case of Palestinians, there has been near silence. Last year, a leading local Darfur activist made the assertion that local "progressives" have sidelined the Darfur issue because it was Jews (Canadian Jewish Congress, specifically, and its Pacific Region past chair Mark Weintraub, in particular) who have led the battle to raise awareness and opposition to the horror.

Now, closing in on six years since the notorious Durban Conference devolved into a circus of anti-Semitism and genocidal chanting, the United Nations is organizing a follow-up conference. An upcoming planning session will be chaired by Libya, which suggests that the United Nations learned precisely nothing from the catastrophe at Durban.

Then there is Israel and the Palestinians. Seven years after the Palestinians walked away from an offer of 97 per cent of everything they publicly demanded, resulting in thousands of deaths and continued mayhem, and now with a civil war having effectively bisected the would-be state, a high-level summit is underway by regional and global leaders to try to grope through the darkness of this new Middle East.

The consensus is clear. Iran, Syria and a not-insignificant stalwart group of European and North American nuts are openly expressing their support for Hamas. Apparently, by contrast, level-headed people worldwide have decided that Fatah is our natural ally. We hope they're right. But (we repeat) it was Fatah that incited this intifada and laid waste to the peace process in the first place. The rift in the Palestinian body politic is real enough – there's no mistaking the seriousness – but it still has the whiff of a good cop-bad cop routine. Will we heap praise, aid and support on Fatah during its fight with Hamas, only to find out that a leopard doesn't change its, well, you know?

History repeats itself, Karl Marx quipped, first as tragedy, then as farce. The situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories has moved grossly beyond both tragedy and farce. If only Marx could foretell what on earth will happen next.

Still, we were only somewhat facetious earlier, when we referred to the fate of Israel and Palestinians as a "small issue." There are, sadly, innumerable crises in the world and the Israeli-Arab conflict has taken up far too much of the attention of media, foreign relations experts, the United Nations and the general public worldwide. This obsession with a comparatively small conflict – particularly in a world with no shortage of atrocities – is due to a range of causes, not least that it is taking place in the cradle of three monotheistic religions. But the universality of the world's attention on Israel-Palestine, and the often-total abandonment of reason and perspective it evokes in people, is due to something beyond the rational.

Aren't these pages partly to blame for this over-saturation? Maybe, but it's our issue. We focus our attention on the region because Israel is the Jewish homeland. Not coincidentally, our enemies focus on it for the same reason.

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