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NYTimes
New York Times
27 Aug 2024
Bret Stephens


NextImg:Opinion | Can We Be a Little Less Selective With Our Moral Outrage?

Of all the world’s injustices, perhaps the saddest is that so many of them are simply ignored.

Protesters the world over loudly demand a cease-fire in Gaza; a dwindling number of people still take note of Russian atrocities against Ukraine. Otherwise, there’s a vast blanket of silence, under which some of the world’s worst abusers proceed largely unnoticed and unhindered.

Let’s try to change that. For this week’s column, here are some alternative focal points for outrage and protest, particularly for morally energetic college students from Columbia to Berkeley.

Venezuela. Last month’s election was stolen in broad daylight by the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro. He has enforced this theft by using his security services to round up and jail around 2,000 people suspected of dissent, promising “maximum punishment” and “no forgiveness.” This is from a regime that has already caused starvation and the desperate exodus of millions of poor Venezuelans. As of last year, more than 10,000 of them were living in New York City shelters.

If ever there was a case of “Think globally, act locally,” to adopt the old slogan, this is it. Especially since the usual forces of social protest have something to atone for when it comes to Venezuela: The regime that Maduro inherited in 2013 from Hugo Chávez, his authoritarian mentor, had no bigger cheerleaders in the West than left-wing magazines like The Nation and political leaders like Jeremy Corbyn of Britain. Contrition is a virtue: Now would be a good time for these (hopefully former) comrades to show it.

Turkey. Anti-Israel protesters sometimes respond to the criticism that they are singling out the Jewish state for unfair censure by noting that it receives billions in military aid from Washington. (This pretext doesn’t fly if protests are in Montreal or Melbourne.) But what about another Middle Eastern recipient of American largess, including the stationing of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons?

That country is Turkey, on paper a secular democracy and a NATO ally. In reality, it’s an illiberal state run for decades by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an antisemitic Islamist who has jailed scores of journalists while waging — sometimes with F-16 warplanes — a brutal war against his Kurdish opponents in Syria and Iraq. For good measure, Turkey has occupied, ethnically cleansed and colonized northern Cyprus for 50 years. Shouldn’t those who argue that occupation is always wrong trouble themselves to protest this one?


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