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@upsidedownmotter
Government numbers from both sides seem to show under 200 civilian casualties in that conflict. If it was a genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was, per Moldbug, a basically peaceful one. Armenia lacked either the material support and power to resist like Ukraine, or the suicidal nationalism of Palestine, so it's not really any more interesting to me than any other border adjustment.
Compare again to Ukraine. Ukraine has seen vastly fewer civilian casualties, despite a larger and more intense conflict, between larger and better armed adversaries, over a longer period of time and across a wider geographical area. Yet Ukraine is both more clearly one-sided in coverage (Orcs, bayraktar techno edits, Russia blamed for things done by Ukraine etc), and also the subject of more good faith debate in politics and media and culture.
One can play whataboutism with various African conflicts, but no one ever gives a shit about those, nor should we.
Meanwhile the NYT has frequently resorted to the passive voice in Gaza coverage, people "die" rather than being killed. Hospitals blow up rather than being bombed.
Meanwhile the TikTok ban was largely justified by supposedly slanted pro-palestine coverage.
Meanwhile very clear and direct hate crimes against Palestinians by Jews get a fraction of the coverage that mythical anti-Black, anti-Gay, and anti-Asian violence get. Jews even feeling uncomfortable at school is a national story.
Meanwhile there have been talks about deporting people who protest Israeli conduct, which are now coming to fruition.
There's a pretty big spread here.
But in your comments, I think a big part of the story is the expectations. I was shocked at the coverage of Ukraine, because I expected it to be closer to the Georgia war in the 2000s: just a line item in foreign coverage, no big deal. We're both talking about expectations, and we can literally see the same things and announce that the conflict is overrated or underrated depending on our expectations going in.
So let's just limit it to a pet example we're familiar with: TheMotte. Before the current Gaza crisis, I was more likely to side with @2rafa against @SecureSignals on virtually every conversation where the two were involved. Because I think the Holocaust happened. Post-Gaza, I find it split closer to 50/50, I still tend to side against SS when WWII comes up, but I'm finding us on the same side against @2rafa et al on discussions about Israel and Gaza. For Jews and Israelis and fellow travelers, that should be concerning, even if they assume I am wrong. It represents a large number of Americans turning against them, and starting to see their enemies as perhaps having a point.
I'm not sure that we shouldn't care about African conflicts, but that's beside the point. The point is that, for better or worse, Western media appears to disproportionately care about Gaza. The suffering in Gaza has received a great deal more media attention than comparable suffering in other places. Don't like Artsakh? Fine, then, take Rakhine state - over a third again as large as Gaza in terms of population, and subject to similar brutality. Don't like that one? South Sudan. And so on.
It is thus, I think, not true that there has some kind of conspiracy of silence around Gaza. On the contrary, if there's a conspiracy I feel like it was to bring more attention to Gaza, not less.
There are some understandable reasons for the greater focus on Gaza - it involves a close American ally, the history of decades of Palestine as a symbol for wider Arab nationalism, lots of Jews in Western countries who pay particularly close attention to Israel, and so on. I'm not saying it's a great mystery why Americans take much closer interest in Gaza than they do in the plight of the Rohingyas. I'm just saying that they do. Thus this:
This is just not true. There was a huge amount of media focus on and discussion of Gaza, much of it openly critical of Israel. The 'vast and dishonest campaign' you posit seems hallucinatory. As 2rafa and upsidedownmotter show, it's just, well, not a true description of Western reporting on Gaza.
Note that I am not claiming that Western reporting on Gaza is unbiased, or plainly representative of the facts, or anything like that. I am just claiming that firstly there's a lot of it and secondly much of it is critical of Israel, whether implicitly or explicitly, so much so that I don't think one can defensibly claim that events in Gaza have been either hushed up or whitewashed.
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Most people in America also don’t give a shit about conflicts in which some tens of thousands of people die in the Middle East.
Ukraine was an event because it involved Russia and involved white people. This isn’t some fringe accusation, in the debate in the German Parliament the day after the Russia invasion the most commented upon as powerful speech pretty much directly said that the events were so extraordinary and horrific because they happened to people that look like us in a place that looks a little like this.
What is it about Gazans that makes them more valuable or worth caring about than Africans? For Muslims, the answer is obvious; their enemies are their enemies in an ancient tribal religious conflict, have humiliated the ummah and so on.
For Western dissident rightists, the sole aim is to bloody the nose of the Jews. The worst thing, as Norm said, is the hypocrisy; it is unfair that Jews get their ethnostate even as ‘they’, it is alleged, advocate and work towards Europeans losing their homelands / ethnostates. Israel’s war on Gaza and attempted ethnic cleansing isn’t unreasonable (it is not as if they would be opposed to ethnic cleansing not only in their ancestral homelands in Europe, but also in settler colonies like the US) because the act is unreasonable, it’s unreasonable because of who is doing it.
If they have memed themselves into caring, it is only because - already believing in the inhumanity of their enemy - they can’t help but sympathize with their ‘fellow’ victims, plus some of the Muslims are pretty based and redpilled etc.
As an aside, the Ukraine war comparisons are ridiculous; it’s a war with a clearly defined front against an enemy that wears uniforms. Gaza is a war against an army that doesn’t wear uniforms, melts into the civilian population at will, has no front, and where the enemy’s only strategy (because they would get wiped out in open conflict) is to hide in the most densely populated civilian districts of one of the most densely populated places in earth. That the civilian death toll will be much higher than a forest or marshland in Eastern Ukraine is obvious.
You write of
But really, the dishonest thing is the claim that a low level regional conflict between two tribes about who owns a small patch of the Middle East is the subject solely to lobbying on one side. Gaza is a canvas upon which every political debate is played, from LGBT rights to decolonialism, from nationalism to internationalism, from the politics of victimhood to the politics of strength. It’s also deeply personal to 1.5bn Muslims (perhaps double the total white population of the world) who care a great deal about their honor and who are often very active online.
What happened in Gaza? What happened is what happens when this kind of thing happens, which is all the time. Protesting that it’s special, or different, is more about who is involved than about what is happening.
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