alt Hacker News"The world" cares about some more than others. That's why the plight of the Palestinians is daily on the news, while that of the Yazidis or Druze is not.
Replies
_DeadFred_ • today at 3:28 PM
I had compassion for Ukrainians weaponized against me here on this site (you are racist, you only care about white people, etc). Many now days use/express compassion as a weapon/political tool.
Maybe read better news? I've been hearing about the Yazidi through reporting on the YPJ/YPG since circa 2015.
But I think theres multiple factors happening. One is scale. Millions of Palestinians are currently experiencing displacement, bombings, and settler colonialism.
Thats a large group of people. Multiple times the size of the Yazidi or Druze populations.
There's also the scale of the conflict and the weapons deployed. Israel deployed somewhere around 80,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. Thats more explosives than were deployed in World War 2. Add in evidence of white phosphorus being deployed, and the scale of the devastation is newsworthy.
And I think access to communication is different, people care about what they can see. Footage of Gaza is readily available and terrible to behold.
Finally, and I'm not pleased about this one, I think many in the west excuse behavior of some countries because they have racist ideas about those countries. Like, many Americans probably expect developing nations to have atrocities, but then look at Israel and go, "I thought this was supposed to be a model democracy! We aren't supposed to do genocide!" (Of course this idea is nonsense, developed countries have done genocide many many times, but I think it does drive news cycles.)