IN THE MEDIA
Why do Gaza hypocrites ignore African horrors?
November 4, 2025 | Arsen Ostrovsky
Daily Telegraph – 4 November 2025
The bloodstained genocide and famine in Sudan is now so catastrophic, you can literally see it from space.
Satellite images released this week show burned villages, scorched farmland and vast camps of displaced families, a haunting aerial portrait of human suffering on a staggering scale.
Yet as millions starve and tens of thousands are slaughtered, the so-called “human rights” community, the activists, international institutions, campus crusaders and governments that never miss a chance to condemn Israel, remain silent. Their outrage, it seems, only activates when they can vilify the world’s lone Jewish state.
Sudan today is enduring one of the gravest humanitarian crises of our time. Since April 2023, when fighting broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, more than 150,000 people have died due to the conflict, while an additional 14 million have been displaced from their homes, with the country once again turned into an open killing field.
The RSF, born from the Janjaweed militias that carried out the early-2000s genocide, has unleashed a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Masalit and other African tribes, using mass executions, rape and starvation as weapons of war.
Just this week, according to the World Health Organisation, over 460 people were reported massacred in an RSF attack on a maternity hospital in El Fasher, Sudan’s North Darfur region, which has seen sone of the most horrific violence, leading UNICEF to conclude “no child is safe.”
The United Nations estimates 30 million Sudanese are now in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, with famine so widespread, that millions are on the “brink of survival”.
Yet for all its talk, the UN is too busy providing diplomatic cover to Hamas and attacking Israel with endless sanctions to lift a finger to help Sudanese children.
Where are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, so quick to accuse Israel of “genocide,” yet barely whisper about Darfur, Khartoum or El Fasher?
Where are the celebrities, the flotillas and the self-styled “justice warriors” who flood social media with hashtags for Gaza but can’t spare a single post for Sudan?
Has there been a single mass rally in Sydney or Melbourne, or march across the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, in solidarity with the people of Sudan?
And where are all those Western governments, including Australia, which rushed to recognise a Palestinian state in the name of “peace” and “justice”? Do they not see the grotesque irony of recognising a Hamas-backed terror state while ignoring an actual genocide in Sudan?
Even Nigeria, where Islamist terrorists have butchered hundreds of Christians in recent weeks, burning entire villages to the ground and slaughtering worshippers during Sunday services, barely registers a mention. It took a statement from US President Donald Trump for some to even acknowledge the atrocities.
This kind of silence is not just hypocrisy. It is complicity, and it epitomises the collapse of moral consistency in the international human rights movement.
Words like “genocide”, “famine” and “human rights” have now been stripped entirely of meaning by those who choose instead to weaponise them against Israel while turning a blind eye to genuine atrocities elsewhere. This kind of selective outrage cheapens real suffering and transforms advocacy into performance.
If Israel were even remotely involved in Sudan, everyone knows what would happen. The UN would be in emergency session. The International Criminal Court would open an investigation overnight. Every front page from London to New York, Australia and beyond, would scream outrage. But when African Muslims massacre other African Muslims or Christians and no Jew, no Israeli, or Western democracy can be blamed, the world falls silent.
It is not that the world does not see the suffering, it is that most don’t care. It is that it does not fit their narrative. And so, the people of Sudan continue to bleed in obscurity.
If the blood of innocents staining Sudanese soil is visible even from space yet invisible to the human rights world below, our problem isn’t blindness. It’s wilful hypocrisy and moral decay.
Arsen Ostrovsky is a human rights lawyer and chief executive of the International Legal Forum. He is the incoming head of the Sydney office for the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).
