Yesterday, the controversial and increasingly far-right blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell claimed that we shouldn't be paying much attention to horrific war crimes in Gaza, because much the same sort of stuff is happening in "fifty other countries". His subtext is "this goes on all the time, always has, always will, so if it didn't distract us from the vital importance of the women-with-beards issue in 2022, why should Gaza have the temerity to distract us from the women-with-beards issue now?"
Just one snag, of course: nothing comparable to the horrors of Gaza is occurring in anything like fifty other countries. I looked carefully last night, and of the handful of other alleged ongoing genocides in the world at the moment, none have been established to have a higher death toll than Gaza. Of the ongoing wars in the world, there are four that have a comparable death toll to Gaza, and those four wars affect seven countries - well short of Stew's claim of fifty. So I challenged him to name his fifty.
After the obligatory rant about the fact that he can't reply directly because I have him blocked on Twitter (a bit rich given that it was he who blocked me and made a big song and dance about it, and I only blocked him afterwards on a "fair's fair" basis), he did his usual stunt of answering the question he wished I'd asked him instead. Rather than finding fifty countries with wars or genocides *on an equivalent scale to Gaza*, he instead linked to a list purporting to show 114 ongoing wars without making any distinction between major conflicts and minor ones that have death tolls with a tiny fraction of Gaza's. Before even looking at the list, I had little doubt that many of the entries would turn out to be low-intensity conflicts similar to The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I was correct about that, but in fact Stew's claim was even dodgier than I had anticipated, because the list also defines all military occupations as "conflicts" regardless of whether there is any actual fighting going on, and it also double-counts, or triple-counts, or even quadruple-counts certain wars.
To give an example, the list claims that there are seven wars going on in Europe. But in fact FOUR of them are just different bits of the war in Ukraine (the occupation of Crimea, the invasion of the rest of Ukraine, the conflict in Donetsk and the conflict in Luhansk are all defined as four separate wars). The other three so-called wars in Europe are: 1) the Russian occupation of Transnistria (legally part of Moldova), 2) the Russian occupation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (legally parts of Georgia), and 3) the Armenian occupation of Nagorno Karabakh (legally part of Azerbaijan). These are all largely frozen conflicts with little or no fighting actually occurring at the moment. To try to pretend that these non-wars are equivalent to the carnage in Gaza is fatuous in the extreme.
So no, Stew, you have not demonstrated that there are 114 wars of an intensity comparable to the Gaza genocide. Not even close. I cannot find more than seven countries that are currently affected by ultra-high-intensity conflicts or genocides. If you can find another forty-three that would make up the shortfall from your original claim of fifty, tell us what they are and explain why you think they are on a par with Gaza.
This smacks of sheer desperation on the part of the far-right Bath blogger.
ReplyDeleteHe's manipulated & misrepresented facts & reality for some 20 months now & recently even gone to the trouble of paying for a transparently skewed poll question which shreds any reputation he may once have had for forensic truth telling. This behaviour might be given a pass by the gibbering baboons that constitute his unthinking followers these days but he's made himself a toxic laughing stock to anyone with the ability to think or with any basic sense of morality & human empathy.
We have to ask ourselves why, in the face of all the evidence he's so desperate to trash whatever remained of his credibility so repeatedly. Repeatedly it has to be said, whilst backing to the absolute hilt a major foreign policy stance of the very state that is supposedly our opponent.
A stance that not only exposes it's rotten colonial core to all of Scotland & the world but is, on the basis of every poll (apart the Campbell joke poll) widely & increasingly unpopular.
Why in those circumstances would anyone purporting to support the freedom of Scotland support the violent Genocidal oppression of another people by the very state (& it's allies) that we oppose?
He's cakey.
ReplyDeleteThank-you for the third and 1st class informative article's relating to the depraved inhumanity in palestine,the crime of crimes & the belittling of mass murder is far beyond the impartiality of the BBC,MSM,WOS,CNN
ReplyDelete