OK, Stew, so what are these other fifty countries? Name them, please.

The controversial and increasingly far-right blogger Stuart "Stew" Campbell literally published a blogpost today with the title "Why genocide is brilliant", but an even better insight into his warped mindset about the human catastrophe in Gaza can be seen in the Twitter exchange below, in which he's not even pretending to be satirical or ironic.

There is a video on here tonight of a man in Gaza holding up half a girl. "Half a girl". Not something I ever thought I would write. Or, god forbid, see.

— Barry Malone (@malonebarry) June 2, 2025

You know, I do actually find this sh*t as horrific as everyone else does. I'm just so f*cking over the fact that nobody gives a bollock about the 50 other countries the exact same thing is happening in, but which aren't fashionable. Go and f*ck away off. https://t.co/I1N5HGmOAR

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) June 4, 2025

From the extreme anger and defensiveness of Stew's response, you'd be forgiven for getting the impression here that Barry Malone had gone out of his way to annoy Stew.  But in fact the tweet wasn't even directed at Stew.  Mr Malone was just minding his own business, expressing his own views in his own online space.  Stew stumbled across the tweet and somehow still felt it to be such an outrageous violation against his own person that he was entitled to tell Mr Malone to "f*** off".

This is an established pattern of behaviour from Stew.  At least once every few days, he has an epic meltdown about social media accounts with large numbers of followers sharing photos, videos or factual text descriptions of individual atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza.  He tries to shame people into no longer sharing such content, by telling them they're only doing it because they want to virtue-signal or to look trendy or to build a media career.  And yet he knows that if those people do fall silent out of Stew-induced shame, public awareness of the genocide in this country will fall, pressure on the Labour government to take a stand against Israel will lessen, and Netanyahu will be able to press forward with the genocide with even greater impunity.  In a nutshell, Stew knows that if he gets the public opinion environment he's seeking to generate, many more people will needlessly die.  And yet still he seeks it.  Why?

We now have a bit of an insight from his reply above.  His reason is that he regards the genocide in Gaza as relatively normal, relatively unremarkable and relatively unimportant.  He thinks it is no worse than what is happening in 50 other countries right now - which, if true, would indeed make it extremely humdrum, because 50 countries would constitute no fewer than 26% of the member states of the United Nations.  He finds it deeply and personally offensive that Palestinians and their supporters are so jumped-up and loud, and that they don't understand their lowly place in the true hierarachy of victimhood.  He thinks they should quieten down for Stew, pipe down for Stew, wheesht for Stew.  If that means the pressure on Netanyahu is lifted, if it means more Palestinians have to die, he thinks they should understand that those extra deaths are no big deal in the global scheme of things, and that it's far more important that they should get on with suffering their fate quietly and without having the bad manners of invading the Stew gaze by appearing in a gruesome Twitter post at the moment of their deaths.  And they certainly shouldn't be permitted to distract us in any way from Stew's obsessive round-the-clock commentary on the all-important, all-consuming women-with-beards issue.

The snag is, of course, that Stew has also just revealed himself to be utterly clueless about where Gaza slots in to the hierarchy of current global events, because no matter which way you look at it, comparable horrors are not unfolding in anything like 26% of the world's countries.  We know from his leading poll question the other day that Stew thinks some sort of "conflict" or "war" is still going on in Gaza, as opposed to a one-way extermination event committed by Israel against a defenceless civilian population.  But even if we humour him on that point, I cannot find any more than four ongoing wars with a death toll comparable to Gaza's.  Those four are - 

* The Ukraine war

* The civil war in Sudan

* The civil war in Myanmar

* The war in the Sahel

Those four wars mainly involve a total of seven sovereign states: Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.  Between them, those countries make up less than 4% of UN member states - way below Stew's estimate of 26%.  

If we look at actual ongoing genocides, Gaza stands out as even more exceptional, because there are around five other alleged ongoing genocides at present and none of them can be clearly established to have a higher death toll than the genocide in Gaza (and of course the official death toll in Gaza will almost certainly be proved in the fullness of time to be a massive underestimate).

I suspect these irrationally extreme displays of angry defensiveness from Stew are a kind of stress response.  Tweets like the one from Barry Malone make Stew feel profoundly uncomfortable because they remind him of something he already suspects on an instinctive level - ie. that if he looked into it properly, he'd discover that he's quite wrong to say that events in Gaza are unexceptional by normal international standards, and that conversely, those he sneers at and tries to shame into silence are objectively right to say that Gaza is the most important moral cause of our time.  That's the case not only because the death toll is unusually high, but because our own UK government is facilitating the mass killings with generous weapons sales and intelligence-gathering reconnaissance flights - not something that can be said about the other wars and genocides of 2025.

It's just possible that those gruesome deaths you're so angry about being shown on Twitter are actually more important than the women-with-beards issue, Stew.  At least, you know, for the time being.