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Why the world seems to care so much about Gaza, but not Africa

“Top Story” with Jonathan Tobin, and guests Ben Poser and Charles Jacobs, Ep. 128

Islamist forces are currently attacking black Africans, killing and even enslaving them. But so-called human-rights organizations that are focused solely on demonizing Israel don’t bother to pay attention.

According to JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, that’s the cruel irony playing out on the international stage as the corporate media and liberal critics of the Jewish state, who are falsely labeling the war on Hamas as genocide and have no interest in egregious human-rights abuses, up to and including the enslavement of blacks.

In this week’s episode of “Top Story,” he’s joined by activists Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser, who are trying to raise awareness about Islamist attacks on black Africans.

Jacobs says black Africans are being murdered, slaughtered and enslaved by Muslim forces. Similar things are happening in Sudan, as well as in Mauritania and Libya. This is nothing new, but as Jacobs explains, the West isn’t interested in the history of enslavement of blacks by non-Westerners. That’s true even when Muslims are carrying out jihadist slave raids on Oct. 7-like attacks on black Christians, as happened in December in Nigeria. Yet these awful events are ignored because the human-rights community isn’t interested in any atrocity that doesn’t involve a perpetrator that can be labeled as “white.”

As Prosor explains, there are no exact numbers or the full extent of how many black people are currently being enslaved by Muslims in North Africa as well as places like Mauritania, where an apartheid-like caste system exists with Arabs at the top and blacks at the bottom. But just as Westerners are ignorant about or don’t wish to discuss the history in which many millions of blacks were enslaved by Muslims in the past—while highlighting the horrors of the slave trade that sent millions to North, Central and South America—what’s happening today isn’t reported in the media.

To the extent that attacks on Africans are discussed, it is being put down to the impact of climate change on these societies. But Islamist assaults on blacks, including enslavement, have been going on long before contemporary worries about global warming became apparent. It is religious warfare and not droughts that are motivating these assaults. And it is due to the influence of woke ideology and intersectional myths in which only privileged white oppressors are ever considered to be at fault that these atrocities go unnoticed while the world obsesses about Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas terrorists.

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Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
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