zlacker

>>mhb+(OP)
Legitimate question - why am I not seeing this in the news? This is horrifying but where is the coverage?

>>ripped+pI4
And there are many other legitimate questions: where are the celebrities speaking up to defend the cause of the iranian protesters? Where are the students in western universities protesting against what the iranian regime did? Where's the International Court of Justice's condemnation of iranian politicians? Where's the flotilla led by Greta Thumberg in support of the iranian people?

There are, IMO, very grave and very serious double standards at play here because I don't think we're going to see any of those.

>>Tactic+N15
The biggest difference is "our" role in it. For western countries, the economic and diplomatic relations with e.g. Israel is a lot stronger than with Iran. It makes much more sense to speak up if you feel your country or one of their allies does something you disagree with.

That is only pragmatic, right? Speaking up might actually change things by putting these relations at stake. For Iran, there might not be much left to do from a western perspective except military involvement. Starting another war is not something a Greta led flotilla might want to do.

>>woeh+t85
I think this is something that a lot of supporters of the Gaza protests tell themselves, but I am not sure that it's actually true. The US and other Western countries sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and have extensive economic ties to that country. Saudi Arabia recently engaged in a bombing campaign in Yemen that looked very similar to Israel's campaign in Gaza. And yet there were no protests. Also, you can influence your country's policies towards another country whether or not the two countries are allies. Years ago, there was a mass protest movement in the west against the genocide in Darfur for example. Nobody said "we don't have a lot of economic or diplomatic ties to Sudan so there's no point in protesting".

I think the real reason has to do with 1) there was an existing, organized pro-Palestinian movement that had experience protesting; 2) many organizations on the left saw the Israel-Gaza conflict as fitting very nicely into their larger anti-imperialist ideology in a way that other conflicts don't; 3) everyone more-or-less knows where Israel is on the map and has some familiarity with it; 4) there were a lot of really shocking images and video from Gaza