THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT IS FAR FROM THE DEADLIEST ON EARTH - IT SHOULDN'T BE THE WORLD'S CENTRAL FOCUS

Somehow, the Sudan/Darfur Genocide was left out of the article below, but still the point remains the same. Add to it the fact that 2.5 million black Sudanese people (mostly Christians, Animists, and heretical Musliims) have been killed by an Arab government, and the point of the article below is only driven even further.

From Reliapundit at the Astute Bloggers:

The well-respected International Crisis Group is currently tracking 70 conflicts around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zimbabwe.

Yes, 70: we live in a dangerous world.

Some of these are very familiar to us: Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Basque country, North Korea and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Others are not nightly news: Kashmir, Burma, Eritrea and so on.

And then there are the conflicts we have forgotten about, or never really heard about too much because they are far away or poor, or both: Armenia versus Azerbaijan, Mindanao in the Philippines, Morocco/western Sahara and Aceh.

Some of the 70 hotspots are especially deadly.

Millions of black Africans have died in Congo in the past decade, well below most people’s radar.

Sri Lanka has had a bit of a focus in recent weeks – though hardly the minute-by-minute wraparound coverage Gaza had in January. How many of us were really aware of the fact that more than 80,000 people have died in a quarter of a century of civil war?

Try this. Google "Tamil Tigers" and you will receive 2.3 million results.

Google "Hamas" and you get 10 times as many – and Hamas hasn’t been around nearly as long.

It’s the same if you Google "Tamils" and "Palestinians".

Is the difference that the Tigers might have killed Rajiv Gandhi but, unlike the Palestinians, have rarely brought their murderous tactics to Europe directly? The Sri Lankan conflict, at least in its military phase, looks as though it is coming to an end. The work of peace-building will last for years to come.

The same could be said about Chechnya. The Russians have just announced the end of their "counter-terrorism" operation. There are no solid figures for the number of civilians killed since the second war began there in late 1999, but estimates range anywhere between 25,000 and 200,000.

Put that in context.

Israel might be geographically small – smaller than Munster – but in population terms Chechnya is absolutely tiny. A region with a little more than one million inhabitants has seen anything up to one-fifth of its civilian population killed in two decades of war. And one school siege aside, we have largely looked the other way.

By comparison, 6,000 Palestinians – armed and civilian together – out of a Palestinian population in the territories three to four times that of Chechnya have died since the second intifada of 2001.

It goes without saying that any civilian death is a tragedy – and, very often, an outrage – but search for Chechnya on the DFA website and you only receive one-tenth of the number of hits that you do for Israel.

No-one believes the DFA is somehow in league with the Russians and supports their quasi-colonial war against Chechnya, but it does go to show some perspective has been lost somewhere along the line.

I SAY THAT PERSPECTIVE HAS BEEN LOST BECAUSE OF ANTISEMITISM:

• WHEN YOU HOLD JEWS TO DIFFERENT STANDARDS THAN NON-JEWS THAT'S THE ONLY EXPLANATION.

• THE UN IS A CESSPOOL OF ANTISEMITISM - AND SO ARE THE FOREIGN MINISTRIES OF MOST OF EUROPE'S NATIONS AND THE EU.

• THE BEST WAY TO DRAIN THESE "SWAMPS" IS TO ABOLISH THE UN AND TOSS THE SOCIALISTS OUT OF POWER IN EUROPE. (YES: THE LEFT IS THE HOME OF ANTISEMITISM.)