Buddhists Against Antisemitism

When Israel is treated differently from other countries, it is fair to ask: why? In such cases we must at least consider the simplest and most obvious explanation: Israel is treated differently because it is the only Jewish state. By itself this certainly does not constitute incontrovertible proof of antisemitism, but unless another, better explanation for the double standard can be found, then one is justified in suspecting antisemitism. Researchers who study antisemitism have identified at least five different kinds of double standards that can be evidence of antisemitism, as was discussed in a previous post in this blog: The Five Double Standards of Left Antisemitism.

This post is the second in a series specifically looking at the “double standard of salience”, and, more specifically, at how this double standard is clearly at work in Bhikkhu Bodhi’s February, 2024 article: Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is the Gravest Moral Crisis of Our Time.

Below is an overview of five terrible humanitarian crises curently happening around the world. My point is not that one or more of these crises is worse or more “grave” than the situation in Gaza. Rather my point is that anyone who wishes to make the claim that Gaza is the gravest crisis of them all, and who wishes to be taken seriously, must necessarily make some effort to compare the situation in Gaza with these other clear examples of terrible injustice and human suffering.

• The Congo conflict

According to the Council for Foreign Relations (link):

Since 1996, conflict in eastern DRC has led to approximately six million deaths. The First Congo War (1996–1997) began in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, during which ethnic Hutu extremists killed an estimated one million minority ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda (DRC’s neighbor to the east).

According to the International Holocaust Memorial Museum (link):

The Democratic Republic of Congo has experienced violent conflict since the start of the First Congo War in 1996–97. The Second Congo War (1998–2003), was the deadliest conflict since World War II. Today there is an ongoing political crisis as government power-sharing agreements are falling apart. The crisis is further complicated by multiple violent conflicts involving over one hundred armed groups, and multiple health epidemics including Ebola, COVID-19, and measles. The risk of a new mass killing in the Democratic Republic of Congo remains high, and our Early Warning Project has ranked the country in the top-10 highest-risk countries every year since the project began in 2014.

According to Al Jazeera (link):

Approximately six million people have been killed since 1996 and more than six million people remain internally displaced in eastern DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo].

The three quotes provided above only scratch the surface of the horrors of the ongoing Congo wars. The scale of this moral crisis is even greater when one understands that this conflict is in many ways an extension and continuation of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

• The Syrian Civil War

According to Council for Foreign Relations (link):

What began as protests against President Assad’s regime in 2011 quickly escalated into a full-scale war between the Syrian government—backed by Russia and Iran—and anti-government rebel groups—backed by the United States and a rotating number of U.S. allies, including France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Three campaigns drive the conflict: coalition efforts to defeat the self-proclaimed Islamic State, violence between the Syrian government and opposition forces, and military operations against Syrian Kurds by Turkish forces…..

Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Syria remains dire, with 7 out of 10 Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance. According to estimates from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 600,000 people have been killed since the start of the war. In its 2023 Global Appeal, the United Nations reported that more than 6.9 million are currently internally displaced, with more than 5.4 million living as refugees abroad. Many refugees have fled to Jordan and Lebanon, straining already weak infrastructures and limited resources. More than 3.4 million Syrians have fled to Turkey, and many have attempted to seek refuge in Europe.

According to researchers Aleksandar Kešeljević and Rok Spruk writing for the journal Empirical Economics (link):

According to the UNHRC more than 350,000 people have been killed, with 6.2 million displaced, including 2.5 million children within Syria. Furthermore, more than 700,000 Syrian nationals are estimated to have sought political asylum in Europe in 2015 and 2016 (Eurostat 2022; World Bank 2017a). As a result of the war, a pre-conflict population of over 20 million has declined to 18.2 million. Around 11.9 million people have been forcibly displaced within Syria and across its borders, out of which 5.7 million are refugees and 6.2 million are internally displaced. Moreover, a report by The Syrian Center for Policy Research (2015) shows that 80% of the population is now below the poverty line compared to 12.4% in 2007.

According to Al-Jazeera (link):

Twelve years ago, protesters dared to take to the streets of Syria to protest against the country’s government and its president, Bashar al-Assad.

The protests quickly took on a revolutionary nature, demanding the “fall of the regime”, but, after a violent response from the government, the uprising transformed into a war, dragging in several outside powers, displacing millions and killing hundreds of thousands.

Syria’s economy has deteriorated, with 90 percent of the population now living below the poverty line, according to the World Food Programme.

The United Nations estimated last year that more than 306,000 civilians have been killed – about 1.5 percent of the population – since March 2011 in the country.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a United Kingdom-based war monitor, estimates the total death toll to be about 610,000.

Much more detail about the ongoing humanitarian nightmare in Syria can be found at the links above. Its also noteworthy that the Syrian civil war has involved multiple cases of the use of chemical weapons, in at least one case leading to over a thousand deaths: Timeline of Syrian Chemical Weapons Activity, 2012-2022.

• Civil War in Sudan

According to the Council on Foreign Relations (link):

In April 2023, fighting between rival armed factions broke out in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, raising fears of a return to full-scale civil war. The conflict is primarily a power struggle between the leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The two groups, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, respectively, are battling one another for control of the state and its resources. As the conflict deepens, humanitarian conditions are declining, and the promise of a long-awaited democratic transition diminishes…..
Several NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, have documented evidence of numerous mass atrocities committed throughout the conflict, prompting accusations of ethnic cleansing and war crimes. In early November, RSF forces and allied militias killed more than 800 people in a multi-day rampage in Ardamata, a town in western Darfur. This recent attack reflects a new surge of ethnically driven killings targeting the Masalit in West Darfur. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) Filippo Grandi warned that current violence is emblematic of the U.S.-recognized genocide in Darfur that killed an estimated 300,000 people between 2003 and 2005. A statement made by the UN in January indicated that between 10,000 and 15,000 people had been killed last year due to ethnic violence by the RSF and its allies in West Darfur. In April 2024, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield highlighted evidence indicating that women and girls as young as fourteen years old have been victims of sexual violence perpetrated by the RSF.

According to Deutsche Welle (link):

The list of wartime atrocities in Sudan is long and getting longer.

A maternity hospital bombed, causing the roof to fall onto babies inside. Refugee camps shelled, mass executions, streets filled with corpses, aid blocked, systematic sexual abuse and other war crimes: since the civil war started a year ago in the northeast African country, an estimated 16,000 people have been killed.

Sudan’s war has also created the world’s worst displacement crisis, with just under 10 million people forced to move to find safety. Last week, the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration reported that of the millions of Sudanese displaced, 70% were “now trying to survive in places that are at risk of famine.”
…. Why is no attention being paid to Sudan?

In mid-April, Melissa Fleming, the under-secretary-general for global communications at the UN, wrote a self-published op-ed in which she explored this question.

One reason for the lack of attention might be what is known as “psychic numbing,” Fleming wrote. “The term … refers to the sad reality that people feel more apathetic towards a tragedy as the number of victims increases.”

Other crises happening simultaneously can also have a numbing effect, she added — everything from climate change to the conflict in Gaza and the Ukraine war.

According to Al-Jazeera (link):

The war has spread across several regions of the country and led to the collapse of infrastructural systems including healthcare and sanitation services, as well as causing thousands of deaths and the displacement of millions. The precise number of people killed is very unclear, with reports varying from one source to another.

As of April 2024, nearly 16,000 people, including military personnel, had been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). However, ACLED and experts have said those numbers are a significant undercount, due to the difficulty in collecting accurate, real-time data during a conflict of this nature.

A report by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, in October stated that nearly 4,000 civilians had been killed and 8,400 injured in Darfur alone, between April 15 and the end of August. According to a UN report seen by Reuters in January, between 10,000 and 15,000 people had been killed in just one city – El Geneina, in Sudan’s West Darfur region – last year….
Sudan is currently “experiencing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions”, according to the UN. The country is grappling with acute shortages of essential items such as food, clean water, medicines and fuel. Prices have skyrocketed as a result of the scarcity.

Approximately half of Sudan’s 49 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, the UN says. Nearly 18 million are also facing “catastrophe levels of food insecurity”, especially in parts of West Darfur, Khartoum, and among the IDPs.

Aid groups are struggling to provide humanitarian assistance because of blocked access, security risks and other logistical challenges. In March, the UN was able to distribute food aid to West Darfur for the first time in months.

As noted in the Al-Jazeera quote above, “The precise number of people killed is very unclear, with reports varying from one source to another.” In February (2024), US Special Envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (link): “We literally don’t know how many people have died, possibly to a factor of 10 or 15. The number was mentioned earlier 15 to 30,000. Some think it’s at 150,000.”

• War in Yemen

Council on Foreign Relations (link):

Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s capital and largest city, Sanaa, demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. Following failed negotiations, the rebels seized the presidential palace in January 2015, leading President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government to resign. Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support….

Meanwhile, the conflict has taken a heavy toll on Yemeni civilians, making Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The UN estimates that 60 percent of the estimated 377,000 deaths in Yemen between 2015 and the beginning of 2022 were the result of indirect causes like food insecurity and lack of accessible health services. Two-thirds of the population, or 21.6 million Yemenis, remain in dire need of assistance. Five million are at risk of famine, and a cholera outbreak has affected over one million people. All sides of the conflict are reported to have violated human rights and international humanitarian law.
Kurdistan

United Nations World Food Program (link):

Eight years of war in Yemen have taken a devastating toll on civilians. The conflict has claimed over 377,000 lives and displaced 4.5 million people. 21 million people need humanitarian assistance, and 17 million people in Yemen are extremely hungry .

The conflict has destroyed the country’s infrastructure, including major roads and airports. The collapse of the economy, high cost of goods and devalued currency make it very difficult for people to access basic necessities.

According to Ahmed Nagi, writing for Foreign Affairs (link, but note that you have to provide your email to read the whole article):

The eight-year civil war in Yemen has created what has been called the world’s worst manmade humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have been killed and some four million people displaced. According to the United Nations, 21.6 million people in the country require humanitarian assistance and 80 percent of the population struggles to put food on the table. Given the extent of the catastrophe, it is perhaps no surprise that observers rejoiced when the Saudi ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed Al-Jaber, shook hands with leaders of the Houthi rebel group, which is allied with Iran, in April. It appeared to be a breakthrough in a devastating, unending conflict.

According to Save the Children, by 2022 as many as 85,000 children may have starved to death in Yemen due to the civil war (link). And here is a link to a Timeline of the Yemen Crisis from The Arab Center of Washington DC.

• Kurdistan

The “Kurdish Problem” is certainly one of most neglected human rights issues in the world. If Kurdistan were a soverign nation, its population would be about 30 million,  larger than Syria (22M),  and almost twice the size of Jordan (11M) and Lebanon (5.5M) combined. It would also be more populous than all the nations of Scandinavia put together (28M). But instead, the Kurdish people are dispersed among the states of Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Armenia. When the modern borders of the Middle East were drawn, the Kurds were simply invisible.

In Iraq a separate Kurdish autonomous region is recognized by the Iraqi central government, and one must admit that this is actually a positive result of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. In Syria the defacto autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava exists in spite of efforts by the Assad government to assert control over the region (and here again, the United States has played small, and highly complex, role in supporting the Syrian Kurds). In Turkey, where Kurds constitue over 20% of the population, repression of the Kurds is fierce and ongoing.

Prior to the overthrow of Saddam, the violent persecution of the Kurdish people by the Iraqi government knew no limits. It was against the Kurds that Saddam used a combination of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing at least 3,000, probably more. This was the largest ever incident in human history of using chemical weapons against a civilian population. In all Saddam killed well over 100,000 Kurds, possibly as many as 200,000. Nearly all of them were civilians.

One of the most important aspects of modern Kurdish history is the heroic role (and this is not hyperbole) that the Kurds played in downfall of ISIS. For a while people were actually paying attention to and giving meaningful support to the Kurds, precisely because they were on the front lines of fighting ISIS. But as soon as ISIS was vanquished, this attention and support mostly vanished.

Here are some online sources for learning more about the Kurds and their ongoing struggles against the governments of Turkey, Iran, and Syria, as well as the remaining remnants of ISIS and other Islamist extremist groups:

• • 1920 – 2022: The Kurds Long Struggle with Statelessness (The Council of Foreign Relations)
  • The Kurdish Project
  • Iraqi Kurdistan 20 Years After (International Crisis Group, April 2023)
  • The Kurdish Genocide Unrecognized Nations and Peoples’ Organization,
  • Turkey launches air attacks against Kurdish rebels in Iraq and Syria (Al-Jazeera Jan 2024)
  • Survivors of the Anfal Kurdish genocide long for closure (Al-Jazeera, April 2021)

It is of course possible to criticize Israel without being antisemitic. In fact, no one is more openly critical of the Israeli government than the citizens of Israel (a vibrant democracy where freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press are energetically exercised by its citizens).

But much of what is today presented as merely, and innocently, “criticism of Israel” is, in reality, deeply and profoundly antisemitic. Sometimes this is obvious, as in the case of groups like “Students for Justice in Palestine” (SJP) who have openly expressed their sympathy for Hamas and their approval of the October 7 pogrom. Or the case of “feminist” theorist Judith Butler, who embraces Hamas as a “progressive” group that is part of the “global left”!

But most cases are not quite so straightforward as it is with Judith Butler and the SJP, who, for whatever reason, don’t even try to hide their antisemitism. Part of the problem is that antisemitism is a systemic phenomenon that can influence people who honestly believe that the things they say and do are not antisemitic. One way of investigating such systemic and possibly unconscious antisemitic behavior and speech is by looking for double standards. Indeed, it is well known that the existence of double standards can be used as evidence for racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.

For example, since 2015 the Stanford Open Policing Project has collected and standardized over 200 million reports of police traffic stops and searches from across the United States. As part of their findings, they report that “we find that police require less suspicion to search Black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers. This double standard is evidence of discrimination.”

When double standards are at work this means that the same behavior is treated differently depending on who is doing it. Black drivers and white drivers are treated differently not based on differences in how they drive, but simply based on race.

Detecting double standards is especially important when dealing with forms of bigotry that are considered socially unacceptable, and, therefore, unlikely to be expressed openly. If police officers are simply asked, “Are you racist?”, they will obviously insist that they are not. But despite such protestations, statistically it can be shown that Black drivers are subjected to a racially motivated double standard.

Investigating double standards is also a way of shining a light on otherwise hidden antisemitism.

Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. Therefore when Israel is singled out and subjected to criticism in a way that is clearly different from how other states are treated, this can be evidence of antisemitism. Criticism of Israel that clearly evinces a double standard might not always be considered sufficient evidence, on its own, to conclude that those making the criticism are acting out of antisemitism. However, in the context of a worldwide upsurge of antisemitism, those who single out Israel for criticism in a way that is obviously not consistently applied to other countries owe us some explanation for this, and unless a convincing alternative explanation can be provided, then it is reasonable to consider such critics with suspicion, and to look for further evidence. If you see a police officer pulling over a Black motorist, it does not automatically mean that there is racism afoot. But it is reasonable to become curious about how often that officer pulls over Black drivers as opposed to white drivers.

In extreme cases, where the double standard goes so far as to cast Israel as the single greatest source of evil in the world, then this alone is not only clear evidence of antisemitism, it is very close to being explicitly antisemitic. In fact, the classical form of early 20th century antisemitism focused on blaming the Jews for all the world’s problems. If one simply replaces “the Jews” with “the Jewish state” then one has this extreme form of an obviously antisemitic double standard now applied to the Jewish state of Israel.

Directly related to the inherent antisemitism of depicting the Jewish state as the main cause of the world’s worst problems is the “double standard of salience”. Two scholars who study antisemitism, Sina Arnold and Blair Taylor, wrote the following about this double standard, and in particular how it manifests among leftist anti-Zionists:

The double standard of salience translates into a political context where the left assigns vastly more attention and importance to the issue of Israel/Palestine than any other conflict in the world today. Israel is one of the few issues that unites a typically fractious left. This one conflict is so central to the U.S. left’s self-understanding that that it is often a highly visible element even in demonstrations for completely unrelated topics like climate change, police brutality, or gay rights. This ideological omnipresence suggests that the left views Israel as both a unifying factor as well as a political lynchpin upon which various other forms of oppression rest. Yet at the same time, various other occupations, civil wars, and violent conflicts receive little or no attention from the left…. [Antisemitism and the Left: Confronting an Invisible Racism]

One could hardly imagine a more glaring example of the double standard of salience than Bhikkhu Bodhi’s article Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is the Gravest Moral Crisis of Our Time which appeared on the Common Dreams website on Feb 12, 2024 (link).

In that article, Bhikkhu Bodhi does acknowledge in passing that that there are other possible contenders for the title of “Gravest Moral Crisis of Our Time”:

Given the many instances of sheer inhumanity unfolding over just two decades—in Iraq, Syria, Tigray, Myanmar, and Ukraine—why should I highlight Gaza as the major moral calamity of our time? I will lay down five reasons this is the case.

However, in the remainder of Bodhi’s article no effort whatsoever is made to actually compare the war in Gaza with the “sheer inhumanity unfolding” in four out of the five alternatives he has bothered to mention: Iraq, Syria, Tigray, and Myanmar. Those four “moral calamities” are simply never mentioned again! He does try to formulate one argument for why the war in Gaza deserves the focus of our attention more than the war in Ukraine, but all he does is assert that since the war in Gaza is given more TV and social media coverage, it is also where our moral outrage should be directed. This, by the way, is what pscyhologists call “salience bias“: whatever captures our attention is mistakenly believed to be intrinsically more important. This is also sometimes called “shiny object syndrome“. I’ll have more on this in a future post.

I will in the very near future look in more detail at the “five reasons” that Bodhi provides for insisting that the war in Gaza, above all else, must be recognized as “the major moral calamity of our time.” But it must be emphasized that nowhere in these “five reasons” does he ever attempt to actually compare the war in Gaza with any other humanitarian crisis, with the already mentioned exception of the strange argument (truly bizarre, in fact, coming from a “senior American Buddhist monk”) that we should automatically judge the importance of world events based on what we see on TV and social media.

I will end below with my own list of 12 humanitarian crises that I think deserve our attention. But should we ask: do these other calamities deserve more attention than the war in Gaza? Do they deserve less? The same? No, we should not ask this question, in my opinion. I do not believe that it is possible to rank such horrors in order of their relative “gravities”. What grotesque unit of measurement could one use to accomplish such a task? One can look at body counts (and while sifting through the corpses we can try to distinguish civilians from soldiers, children from adults, women from men, guilty from “innocent”), the number of children who starve to death, the number of people displaced, the number of bombs dropped, the number of rapes, the number of hostages, the number of limbs lost, the number of people blinded, the buildings destroyed, the outbreaks of disease, the cumulative psychological trauma of those who manage to survive, etc. And we could try to combine all these blood soaked statistics to come up with some kind of objective metric of human suffering. And then we could calculate some sort of numerical “suffering score” for every tragedy, and place it in it’s properly ordered place in our Excel spreadsheet of horrors. But, surely, that way madness lies.

The Buddha taught us to not look away from suffering. This is the First Noble Truth. But he never taught us to treat one particular instance of suffering as somehow “the gravest” and more deserving of our attention than other suffering.

Finally, here is a list of other disasters (I will write more about each in the near future):

1. The Congo Conflict
2. The Syrian Civil War
3. The Civil War in Sudan
4. The War in Yemen
5. The plight of the Kurdish people
6. The Russian Invasion of Ukraine
7. The Rise of Fascism in the United States
8. World Hunger
9. Tyranny in China
10. The humanitarian crisis in Haiti
11. Mass Incarceration in the United States
12. The International Rise of Autocracy