Bret Stephens: Can we be a little less selective with our moral outrage?

Of all the world’s injustices, perhaps the saddest is that so many of them are simply ignored.

Protesters the world over loudly demand a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip; a dwindling number of people still take note of Russian atrocities against Ukraine. Otherwise, there’s a vast blanket of silence, under which some of the world’s worst abusers proceed largely unnoticed and unhindered.

Let’s try to change that. Here are some alternative focal points for outrage and protest, particularly for morally energetic college students from Columbia to Berkeley.

Venezuela. Last month’s election was stolen in broad daylight by the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro. He has enforced this theft by using his security services to round up and jail around 2,000 people suspected of dissent, promising “maximum punishment” and “no forgiveness.” This is from a regime that has already caused starvation and the desperate exodus of millions of poor Venezuelans. As of last year, more than 10,000 of them were living in New York City shelters.

If ever there was a case of “Think globally, act locally,” to adopt the old slogan, this is it. Especially since the usual forces of social protest have something to atone for when it comes to Venezuela: The regime that Maduro inherited in 2013 from Hugo Chávez, his authoritarian mentor, had no bigger cheerleaders in the West than left-wing magazines like the Nation and political leaders like Jeremy Corbyn of Britain. Contrition is a virtue: Now would be a good time for these (let’s hope former) comrades to show it.

Turkey. Anti-Israel protesters sometimes respond to the criticism that they are singling out the Jewish state for unfair censure by noting that it receives billions in military aid from Washington. (This pretext doesn’t fly if protests are in Montreal or Melbourne, Australia.) But what about another Middle Eastern recipient of U.S. largesse, including the stationing of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons?

That country is Turkey, on paper a secular democracy and a NATO ally. In reality, it’s an illiberal state run for decades by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an antisemitic Islamist who has jailed scores of journalists while waging – sometimes with F-16 warplanes – a brutal war against his Kurdish opponents in Syria and Iraq. For good measure, Turkey has occupied, ethnically cleansed and colonized northern Cyprus for 50 years. Shouldn’t those who argue that occupation is always wrong trouble themselves to protest this one?

Ethiopia and Sudan. Critics of U.S. foreign policy, particularly on the left, often complain that Washington cares more about suffering among white people than Black people. They have a point. So why do those same critics proceed to largely neglect the staggering human rights abuses taking place now in Sudan and Ethiopia?

In Sudan’s case, the humanitarian group Operation Broken Silence estimates that at least 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million people have been turned into refugees. In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed – possibly history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize – first turned his guns on ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll estimated as high as 600,000. Now the government is waging war against former allies in the Amhara region, even as the Biden administration last year lifted restrictions on aid owing to its abuse of human rights. How many college protests has this elicited?

Iran. The regime in Iran ought to tick every box of progressive outrage. Misogyny? As CNN documented in 2022, the government responded to mass protests against mandatory hijab by systematically raping protesters, men as well as women. Homophobia? Homosexuality is legally punishable by death, and executions are carried out.

Then there is Tehran’s imperialism. The regime doesn’t merely make a habit of taking unlucky visitors hostage. It takes entire countries hostage, too, none more tragically than Lebanon. Hezbollah, which parades as a Lebanese political movement, is little more than a subsidiary of Iran. The group has turned the south of the country into a free-fire zone while putting thousands of civilian lives at risk for the sake of its ideological aims against Israel. When Lebanese patriots such as the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri try to stand in Hezbollah’s way, they tend to wind up dead.

It says something about the moral priorities of much of today’s global left that Iran is one Middle Eastern regime toward which they’ve advocated better relations, including the lifting of economic sanctions, while simultaneously insisting on boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Why that is – the mental pathways that lead self-declared champions of human rights to make common cause with some of the worst regimes on Earth while directing their moral fury at countries, including Israel, that protect the values those champions pretend to hold dear – has been one of humanity’s great puzzles for over a century.

But that puzzle shouldn’t restrain morally minded, globally conscious people from standing up for the oppressed and suffering everywhere they might be. The list I’ve offered above is partial: There are also Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, Christians in Nigeria and ethnic minorities in Russia, to name a few. They, too, deserve the world’s attention, compassion and, whenever possible, active assistance.

It could happen if only one cause weren’t consuming so much of the world’s moral energies.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.