Critics Denounce Racist Double Standard of Western Media's Ukraine Coverage

[Bilal9]

On left, a mother and child who have evacuated from the Donbas region in Ukraine sit in a railway station on February 19, 2022. On right, a Palestinian child waits with her mother for a travel permit to cross into Egypt on June 13, 2015. (Photo: Vladimir Smirnov/TASS via Getty Images and Momen Faiz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

"If your response to war in Ukraine is 'they're just like us,' remember that so are the people of Yemen, Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine," said one British lawmaker.

JULIA CONLEY
February 28, 2022

The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association on Sunday was among those criticizing coverage from major international news outlets which suggested the Ukrainian people are more worthy of sympathy than victims of other military conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere outside of Europe.

Standing "in full solidarity with all civilians under military assault in any part of the world," AMEJA listed a number of comments made by correspondents for CBS News, Al Jazeera English, The Telegraph, and French news network BFM TV in which Ukrainians under attack were referred to as "civilized" and "prosperous," with some remarking that the civilians look like an unidentified "us."

"The entire West should do a lot of reflecting on the not so subtle message the past few days sent to Palestinians. 'We are perfectly capable of collective outrage, action, and recognition of international law but with you we just don't care.'"

"They seem so like us," wrote David Hannan of The Telegraph. "That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations."

Comparing Kyiv to cities in Afghanistan and Iraq, Charlie D'Agata of CBS News commented that Ukraine's capital "is a relatively civilized, relatively European" city, "one where you wouldn't expect that, or hope that [an invasion is] going to happen."

"AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist and racist implications that any population or country is 'uncivilized' or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict," the organization said. "This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America."

"It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected," AMEJA added.

The group called on journalists and newsrooms around the world "to train correspondents on the cultural and political nuances of regions they're reporting on, and not rely on American- or Euro-centric biases," garnering statements of solidarity from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in the U.S. and the Asian American Journalists Association.

"I am stunned at these quotes [and] writing from reporters," tweeted Washington Post White House reporter Seung Min Kim of AMEJA's statement. "Fellow journalists, please read this."

AMEJA was among the first large organizations to condemn the suggestion by numerous reporters that the invasion of Ukraine is more shocking or unjust than the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, the U.S.-led intervention in Syria, the U.S.-backed Saudi offensive in Yemen, and the U.S.-backed military occupation of the Palestinian Territories by the Israeli government.

"If your response to war in Ukraine is 'they're just like us,' remember that so are the people of Yemen, Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine," said Nadia Whittome, a member of British Parliament for the Labour Party, on Sunday. "Everyone has the right to self-determination and safety."

On social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's vehement statements condemning Russia's invasion, rallying the public, and vowing to fight for his country's right to self-determination have captured national attention, as have stories of civilians standing up to the Russian military.

But in one case, a viral video showing a girl confronting a supposed "Russian soldier" was actually a young Palestinian, Ahed Tamimi, who was arrested at age 16 for an altercation with an IDF soldier in 2017 and was imprisoned for eight months in Israel.

The viral video, which was viewed more than 12 million times on TikTok, "really reveals the difference between how white European resistance is treated as opposed to anywhere else," tweeted writer and organizer Joshua Potash.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Abraham Gutman also compared the invasion of Ukraine to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

"The entire West should do a lot of reflecting on the not so subtle message the past few days sent to Palestinians," said Gutman. "'We are perfectly capable of collective outrage, action, and recognition of international law but with you we just don't care.'"
Matt Duss, foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a Ukrainian American, tweeted that "the bravery of Ukrainians" and "the support being shown by Americans" have made him proud in the past week.

However, Duss added, "as a Middle East analyst I am floored by the blatant double standard on resisting occupation and repression."

With countries across Europe welcoming Ukrainian refugees after aggressively and steadfastly refusing entry to asylum-seekers fleeing wars from South Asia and the Middle East, critics are "demanding that this humanitarianism be extended to all people regardless of background," said Boston Globe opinion writer Abdallah Fayyad.

The remarks of newscasters and the policies of European leaders serves as a "reminder of the kind of rhetoric non-white refugees have had to endure our entire lives, even after we've been given asylum and become citizens," tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). "Every news anchor and world leader doing this is calling black and brown people something other than human."

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Let the horror in Ukraine open our eyes to the suffering of war around the world​

Nesrine Malik

Too many frame the invasion as an attack on ‘civilisation’, uniquely awful because it happened in Europe. That approach demeans us all.

‘There is an acceptance that war is natural in other places, an aberration here.’ Refugees from Ukraine arrive at the Polish border. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
Tue 1 Mar 2022 07.15 EST


Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has sharpened two terrifying realisations.

The first is that Putin does not function within the realm of the usual finely balanced checks and balances, sticks and carrots, that the west hoped would contain him and maintain an uneasy truce in Europe.

The second is that decades of work since the second world war to learn from the mistakes of the past and fortify against them in the future have failed.

Here again, we have not a civil war, but an invasion of a sovereign state in defiance of the rest of the world. Here again, we have images that are only known to us as historical reels, of frenzy and panic as thousands attempt to flee to safety.

But there is a third realisation that appears to shape the perception of too many western journalists justifiably appalled at the defiling of Europe. From the tone of much coverage, this seems uniquely distressing and more alarming to them because the lives of non-Europeans have less value, and their conflicts are contained, far away from us.

I thought it was just clumsy phrasing from a couple of reporters under pressure, but soon it became clear that it was, in fact, a media-wide tic.

From Al Jazeera to CBS News, journalists were appalled that this was not happening in “Iraq or Afghanistan” but in a “relatively civilised European city.”

One said: “The unthinkable has happened. This is not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe.”

Another reflected: “These are prosperous middle-class people … these are not obviously refugees getting away from the Middle East. To put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine … They’re Christian, they’re white, they’re very similar.”

Ukraine’s former deputy chief prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, told the BBC, unchallenged: “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed.”

Daniel Hannan, Telegraph columnist, former MEP, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere; put it more bluntly, writing that those suffering in Ukraine “seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking … War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.” It is, he said: “civilisation in retreat.”

This strange account of a history in which wars, conflict and dispossession mostly happened in “third world” and “remote” countries (remote from whom?) is a fiction that has come about as a result of a political and media climate that has stripped the humanity of those seeking refuge so completely it has become a fact, repeated with no self-awareness or shame.


Ukrainians want to stay near home, claims Raab, amid UK visa criticism
Read more

An extremely generous view of these statements is that it is not, in itself, an unusual impulse to care more about, or be affected more, by events happening closer to home than farther afield. Perhaps what these people are really trying to say is something along the lines of “this has not happened in this patch in generations” in order to highlight the abnormality of this particular conflict. There is that.

But there is also much more to it. There is an acceptance that war is natural in other places but an aberration here. That war happens only to the poor and the uncivilised, not the well-off and stable. That the fates of refuge and uprootedness are the lot of others, and therefore less of an event.

These are beliefs that fall apart under the slightest of scrutiny to reveal a worldview warped by what has for too long been a popular, unchallenged discourse on refugees and asylum seekers. These opinions were shaped, concertedly and over time, in order to justify inhumane and often violent policies passed to block people from entering European lands. For these policies to become accepted, their victims had to be portrayed as threatening and undeserving.

The legacy of that is a western world hostile to all those in need, blue-eyed or not. As ever, when we avert our eyes from the humanity of one group of people, we end up building immigration systems that assail the humanity of all. A border of policies as high as the heavens now meets Ukrainians seeking to enter the UK, even as family members.

As the Ukrainian flag was projected on to Downing Street, the Home Office was hoisting up the drawbridge, posting on its website: “Ukrainian nationals in Ukraine (who aren’t immediate family members of British nationals normally living in Ukraine, or where the British national is living in the UK), are currently unable to make visa applications to visit, work, study or join family in the UK.”

After a barrage of criticism, the government promised to ease these visa rules, allowing the grandparents, adult children, siblings and adult parents of Ukrainians who are settled in the UK to apply for visas under the scheme. Even those visa applications that are allowed will have to navigate an obstacle course of paperwork in the middle of war.

Exceptionalism means we are doomed to repeat the complacencies of the past, constantly comforting ourselves that it can’t happen here, because it only happens elsewhere to others whose pain is somehow different from ours.

But their wars are no less unthinkable, their uprootedness no less traumatic, their civilisation no less valid, than the thousands now leaving Ukraine. And in designing a world in which we are sanguine about other people’s war, we have ensured that we cannot anticipate when war will happen on our doorstep – and that when it does, we are appalled, but then find our humanitarian response systems hobbled, calcified in cruelty.

• Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

 

[Brutas]

Irish lawmakers call for actions​

 

[Avicenna]

Rohingya.

Fookin include them too.

 

[Maira La]

Looks like Ukrainian RAPEFUGEES are now flooding Europe.

 

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[Bilal9]

The West's Racist Double Standard For Refugees​

As the world stands with Ukraine, refugees of color don't get the same treatment.


By
Nathalie Baptiste
03/02/2022 04:39pm EST

With reportedly 2,000 dead in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and more than 836,000 people displaced as they flee his brigades, bombs and bullets, somehow, amid all the fear and uncertainty, there is still time for racism.

Over the last few days, several reports from the Ukraine-Poland border have indicated that Black people living in Ukraine have had a much tougher time getting to safety. According to CNN, the refugees of color were forced to wait in frigid conditions with no food or water. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s foreign minister said that all people leaving the country should be treated fairly.

“Ukrainians have been prioritized over Africans — men and women — at every point,” Rachel Onyegbule, a Nigerian medical student, told CNN. “There’s no need for us to ask why. We know why.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put the Western world’s inability to see Black people as human in the spotlight. While rallying the troops and his people to fight back against Putin’s aggression, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was successful in appealing to our common humanity. It’s not something that Black and brown people in conflict have really ever been able to do.
Even the ones trying to flee Ukraine.

One CNN producer tweeted about his sister who is from Sierra Leone and lives in Ukraine. Her harrowing escape from the country included walking 10 hours in the cold, sleeping outdoors and abandoning belongings. One student from Guinea said he and other Africans were physically prevented from crossing into Ukraine while they watched white people be let through.

“Unlike with people from the Middle East or countries with predominantly Black or brown populations, for whom war and other devastation are often seen as 'expected,' the Western media very quickly realized the humanity of Ukrainians.”

Though many may feel as if the unprovoked attack on Ukraine is unprecedented, the horrifying truth is that for many countries and people, war has been a constant for decades. But Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans and Syrians— though constantly under the threat of death and destruction — haven’t been receiving overwhelmingly warm welcomes and worldwide support.

At times, it’s been the exact opposite. In 2015, Hungarian camerawoman Petra Laszlo was filmed tripping and kicking Middle Eastern refugees who had fled from war. She was sentenced to three years probation in 2017 but her sentence was overturned the following year.

Unlike with people from the Middle East or countries with predominantly Black or brown populations, for whom war and other devastation are often seen as “expected” (as if their skin color predetermined whether or not they’d get to live a peaceful existence), the Western media very quickly realized the humanity of Ukrainians. “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades,” CBS’s Charlie Agata said. “This is relatively civilized, relatively European.”

Decoding the dog whistle is not rocket science; the outpouring of support for white Ukrainians while ignoring or even impeding Africans’ escape from the conflict is clearly rooted in white supremacy and the idea that we must do everything to stop war in countries like Ukraine while, in brown and Black countries, that’s just the way those people are.

And in the United States, the racist double standard is so extreme that some Republicans are comparing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to alleged problems in other “white” countries — namely, this one.

“We also have neighbors to the north who need freedom and need to be liberated and we need that right here at home as well,” Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) said at CPAC last week, equating a bloody invasion to wearing a mask at the grocery store in the U.S. and Canada.

But still, after some early praise for Putin from former President Donald Trump, who remains the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, and from Fox News’ talking heads, even the GOP had to concede that the Ukrainians were putting up an impressive fight.

Much of the world has united behind Ukraine. Members of Congress are wearing yellow and blue — the colors of the Ukrainian flag. Social media users have changed their profile pictures to declare their alliance with the Ukrainian people, and pundits are musing openly (and dangerously) about the U.S. getting directly involved.

At President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday night, his lines about the conflict drew bipartisan support. Republicans, whose sole goal is to oppose anything the Democrats believe in, were on their feet cheering and applauding Ukraine. Can you imagine getting bipartisan support for Afghan refugees or Black Lives Matter?

The U.S. is rightly horrified. But the U.S. is also hypocritical.

Turning entire nations into The Other is what leads to wars, genocides and other atrocities. This very thing that the U.S. and its allies are doing — declaring Ukraine good and therefore deserving of our support while either demonizing or flat-out ignoring similar atrocities in non-Western countries — is how wars like the one Russia is waging begin in the first place.

The solution here, however, isn’t to turn our backs on Ukraine. But if the U.S. and the rest of the West want to consider themselves the good guys — the people who defend democracies and the ordinary people of the world — they must, for once, do the same for the people who don’t look like them.

 

[Bilal9]

This is from 2017 - sad to see some EU countries haven't changed. My salute to those EU citizens who have accepted refugees in their hearts as their own.

As conscious people - we must all condemn racism and not enable racists, that should include minimizing trade relationships with racist regimes (especially in Eastern Europe nowadays). Thankfully, Russia (so far as I know) is outside the ambit of racist influences.
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Hungarian camerawoman sentenced for kicking, tripping refugees | CNN

Hungarian camerawoman Petra Laszlo, who was filmed kicking and tripping refugees near the country's border with Serbia, has been sentenced to three years probation.

www.cnn.com

Hungarian camerawoman sentenced for kicking, tripping refugees​

By Eliza Mackintosh, CNN
12:33 PM EST, Fri January 13, 2017

​

STORY HIGHLIGHTS​

• Footage of camerawoman Petra Laszlo tripping refugees went viral, triggering outrage on social media
• Hungary has announced it will detain all asylum seekers while their applications are being processed
• Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban swore in "border hunters" in Budapest on Thursday

London CNN —

A Hungarian camerawoman who sparked global outrage after she was filmed kicking and tripping refugees has been sentenced to three years’ probation, according to Szeged District Court.

Petra Laszlo was caught on camera kicking a young girl and tripping a man running with a child in his arms.

Both were fleeing from police at a holding camp near the town of Roszke, on the Hungary-Serbia border, in September 2015 after about 400 migrants broke through a police line.

Hungarian camerawoman Petra Laszlo is seen kicking a child at a camp near Roszke, Hungary.
-/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Video of the incident showed Laszlo sticking out her foot as Osama Abdul Mohsen, a Syrian refugee who was holding his seven-year-old son Zaid, darted past police.

The footage, which went viral after it was shared by RTL Television reporter Stephan Richter, has been retweeted over 2,400 times.

Lage in #Roeszke #Hungary weiter schlimm - Polizei überfordert - Flüchtlinge durchbrechen Polizeikette - Verletzte! pic.twitter.com/GlMGqGwABb
— Stephan Richter (@RichterSteph) September 8, 2015

“The video has caused indignation and disbelief all over the world,” Richter told CNN Friday. “To all appearances, the Court of Szeged is similar in its decision.”

Shortly after the incident, Laszlo was fired by her employer, the Hungarian nationalist N1TV station, and apologized for her actions.

But in an interview with CNN in 2015, Mohsen said he did not buy Lazlo’s excuses: “I tell her, be sure you Hungarian journalist that karma will get back to you, and God will not leave this be.”

Syrian refugee warned Lazlo of karma​

Mohsen said that the stampede was spurred by desperate conditions at the temporary camp where thousands of people – mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – had gathered on their way to Western Europe.

Mohsen told CNN he only spent one night in the camp, sleeping on the ground, but that others had lived in cramped conditions for weeks.

“This caused anxiety and weariness to many migrants,” Mohsen said. “The indifference of the Hungarian authorities triggered the situation, causing the migrants to storm the police defenses and walk their way to the nearby village, around three to five kilometers away.”

It was during this melee that Laszlo was seen kicking and tripping fleeing migrants.

Osama Abdul Mohsen and his son Zaid eventually moved to Spain, where Mohsen was offered a job.
JOSEP LAGO/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

A few days after the ordeal, Laszlo apologized for her actions in a letter published by the daily Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet. In it, she said she was frightened when the migrants burst through the police cordon, and feared she would be attacked.

“I am very sorry for the incident, and as a mother I am especially sorry for the fact that fate pushed a child in my way. I did not see that at that moment. I started to panic and as I re-watch the film, it seems as it was not even me,” her letter states.

Mohsen, who was a soccer coach at a sports club in Deir Ezzor before leaving Syria, was offered a job at a football academy near Madrid, Spain, after the dramatic video of the incident went viral.

And his son Zaid was chosen as a mascot for Real Madrid, walking out on to the field at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium holding soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo’s hand.

Zaid Mohsen was chosen as a mascot for soccer team Real Madrid.
Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno/Getty Images Europe/Getty Images

In a later interview with the Guardian, Mohsen said that he has since forgiven Laszlo. Her actions, he said, gave his family a future while costing her family their own.

Hungary cracking down on refugees​

Hungary has been heavily criticized for its tough immigration measures since shuttering its border last September and installing a razor-wire fence.

On the same day of Laszlo’s sentencing, the Hungarian government introduced more measures to crack down on the tide of refugees, announcing that asylum seekers will be held in police custody while their application is being processed.

“No one may freely move in the territory of Hungary until the assessment of the asylum application submitted,” Janos Lazar, the minister heading the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office, said.

Hungary is recruiting thousands of so-called “border hunters” to patrol the frontier with the police and army.

During a ceremony in Budapest Thursday, Orban swore in police officers who had taken part in the first phase of border guard training.

Orban said Hungary was one of the safest countries in the European Union, but that it must not expect help from Brussels, insisting “we ourselves must organize our own defense.”

The nationalist PM championed a campaign to reject EU migrant quotas in a controversial referendum last year; Orban hailed the vote a victory, despite a low turnout that rendered its result invalid.

CNN’s Milena Veselinovic and Mustafa Al-Arab contributed to this report.

 

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[Madni Bappa]

I bet this will still not wake up sleeping Muslims.

Arabs, Turks and Persians will still fight amongst each other and claim to be superior.

 

[Enigma SIG]

 

[nahtanbob]

View attachment 822190

biggest instigators of violence in Muslim countries are Muslims

 

[gambit]

biggest instigators of violence in Muslim countries are Muslims

I think those 'Death to America' calls may have something to do with this...