BBC Discovers Human Rights Violations... Not in Gaza, Thank Goodness
The BBC dutifully reports that Olympian Zeragaber Gebrehiwot and 12 others have been freed after 18 years in Eritrean detention without trial. A clear-cut human rights violation, easily condemned. But while Eritrea's abuses are front-page news, similar—or arguably worse—conditions in places like the US-backed Saudi detention camps, or the 'administrative detention' without charge for thousands of
Palestinians in Israeli prisons ('detained for security reasons' as mainstream media so delicately puts it), rarely get the same outrage. (After all, who wants to question allies?) One might wonder if the duration of their imprisonment, spanning nearly two decades, is designed to be just far enough removed from current geopolitical flashpoints that a Western audience can safely cluck their tongues
without ever having to interrogate their own governments' complicity in similar regimes of detention and abuse elsewhere. Condemnation is always easier when it costs nothing.