Melanie Phillips quotes an interesting article by Bret Stephens of the WSJ:
Why, for instance, do high-profile Western writers like Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago make ‘solidarity’ pilgrimages to Ramallah, but not to the Chechen capital of Grozny? Why do British academics organize boycotts of their Israeli counterparts, but not their Russian ones? Why is Palestinian statehood considered a global moral imperative, but statehood for Chechnya is not? Why does every Israeli prime minister invariably become a global pariah, when not one person in a thousand knows the name of Chechen ‘President’ Ramzan Kadyrov, a man who, by many accounts, keeps a dungeon near his house in order to personally torture his political opponents? And why does the fact that Mr. Kadyrov is Vladimir Putin's handpicked enforcer in Chechnya not cause a shudder of revulsion as the Obama administration reaches for the ‘reset’ button with Russia?
He has an answer: racism, with which Melanie seems to agree:
I have a hypothesis. Maybe the world attends to Palestinian grievances but not Chechen ones for the sole reason that Palestinians are, uniquely, the perceived victims of the Jewish state.
While this is certainly true, and sadly anti-Semitism is spreading again in Europe, I would like to add another reason to explain the selective behavior of the hypocritical left: if they attempted to do or say to the Russians (or Sudanese, Arabs, Iranians, North Korean, Chinese) what they do and say to Israel, they would be castrated, quartered, dissolved in acid and shipped back to their countries in a jiffy.
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