I've been following the UN a bit this week, the way you do when you really ought to be doing something else - and I keep getting stuck on one thing, and I honestly can't tell whether it's a stupid thing to ask.
So I'll just ask.
If Hamas hadn't crossed the border on October 7th, almost three years ago now, how many dead would there have been in Gaza in the years that followed?
Roughly?
I'm no expert and no mathematician. I don't have a degree in Middle Eastern studies or an office in Geneva. But I can't get the sum to come out any differently than I think it does for most of us, when we do it quietly…
Well. Let's leave it there.
Because then there was January this year.
In January the Iranian authorities switched off the internet - and in the days when no one could see in, the regime opened fire on its own people. And if the hospitals' own lists are right, more than 30,000 people were registered dead at civilian hospitals on January 8th and 9th. Shot at close range. Put down like animals.
So it didn't even take them a whole week. It took two nights. Iranian doctors themselves used the word genocide. I don't. But ehm.. now heads of state stand at the podium in New York with furrowed brows, and the talk is of Gaza.
And they're welcome to it. But I've listened and listened and listened for something about the regime in Tehran - which the UN's own fact-finding mission concluded a week ago has committed crimes against humanity - and I haven't heard much.
Could be an internet outage, of course.
Because I remember autumn 2022 well, when a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police, and the whole West could suddenly say Woman, Life, Freedom with full conviction. Politicians cut off their hair at the podium of the European Parliament. It was beautiful, and it was right.
Then a year or so went by, and Iran's ambassador was chairing the UN Human Rights Council's Social Forum. I had to read it twice. It wasn't satire. It was just the UN.
Back then it was one woman. Now it is thousands. And the hair stays firmly on everyone's head.
And of course it's a coincidence that the General Assembly, year after year, has adopted more resolutions against Israel than against all the other countries of the world combined. UN Watch has counted. I haven't checked myself. I'm no mathematician, after all. 🤓
So I'm left with a question so naive I'm almost ashamed to ask it -
If a dead person counts differently depending on who killed him, is it the dead we are mourning?
Or is it the perpetrator we need?
A human being is surely a human being, whether in Gaza. Or in Tehran. Or in a kibbutz on a Saturday morning in October.
Or am I completely off?
😏🤓🤷🏼♂️
