Van Jones, the CNN host and commentator, recently complained that neither the global left nor the mainstream media are covering the horrific violence against Nigerian civilians by Islamic terrorists.

True, they are not reporting the slaughter.

Truer still, they should be.

However, Van Jones went completely off the rails when he blamed “the Jews.”

Or as he put it, “No Jews, no news” — a stereotyped statement as antisemitic as it is untrue.

In truth, lots of mass violence worldwide is ignored.

Unlike President Donald Trump, neither the left nor the mainstream media cared much for the recent mass ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians from Nagorno-Karabakh — more than 120,000 — by Azerbaijani Muslims.

Nor did they report much on the dangerous May 2025 “mini” war between nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India, prompted by a mass killing by Pakistani terrorists.

They mostly ignored mass evacuations, terrorist acts, and ethnic cleansings had nothing to do with Jones’s absurd idea of “no Jews, no news.”

Nor were they neglected because of the color of the dead.

The West snored all through the 1990s when Russia obliterated Chechnya and left Grozny completely flattened.

Why then so much more attention to the Middle East conflicts, and for that matter, the Ukraine War?

The Middle East is the historic and volatile nexus of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Choke points, like the Straits of Hormuz, Suez Canal, and Bosphorus, are critical to the global economy.

The region is the birthplace of three global religions — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Religious wars there have incited world attention continuously, from well before and after the Crusades.

The Middle East proved a critical front in both World Wars. During the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union in 1973 neared a nuclear showdown over a proxy war.

Over 40 percent of the world’s daily oil leaves the Middle East.

It is the birthplace of the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Hezbollah. Over the decades, they have collectively killed thousands of Americans.

To the degree the media now fixates on Israel, it is likely because of fear of an exchange between wannabe nuclear Iran and Israel, in such a historic, oil-rich, and geostrategically contested area. Or better, we might fault ancient antisemitism, which explains why the majority of condemnatory UN resolutions have fixated on tiny Israel.

Moreover, Europe has learned that any violence in the Middle East quickly translates to widespread terrorism and mass violence on its own streets by its growing and restive Islamic minorities.

As far as media attention on the Ukraine war, it marks the first proxy conflict between nuclear Russia and the nuclear West, in which one side is directly involved in the fighting, on Russia’s own border and at the doorstep of Europe.

The war is the greatest bloodbath in Europe since 1945, exceeding battles at the Somme, Verdun, and Stalingrad in both duration and body count.

As for the horror in Nigeria, the only time when the left and the mainstream media really covered violence in Africa was during the unrest of the 1980s in apartheid South Africa, when it was a daily news story.

Then the Western media focused only on white Afrikaner-on-black violence.

In contrast, there is plenty of black-on-white violence today in South Africa, whose cities are statistically among the most dangerous in the world.

But the media and the world have mostly ignored the failures of a post-Mandela and increasingly racist and violent South Africa.

It is also lamentable that the left and the media do not talk much about the 12,000 murders per year of black Americans, mostly by black males.

Instead, it focuses far more on rare white-on-black iconic deaths that the left sees as politically useful, such as those of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Trayvon Martin.

To the degree that the media reacts to particular pressures at home, domestic constituencies play some role.

Meteoric rises in the U.S. Islamic population and foreign students from the Middle East have made the Gaza “genocide” front and center in popular culture and the news, and far more covered by the media than October 7 itself.

If Jones wishes proper attention to the Nigerian catastrophe, he might better explain why American blacks have not commensurately pressured the left to publicize the slaughter of innocent Nigerians by Islamist terror gangs.

The reason is not “the Jews,” but more likely the nature of the killers.

The mass deaths in Africa are not due to affluent white “colonial settlers,” but to radical black Islamic terrorists.

Moreover, the protocols of diversity/equity/inclusion have strangely cast radical Islam as a shared victim in the binary of victimized/victimizers.

In sum, black Islamic terrorists who commit mass murder are often immune from left-wing and media censure, and thus their innocent black victims are mostly forgotten as well.

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