Victor Davis Hanson pushes back against a recent analysis of media coverage of violence worldwide.
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 anti-Semitic as it is untrue.
In truth, lots of mass violence worldwide is ignored.
Unlike 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.
These 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.
