Hellbent on shaming Israel in the midst of an existential war, the media ignores the mega-million starving across the world.

By Allan Wolman

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Gaza was the only place on Earth where children go hungry. Just switch on CNN, Sky, or BBC – every night another solemn anchor, another indignant UN official, another weepy “expert” telling us what a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Gaza. And yes, it is tragic. But if starvation is now characterised as the world’s ‘No. 1’ war crime, what about all the other famines the media doesn’t bother to cover?

Remember Ethiopia in the 1980s? Over a million dead of hunger—an entire nation skeletal and forgotten – until Bob Geldof grabbed a mic and shamed the West into coughing up for Band Aid. No 24/7 news ticker, no panel of UN pundits. Just silence. The fact is, Africa has seen starvation used as a weapon of war for decades, if not centuries, but little of it made the prime-time cut.

However, when it comes to Gaza, suddenly every camera lens, every crocodile tear, and every moral sermon is locked in. The media’s appetite for images of starving children seems oddly selective – especially when it’s Israel in their crosshairs. We hear next to nothing about starvation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe or the Horn of Africa. These don’t suit the media’s narrative. Gaza, however, does.

And yet, while Amanpour and company bleat about Gaza, they continue to miss – or ignore – what’s happening in South Africa. This is no war zone. No blockade. No siege. This is a country run by a government that shouts “a better life for all!” while literally letting its children starve to death.

Paul Hoffman of Accountability Now pulled no punches back in 2022 when he asked, “Too corrupt to feed starving children – is this freedom?” He was talking about South Africa’s ruling party – the ANC – which, instead of feeding its own people, dumps nutritious food into landfills. Meanwhile, kids are dying.

That same year, William Saunderson-Meyer highlighted the horror: in just three years, 2,818 children under five died in public hospitals from malnutrition. UNICEF says chronic undernourishment is responsible for over half the deaths of South African children under five. One in three children in the country is physically stunted from lack of food. Cape Town’s Children’s Institute revealed that 4 million children are growth-stunted, and 10 million go hungry every single day:

– Not during war

– Not under sanctions

– Just under the ANC.

But will you see that on CNN? Will BBC dispatch their moral heavyweights to the Eastern Cape or Limpopo? Will the UN scream genocide in Pretoria? Of course not. South Africa doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

When the ICJ hears South Africa’s accusations of genocide against Israel, perhaps someone will ask: what about the slow-motion genocide of your own children?

There’s something truly rotten when the loudest voices claiming to care about human suffering go mute when the victims are poor, black, and too close to home.

Apparently, black lives only matter when it suits the script.

About the writer:

Allan Wolman in 1967 joined 1200 young South Africans to volunteer to work on agricultural settlements in Israel during the Six Day War. After spending a year in Israel, he returned to South Africa where he met and married Jocelyn Lipschitz and would run  one of the oldest travel agencies in Johannesburg – Rosebank Travel. He would also literally ‘run’ three times in the “Comrades”, one of the most grueling marathons in the world as well as participate in the “Argus” (Cape Town’s famed international annual cycling race) an impressive eight times. Allan and Jocelyn immigrated to Israel in 2019.

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