The human rights industry’s favorite kind of victim is the politically useful one: the victim whose suffering can be attached to an adversary — a designated “villain” — preferably one that Western activists already know how to hate, pressure and organize against.
That is why Palestinian victims, when Israel can be cast as an alleged perpetrator of wrongs, generate an extraordinary machinery of outrage, while Sudanese victims of genocide, Afghan women under the Taliban, Iranian protesters murdered by their own regime, or persecuted Christians in Nigeria largely do not.
