This clip captures much of what’s wrong with the current pro-Palestinian movement today
https://reddit.com/link/1tgn21y/video/qylgz18gaw1h1/player
This guy from Five Pillars UK is effectively saying that the genocide, destruction, and mass suffering of Somalilanders are irrelevant unless Somalilanders first prove their ideological loyalty to Palestine. If they refuse, they are branded “traitors to the Ummah.” That is not moral consistency, it is naked selective outrage.
I see the same mindset on this sub whenever people downplay or ignore the persecution of Uyghurs in China or the Rohingya in Myanmar whenever boycotts or criticism of those governments are brought up. It increasingly feels like some atrocities matter more than others depending on who the perpetrators are. Apparently, not all victims within the “Ummah” are treated equally.
For those unaware: in the late 1980s, the regime of Siad Barre carried out a brutal campaign of terror against civilians in Somaliland, especially the Isaaq population. Hargeisa, then Somalia’s second-largest city, was reduced to rubble through indiscriminate aerial bombardment. Civilians were massacred, tortured, disappeared, and driven from their homes by the hundreds of thousands. Vast minefields were left across the region, so extensive that nearly four decades later groups like The HALO Trust are still clearing them.
Yet people who constantly lecture the world about justice and oppression suddenly become silent, dismissive, or defensive when the victims are Somalilanders. To casually say “I don’t care what your grievances are” in response to that history is genuinely outrageous.
I even remember trying to explain this history to someone here, and they dismissed it as “Hasbara” because of Somaliland’s recent diplomatic ties with Israel, as if the massacres, bombings, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people were somehow invented retroactively by Israeli propaganda. That level of ideological blindness is absurd. For those interesting in learning more about the genocide that happened in Somaliland, which non from the "Ummah" helped to stop, you can read ,more here. https://macmillan.yale.edu/gsp/somalia-isaaq-genocide
