In Impromptus today, the last installment of my journal on, and from, the Oslo Freedom Forum, I discuss a lady named Leymah Gbowee. She is an extraordinary person. She organized women in her country, Liberia, as a civil war raged. They pressured the combatants to stop the war. Their pressure worked. Gbowee’s story is told in a documentary called Pray the Devil Back to Hell. (One of my favorite expressions, all-time.)

Speaking at the Freedom Forum, Gbowee recalled the horror and depravity of that civil war: Men did the sickest stuff they are capable of doing. And I thought, not for the first time, how little attention Africa receives here in the West. Liberians or Sierra Leoneans, maiming, raping, and slaughtering other Liberians or Sierra Leoneans — not such big copy. Jewish apartment buildings in the Israeli capital — big, big copy.

When I was growing up, I was taught that Africa was a story of black and white, essentially. White people arrived on the continent for the purpose of exploiting and harming black people. When the colonialist yoke was thrown off, Africa was free. A scholar in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., Ali Mazrui, was a particularly honored peddler of this line. I believe he had a PBS series. Anyway, you grow up and you realize, “It’s not true,” or, “It’s not so simple.”

I have long been interested in the question of what the world chooses to focus on. (What do I mean by “world”? The New York Times, the Sorbonne, and the U.N.?) For many years, the world has cared keenly about the Palestinians (or pretended to). The U.N. sometimes seems to be organized around them. In my “Oslo Journal” yesterday, I quoted a Kashmiri doctor: “When a rat dies in Gaza, it makes the front page of the New York Times. Our people are shot in the streets, and not a word is said.”

The world is not so much interested in Palestinians’ abuses of Palestinians — the cruelties of the PLO and Hamas. What the world wants to know is, “What crimes have the Israelis committed today?”

#more#For several decades, elite opinion was virtually unanimous against apartheid in South Africa. Take just the realm of sports: From 1964 to 1992, South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games. And athletes from other countries paid a penalty if they competed in South Africa. The U.N. kept a list of athletes who traveled to that country — this was the U.N. Register of Sports Contacts with South Africa. If your name was on it, your name was mud.

Now, we might debate whether individual citizens, such as athletes, should be punished for the policies of the governments that rule them. And we might debate whether any country should be off-limits to athletes or others. But what about the fact that, from 1964 to 1992, athletes governed by other beastly regimes were allowed to compete in the Olympics? What about the fact that countries with regimes at least as beastly as South Africa’s were not made pariah states?

Hell, the Soviet Union, which ran a gulag, hosted the Olympic Games.

Back to Africa for a second. For 20 years, the regime in Sudan committed genocide in the south of that country. The victims were Christians and animists, mainly. Elie Wiesel referred to this killing as a “slow-motion genocide.” Very few in the world paid attention or cared. (An exception was American evangelicals.) But then, the regime turned to Darfur in the west, committing genocide there — and the whole world woke up, shocked. “Darfur” was on everyone’s lips.

So, sometimes Africa does indeed receive attention.

Obviously, you can’t keep your eye on every sparrow — that would be ridiculous. But the world’s selectivity is very interesting. It’s a big question, too: far too big for a blogpost. But I thought I’d jot a little something.