An open letter to the editor of The San Diego Union-Tribune

To Lora Cicalo:

For more than almost two years, prominent space in your paper has been devoted—often front and center—to the same Associated Press images and narratives from Gaza. The suffering there is real and tragic. But the question many readers are asking is not whether Gaza deserves coverage; it is why this conflict receives such singular, repetitive attention while other humanitarian catastrophes are treated as footnotes or ignored altogether.

Where is the sustained coverage of Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have died and over 11 million people have been displaced? Of Nigeria, where mass violence continues largely unseen? Of Ukraine and Russia, where the war has consumed lives on a staggering scale? Of Tibet, where cultural and demographic erasure has unfolded for decades? Or of Iran, where ordinary people—women, students, journalists, artists, parents—are risking imprisonment, torture, and death to challenge one of the most repressive regimes on earth?

The imbalance is troubling, not because Israel should be exempt from scrutiny, but because selective outrage is not moral clarity—it is moral failure. When coverage and condemnation are applied obsessively to one country while atrocities elsewhere elicit silence, the message conveyed is that some victims matter more than others, depending on whether they fit an ideological narrative.

What is especially revealing is the quiet response from many self-described human rights advocates when Iranians rise up demanding dignity, freedom, and safety. That silence is not neutrality. It is a choice. And it raises an uncomfortable question: has opposition to Israel, and too often hostility toward Jews, become so consuming for some that it eclipses compassion for others who are suffering just as profoundly?

A free press has both power and responsibility. Repetition is a form of emphasis, and emphasis reflects values. I urge your editors to consider whether the moral lens being applied is as broad, consistent, and humane as it ought to be.

I still subscribe waiting for a return to civility and morality.

Sincerely,

Helene Ziman

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Interior designer Helene Ziman is a member of the antisemitism task force established by StandWithUs.