I would never lower myself to watch that whining lady, but let's be frank.
She is right.
It's being hushed up right now because the viciousness of the Russian invasion is so horrifying that we are all focused on the indescribable suffering of the refugees who were living normal lives just two weeks ago.
There was none of this 24/7 coverage of the plight of refugees from the Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa, however.
I guess the general feeling was: Well, what do you expect from such a backward area?
No, from your examples, she is wrong, but so is the person who says, it's because Ukraine is a democracy.
Ukraine is important partly because it's the second largest country in Europe after Russia. It has the largest nuclear energy plant and quite developed. It is very old; Kyiv's golden age goes back to at least the late 900s.
It is also important partly because it has had a mixed East-West history. Before imperial Russia managed to take the country over, Ukraine turned to Poland for help to remain independent, which it did until the late 1600s. Thus, it has a history older than being part of imperialist Russia and the USSR. It has had its own brand of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and its own language.
Because it became fully independent of imperial Russia and then joined the USSR voluntarily, it had every right, when the USSR fell, to say its experiment of being joined at the hip with Russia was over. It gave up its nuclear weapons for guarantees of security from the UK and US, and Russia, and somewhat vaguer promises of France and China.
So Ukraine is important for being a large country sharing history with other European nations, being highly developed, and being sufficiently linquistically, culturally, and politically distinct enough to have every right not to be some Russian satellite. Add to that Putin's insulting arrogance, saying Ukraine is not a "real country," etc., and the fact that Ukraine as such has never threatened other European or American nations.
The main reasons for not focusing on refugees from the examples?
They are not European but geographically distant.
They did not share a European identity, language, or cultural assumptions, which make assimilation easy.
They did not share a common experience of Nazi terrorism.
The sharing they did have was quite different, as some Mid-Easterners had positive views of Nazis and negative attitudes toward Jews.
So this "racism" meme is quite annoying.
Reminds me of Whoopi Goldberg getting in trouble with her network for saying the Holocaust had nothing to do with racism.
People have started using "racism" to mean things that do not have to do with either the phony application of the term to "ethnic identity" in the early 20th century or the dubious folk application of the term for only white/black/Asian/Hispanic identities as if these were serious genetic, not ethno-political, categories. Everyone needs to go read a whole lot of history books written by reliable academics who used really good references.
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