Blogger Najm Al-Din says the West’s support for Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians should open the eyes of every Muslim to the sham principles Western societies are supposedly built on.
The Israeli genocide has entered another diabolical phase, with the IDF capturing the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, which until now has been a safe haven for those fleeing northern Gaza.
As another humanitarian catastrophe beckons and the world gasps in horror at Israel’s callous disregard for human life, it’s time we unmask the facade of the liberal “rules based order” propped up by the virtue-signalling Western powers.
With the U.S., UK and other “beacons of democracy” watching a genocide unfold in real time and whitewashing Israel’s indiscriminate killing of a civilian population, the “international law” we held as sacrosanct has proven to be little more than a vain pretence to legality and leverage to advance the geopolitical interests of powerful states. Its status is damaged beyond repair as those instrumental in its creation have abandoned its foundational principles.
Despite the International Court of Justice ordering Tel Aviv to adhere to its obligations under the Genocide Convention and the International Criminal Court applying for an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, those posing as pillars of the rules based order continue rationalising the rogue behaviour of the Israeli PM, who is sparing no Amelikite in his quest for Zionist supremacy.
With three permanent members of the United Nations (U.S., UK and France) vetoing or abstaining from Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire and continuing to furnish the Zionist entity with state of the art military hardware, not only has the UN proven hopelessly ineffective in constraining the use of force in international affairs, but the very nations espousing multilateralism have exposed their unyielding allegiance to a settler colonial project which hasn’t even pretended to hide its genocidal intent.
Instead, Israel has pledged to ignore any international consensus that hinders its war objectives, irrespective of whether these comply with established international protocols regarding war crimes.
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Lessons for Muslim world
The Muslim world must heed an important lesson from this damning indictment of international law.
For decades, we believed that the normative relationship between nation states was one of “peace,” as the second half of the 20th Century saw the creation of the UN which upheld the principles of territorial sovereignty, proportionality and deconfliction.
However, the world doesn’t shift from a “state of war” to a “state of peace” merely by declaration. For peace to have any meaning, it must be reflected in the lives of people and confirmed by realities on the ground.
It should not have taken the orgy of violence over the past seven months for the Ummah to realise that the world has entered an endemic state of war.
Rather, the illegal wars and unjustified aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the horn of Africa and beyond imposed a climate of fear and insecurity for millions of Muslims, undermining any presumption of peace prior to the current genocide.
Crackdown on freedom of speech
The Orwellian crackdown of the anti-Israel commentariat and duplicitous application of the principle of free speech has also exposed the liberal and right-wing hypocrisy surrounding cancel culture.
In recent weeks, pro-Palestinian student movements across major U.S. cities have been barred from college campuses, with many Israel First advocates equating their anti-genocide campaign with calls to lawless action.
Furthermore, academics in some of America’s most prestigious universities are being blacklisted for decrying Israel’s violence and governors across U.S. states are issuing executive orders targeting antisemitism in state campuses, highlighting the stifling influence of the pro-Zionist lobby on the U.S. education system.
But students and professors are not the only casualties in the post October 7th war against free speech.
Around the world, journalists, politicians and citizens of conscience have been doxxed, smeared and rendered beyond the pale by the false prophets of free speech, for committing the cardinal sin of condemning Israeli war crimes.
Jazmine Hughes, a former staff writer for the New York Times was recently coerced into resigning after signing an open letter condemning Netanyahu’s human rights abuses. By endorsing a coalition committed to Palestinian solidarity, the actions of the award winning journalist were deemed a breach of protocol and violation of newsroom policy.
In the UK, speculation mounts about the sudden departure of LBC radio presenter Sangita Myska, whom many believe was suspended after a recent hardball interview with an Israeli government spokesperson.
Meanwhile, MPs like Andy Macdonald had the Labour whip withdrawn for using the phrase “From the River to the Sea” at an anti-war demonstration, which critics interpreted as an implicit call for the annihilation of Israel.
On the social media front, Big Tech is suppressing pro-Palestinian hashtags, blocking livestreams of IDF war crimes and suspending accounts which are critical of Zionism for violating YouTube and X’s nebulous community guidelines, resulting in the de-platforming and de-monetisation of many content creators.
Those like Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk who have built entire platforms railing against cancel culture and the radical left’s censorship of freedoms have betrayed their higher calling by conflating decolonisation with antisemitism and doubling down on calls to repress non-violent Pro-palestinian activism.
For some years now, lawyers have raised concerns about the non-legally binding IHRA working definition of antisemitism, arguing that its forceful imposition can undermine freedom of expression. We are now witnessing how the adoption of such incoherent definitions can be weaponised to limit the spectrum of acceptable opinions and pressurise citizens into self-censorship.
The First Amendment rights in the U.S. as well as constitutionally protected freedoms in countries like the UK and much of the European Union are being slowly sacrificed at the altar of Zionism, confirming beyond doubt that Israel is the sacred cow of western democracies and anyone daring to criticise Zionism risks crossing a moral threshold.
Sham democracy
With the Republicans, Democrats, Tories and Labour Party all endorsing Israel at the peak of its depravity, it’s time that we eschew pragmatism based on the lesser of two evils and recognise a stark reality about the modern political system.
Far from living under a sovereign democracy, citizens in the West are languishing under a uni-party globalist system where politicians are not answerable to the electorate but to an unaccountable bureaucracy, consisting in large part of a military industrial complex.
The pro-Israeli bipartisan consensus emerging in Washington, London and beyond highlights how mainstream parties represent rival wings of the same hegemonic apparatus, which can only flourish by manufacturing consent for wars and exporting terror under the guise of liberal interventionism.
The governments which supposedly operate in the interests of citizens simply exist as an administrator of policies recommended by powerful stakeholder capitalists and warmongering oligarchs and simply transform pre-established policies into hard policy, while promoting the sham of “representative governance.”
Be it Sunak, Starmer, Biden or Trump, the parties they represent are not traditional policy makers. They are merely policy enablers who enforce agendas set by an unelected syndicate of powerful interest groups who wield immense leverage over the foreign policies in most developed countries.
While many will endorse pro-Palestine independent candidates in the upcoming elections to punish mainstream parties for their support for Israel, these candidates fundamentally lack support networks to leverage political agendas and offer little except consolation against a juggernaut which is happy channelling voter dissatisfaction through independent candidates to sustain the illusion of political freedom at home.
Muslims can no longer be heedless to the reality of power dynamics in Western democracies where those at the highest rungs of power are primarily responsive to donors and lobbyists like AIPAC and private military contractors, whose coffers are filled with cash which is reinvested in political campaigns to keep the largesse flowing.
De-humanising Palestinians
The selective moral outrage and ritualistic condemnation of the Palestinian resistance seeks to not only delegitimise the broader struggle against colonialism; it also reveals a cultural bias inherited from 18th and 19th century orientalist scholarship, which consisted of monolithic and disparaging literary, historical and artistic representations of non-Western peoples, traditions and languages.
Orientalists reduced non-European cultures to negative stereotypes, categorising the world through a binary typology of advanced and regressive races. This historically functioned as a raison d’etre for European imperialism and a similar mindset has permeated large swathes of Western politics, academia and journalism.
The specific language employed to frame victims of a genocide as criminals and its perpetrators as civilised is no accident. Rather, the justification for what many legal experts consider a textbook case of genocide exposes an age old racial trope to which many pro-Israel commentators in the Anglosphere remain committed.
The incineration of Gaza’s women and children fails to pull at the heartstrings of Western Zionists due to a deeply embedded epistemic tradition, characterised largely by euro-centric motifs and simplistic ideological constructions of Muslims as barbarian hordes, in contrast to their superior white European counterparts who are harbingers of civilisation and enlightenment.
This medieval polemic and otherisation of African and Asiatic “savages” persists in the neo-imperial imagination, judging by the differential treatment of Ukrainian and African refugees as well as the dehumanising coverage of the Palestinian plight.
Instead of interrogating the historical bias and unlearning the anti-Muslim bigotry which was institutionalised in Europe’s centres of learning for centuries, the racialised representations of the “other” continue to shape cultural perceptions of many Western pundits who believe Israel has the moral high ground against a population whose faith, tradition and culture makes them ungrievable, unmournable and irredeemable.
It is this ugly history which informs the Western meta-narrative on Palestine, explaining the irresistible urge in the corridors of power to distort the realities of other cultures and casually disregard a nation’s complex history and multigenerational trauma for often political ends.
Having dehumanised Palestinians, it becomes possible to treat Gaza as an experimenting ground for the IDF’s hi-tech weaponry and surveillance technologies, before exporting these advanced counterinsurgency methods elsewhere.
With rumours of Gaza being converted into a smart city as per the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the depravity of Zionists and their Western cheerleaders has been unmasked, none of whom deem the Palestinians as conducive for natural reserves and green spaces.
