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History is repeating itself with Europe once again in the limelight in connection with atrocities or crimes against humanity. The same countries that cowardly aided and abetted the Nazis in their plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe are now aiding and abetting the descendants of the holocaust’s survivors in exterminating the Palestinian people. In doing so, they seem to be seeking to make amends for their historical complicity in a crime against humanity by supporting another crime against humanity. In the two instances, the West, the so-called arbiter of the rules-based international system, has its hands stained with blood.
But the difference between then and now is huge and consequential: during WWII — which actually was not a global war but a European war — most people across the planet were unaware about the wrath that befell the Jews. Now, however, the whole world is watching on live television and through social media the atrocities and crimes against humanity that Israel, with the blessing, support and assistance of the United States and Europe, is committing against the Palestinian people.
Israel’s emboldened by the West’s indifference to non-Western lives
Given Western countries’ professed goal of defending international law and upholding the “universal values” they stand for, millions across the world, including many of their own citizens, have expressed their outrage at the West’s double standards, its complicit silence in the face of the massive atrocities being committed against defenseless Palestinians and their rejection of all calls to demand an immediate ceasefire.
Since the outbreak of Russia’s war on Ukraine in February 2022, global public opinion has been inundated with statements by Western leaders expressing — rightly — their sympathy for the Ukrainian people, sometimes even shedding tears on camera. But these same leaders have turned into callous, heartless, and soulless bodies with no sympathy for any Palestinian even as the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) relentlessly and mercilessly unleashes a hell of collective punishment on the Palestinian people to avenge Hamas’s surprise 7 October attack on southern Israel.
One after another, Western leaders have flocked to Israel and spoken in unison about its right to defend itself, thereby giving the Jewish state’s leaders a blank check to slaughter and annihilate the Palestinian people. In the process, they have made no bones about establishing an equivalence between the colonizer and the colonized, the occupier and the occupied. Indeed, they seem to see no difference between an army with the most sophisticated and lethal weapons and a defenseless, dehydrated, starved people that have been fighting for the past 75 years to defend its inalienable right to establish its independent state and live in dignity.
More than three weeks have passed since Israel launched its murderous war of collective punishment against the Palestinians, depriving them of water, food, electricity and internet, and no Western leader has called for a ceasefire. In fact, not only have the West failed to call for a cessation of hostilities, but they have torpedoed two UNSC draft resolutions aimed at calling for a humanitarian truce. For the first time in modern history, the world is giving its blessing to the extermination of a whole population in broad daylight.
As a result of the blank check the West has given Israel to slaughter the Palestinians, the occupying power has committed three grave violations of international law: killing and maiming children; attacking schools or hospitals; and denying humanitarian access to children. These crimes are among the six grave human rights violations identified and condemned by Resolution 1261, which the UN Security Council adopted in 1999. Israel has violated all provisions of international law relating to armed conflicts, including the first article of the 1864 Geneva Convention, the 1907 Hague Convention, the 1949 Geneva Convention, as well as General Assembly Resolution 2675 (1970), which clearly states that “a hospital zone or similar refuge should not be the object of military operations.” In other words, this resolution makes it clear that indiscriminate or targeted attacks on hospitals, medical units and medical personnel operating in humanitarian zones are prohibited.
The moral high ground fallacy
In view of the West’s complicity in the mass atrocities being perpetrated against the Palestinian people, many are pointing to its moral bankruptcy, stressing that it has lost legitimacy to portray itself as the bulwark of universal values such as democracy, human rights, freedom, equality, justice, etc.
But did the West really ever have any morality or high ground? Is its blind enabling of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians really shocking or even surprising? The butchery that is taking place in Gaza against the Palestinians under the world’s watch should neither shock nor surprise us. In fact, violence, moral relativism, and indifference to the suffering and annihilation of those deemed inferior or not human enough have historically been the pillars of Western civilization. In other words, the true face of the West, or the driving force behind its triumph over the rest of the world, is some combination of ruthlessness, bloodthirstiness, barbarism, and savagery.
Those who need convincing of the inherent brutality and savagery of the West as a civilization need look no further than the Crusades, transatlantic slavery, and the colonial subjugation of Africa in the wake of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, among many other episodes that illustrate the West’s history of vicious brutishness.
The genocide that is unfolding before our eyes should serve as a wake-up call to all nations whose people hope to break free of the grips of the West’s century-long control over their destinies. More specifically, the problem Arab and Muslim countries have faced over the past 70 years, even among the educated classes, is that people have been too inclined to take as gospel the West’s glossy narrative about itself. Instead of judging the West based on its actions and policies, as well as on its dark track record, we have tended to judge it based on the way it has portrayed itself since the late 18th century.
Because most of the literature used in our school system is saturated with Western views, we have tended to believe that the West is indeed the cradle of civilization, the ultimate defender of human rights and the establishment of a world order based on the values of equality, tolerance, coexistence, and peaceful relations among nations. In other words, the inferiority complex that colonization and decades of cultural alienation have instilled in our minds has led many of us to naively believe that Western media are the epitome of objectivity and that Western journalists and intellectuals are truly “professional,” “impartial,” and have a very high work ethic.
And so, in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the mainstream media’s shameful and outrageous coverage of what they euphemistically, mortifyingly call the “Israel-Hamas war” should be a resounding lesson to those of us who have long been in awe of the West’s so-called ideals. In other words, the shameless and vile bias of the Western media against the Palestinian people and their blind support for Israel should be a stark reminder that these media have always acted as an echo chamber of their governments, seeking to help achieve the domestic and foreign agendas of the ruling classes.
To be sure, the Gaza genocide is not the first time – nor will it be the last – that Western media have done the dirty work of manipulating facts to serve their masters’ agenda. Prior to the first Gulf War in 1991, the Western media played a central role in propagating the false claim that Iraqi soldiers had taken over 300 babies from their incubators and killed them during the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Mainstream media reports were based on the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. She said she witnessed Iraqi soldiers killing these babies. But Nayirah was none other than the daughter of Kuwait’s then ambassador to the United Nations, and her claims were all false.
The Western media played the same role before the US war on Iraq in March 2003. Becoming the echo chamber of US officials, the US corporate media simply parroted whatever US officials fed them and helped the Bush administration convince the American public that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and posed an existential threat to the US. Then, as now, the U.S. media simply echoed the U.S. administration’s views on the genocide in Gaza, giving no airtime to dissenting or pro-Palestinian voices.
As far as I am concerned, I have always made sure, throughout my two decades of work in academia and international diplomacy, to emphasize in my writings that the Western media are not as free or objective as they pretend or try to make people believe. They are mere tools in the hands of wealthy white Westerners who use them to sway people into embracing their self-centered Western values. For the most part, the Western media are the gatekeepers of white supremacy, which makes them complicit in the oppression, enslavement, and extermination of non-white people and their centuries-old civilizations and cultures.
The unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe that has befallen the Palestinian people has thus conclusively exposed the brazen and shameless double standards of western media. By suppressing dissenting views that provide a different perspective from their biased coverage of the conflict, they have shown where they stand on the scale of freedom of expression.
Entire families have completely disappeared from the Palestinian civil registry and over close to 4,000 children have been murdered by Israel. Still, the Western media continue to establish an equivalence between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the executioner and the victim.
An illustrative example of the cruel and outrageous game of conflation and equivalence at play in the mainstream media’s coverage of the Gaza genocide is journalist Piers Morgan, who still shamelessly starts his shows by asking all non-pro-Israel invitees the same question: “do you condemn Hamas?” The systematic killing of Palestinian civilians over the past 75 years, the targeting of children, women and the elderly in the current and past Israeli aggression do not elicit calls for condemnation from Morgan and his acolytes. Morgan thus epitomizes the bankruptcy of western media outlets and exposes their true white supremacy-driven agenda.
The naivety or complicity of local elites
The problem that countries in the Middle East and Africa have faced for the past century is that their elites have tended to marvel at, or take for granted, the West’s empty slogans about justice for all peoples, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, religious tolerance, and equality between all people regardless of creed, skin color, or national origin.
We have been so oblivious to history, and permeated by the West’s vast and multi-faceted propaganda machine, that we have simply forgotten to look deeply at its dark and bloody past. Even those who look at or write about it often find it difficult to question the way in which the West has portrayed itself in comparison to other civilizations. The complex of the colonized has bogged us down.
In this sense, anyone who begins the process of truly decolonizing their mind, who starts seeing Westerners as his or her equals, scrutinizing every aspect of their past and present, will come to the obvious conclusion that the West has never been the cradle of justice, social equality, democracy, or freedoms.
What, for instance, does one discover when one digs just a little bit into the propaganda that the West has fed us over the past two centuries? We quickly realize that France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Men and of the Citizen, which is regarded by many as the bedrock of the modern world’s human rights literature and inspired the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was in fact, not meant to consider all human beings as equal. These rights were only granted to French male citizens over 25 years of age. This means women, servants, and foreigners were not to benefit from the equality of rights advocated for by the Declaration. Nor did it seek to abolish slavery.
For the past 250 years, the attitudes of European nations toward the rest of the world — especially toward Africans, Asians, and Muslims — have been shaped by the fundamental flaw in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, even though France and other Western nations that adopted these principles have since promised to uphold the equality of human beings.
The hidden, dark side of European Enlightenment
Prominent thinkers who are widely regarded as the cornerstones of the European Enlightenment were in fact perpetrators of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia. Consider, for example, the case of Voltaire. The French philosopher is revered by many people around the world, especially in Muslim and Arab nations, as the embodiment of intellectuals who dedicated their lives to upholding the admirable principles of equality, justice, tolerance, freedom, and humanitarianism. Thus, Voltaire is seen as the supreme defender of the universal principles that helped to initiate the French Revolution.
Beneath this idealized image of Voltaire, there is a darker, more menacing side to the pioneer of the Enlightenment. In reality, he was the primary proponent of white supremacy, which rested on the dehumanization of non-Europeans and the justification of the demonization or subjection of other cultures..
For example, in his 1743 play “Le fanatisme de Mahomet,” Voltaire described the Prophet Muhammad as a “monster,” “impostor,” “barbarian,” “insolent Arab,” “brigand,” “traitor,” “deceitful,” “cruel,” and the “most criminal of all tyrants.” In his 1756 book “Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations,” Voltaire, who was also an incorrigible anti-Semite, characterized Jews as stupid, barbaric, greedy, superstitious, and spiteful. He thus created, in his writings, a hierarchy between the races, with the white European male at the top of the pyramid.
Or, as he notably wrote in his 1756 essay, “Only a blind person is allowed to doubt that whites, Negroes, albinos, Hottentots, Chinese, Americans are entirely different races.” Another prominent French philosopher, Montesquieu, was an apologist for slavery and regarded black Africans as less human than Europeans. In his 1748 book L’Esprit des Lois , Montesquieu said: “We cannot imagine that God, who is a very wise being, put a soul, especially a good soul, in a completely black body.”
Montesquieu believed that Islam was an existential enemy of Europe and the archenemy of Christianity, which was in line with the prevailing European opinion and attitude toward Islam at the time. In his writings on the alleged cruelty of Islam, he emphatically described the Prophet Muhammad as a warlord and an impostor. He called this the inherent tyranny of Islam, claiming that there was no justice in Muslim countries, where people supposedly lived at the whim and mercy of their autocratic rulers, because political and economic life was based on the strict interpretation of Islam.
Montesquieu thus created the philosophical framework that would allow French and Europeans travelers to Muslim countries like Morocco to question the legitimacy of their rulers. For instance, the prolific production of books where French writers vilified Moroccan rulers would provide the pretext under which France rushed to occupy and subjugate Morocco while claiming that the goal of this occupation was not only to lift the North African kingdom out of backwardness but also to save its populations from the supposed tyranny of their sultans.
Racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism have flourished in Europe since the theoretical framework that Montesquieu and Voltaire defined in their books against non-Europeans, particularly, Muslim and Africans, but also the Jewish people. At the heart of this philosophy developed by Voltaire and other prominent Enlightenment figures was the belief, still prevailing in some Western circles to this day, that white Europeans are the chosen race whose values should rule the globe.
Little wonder, then, that Western nations, the same who claim to be led by Enlightenment ideals, have unwaveringly backed Israel, a country that has a history of breaking both international and humanitarian law. Their stated commitment to international peace, stability, and cohabitation is based on the conviction that achieving global peace cannot and should not come at the expense of preserving the Eurocentric world order, which was established more than a century ago. And so, anyone who challenges this world order is bound to incur the wrath of the West and see its true face.
Dominating others is the West’s preferred business and political model
The logical extension of this racist, eurocentric belief is that Enlightenment has bestowed on the West the exclusive right to violate international law and commit crimes against humanity. Ironically — if not insultingly — we are expected to believe that when the supposedly principled and superior West commits atrocious crimes, they do it for “global security” sake and for the sake of serving humanity as a whole.
Did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not say that his country is on the side of civilization and democracy as it carries out a genocide in the besieged Gaza Strip? For Netanyahu, the murderous IOF campaign in Gaza is a much-needed war against the “axis of evil.” This reasoning echoes the then-US President George W. Bush’s rhetoric following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. By casting Hamas, and more broadly the Palestinian people, as evil and a threat to the outpost of the “civilized” world in the Middle East, Netanyahu is seeking to conjure in the minds of Westerners all the fears and apprehensions that the West harbors about Islam.
Losing the war to Hamas and allowing the Palestinians to establish their independent state would be ominous for the West and sound the death knell of its subjugation of the region. Israel has been, and will continue to be, a client state of the West and will continue to implement its disruptive and subversive agenda in the region. A West that has gotten accustomed to controlling other peoples’ fates and dictating to them how they should view the world, cannot afford a scenario under which others would encroach on its exclusive right, as white men, to shape the global system in line with its whims and strategic interests.
The West cannot think or behave otherwise. This is the West’s business and political model. The West cannot conceive of a world where all humans are equal and have the right to live in peace, prosperity, and stability. The “universal values” that Western intellectuals have been exploiting for the past two centuries are a mere tool designed to enable the West to perpetuate its global dominance.
Whenever these values or the international rules that govern the world do not align with the West’s strategic goals, its leaders have no quarrels over violating those same rules and values they have purported to defend. We have seen this cynical behavior at play in the genocide that is unfolding in Gaza. Despite all the war crimes that Israel has committed since the launch of its campaign of ethnic cleansing, its failure to kill any Hamas militant, Western leaders are still saying with a straight face that Israel has the right to defend itself.
Western philosophy is rooted in a tacit zero-sum game in which the European white man should dominate the world. The only acceptable, livable world is thus one in which the West’s prosperity and development can be achieved at the expense of other peoples.
Let’s face it, and say it out loud and unreservedly: throughout history, the West has been — and still is — the source and instigator of racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, brutality, destruction, the most abject cruelties, the deadliest wars and the most heinous genocides and exterminations the world has ever seen. The West has never been the “land of the free” or the “civilized world,” but the land of sadistic, savage, and heartless people bent on subjugating other peoples, plundering their wealth and keeping them in bondage.
Never in history has there been a ruling class more vicious, despotic, violent, and hostile to the peoples of the rest of the world than the European-born ruling class. History is replete with examples of the cruelty and savagery that Europeans have inflicted on other peoples, despite the efforts of the Western media and elite to obscure the historical record of the West.
Read also: Europe: The Most Brutal and Savage Continent
But the ruthless Western ruling classes have not only taken their toll on foreign countries. The wicked and unscrupulous policies of the West’s ruling oligarchies have also long affected and continue to affect ordinary people in the West. Many in the West have been manipulated to support policies and actions that have only served the interests of the wealthy. Furthermore, people in the West have been deceived into believing that they are entitled to exercise their basic rights under a democratic government. In reality, however, what these people enjoy is a set of permissions afforded to them by the ruling classes.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently admitted to Europe’s inherent tendency toward barbarism. “Unlike all other continents on the planet, Europe is the most brutal continent where the most savage wars took place. It is not Africa, it is not Asia, it is in Europe,” Sarkozy said in a speech to the European Parliament in March this year. “I would like to tell you something: this did not happen in the Middle Ages, it happened in the 20th century. The extermination of Jews occurred in Europe (…) Our continent is brutal, savage and can lapse into barbarism.”
Beyond the tragedy of the two world wars, what further vindicates Sarkozy’s comments is Europe’s history of conquest and subjugation of other civilizations. Consider, for instance, the brutality with which the Franks treated Muslims during the occupation of Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Jerusalem) in 1098 — where they committed a mass massacre against the city’s residents; the Spanish Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula, and the ensuing ethnic cleansing and subsequent deportation of Jewish people and over 700,000 Muslims from Spain’s newly conquered country; the extermination of the indigenous people of the Americas and the indigenous people of Australia; the wars led by Western countries in Korea in the 1950s, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina; and the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq.
If all of this does not testify to the inherent brutality, the bloodthirstiness, and the moral bankruptcy of the West, then what does? And so, it is high time that we decolonize our minds and start calling out the West for what it really is and has been throughout history. It is time to look the West in the eye and tell its politicians and its media empires to stop lecturing the rest of the world on morality, humanity, and other “universal principles.” It is time to knock down the “moral high ground” on which the West has long placed itself, and to confront the Western media and intellectuals with the sobering truth that, throughout history, one of the few areas in which the West has been unrivaled is in plundering other civilizations.
