Because we have committed so many atrocities and allowed unthinkable evil to fester, we think we can atone for our deeds by accommodating, sponsoring, and abetting the devil. In June of 2025, I noticed the news ticker on the Al Jazeera channel had an item that provided an update on the number of people (mostly women and children) killed daily by Israeli attacks on Gaza. After observing for about a week, I began taking pictures of these updates.
I remember picking up my phone in bed on Saturday, October 7, 2023, to the breaking news that Hamas was attacking Israel, then racing to turn on the TV to observe what would become the most barbaric genocide in recent history, justified by ancient folklore. They will want us to believe Israel’s planned and systematic extermination of Palestinians is a just response to the October 7 armed resistance by Hamas. Well…
I took a long pause after the first two paragraphs of this article because of conflicting thoughts. I have multiple thoughts and opinions on this subject, most of which are based on plain truth. However, on this issue, the truth has been shown not to matter. So, after the first two paragraphs, I decided to reconsider the perspective of this article. I can’t tell how helpful that was. I guess I will just share the thoughts that fall on my fingers.
I have consumed a lot of news material on this issue since it started, both on traditional and new media, and I can recall when Piers Morgan would ask every Palestinian sympathizer, “Do you condemn the Hamas attack of October 7?” This question he will put to even Palestinians who have either had themselves or a relative killed, displaced, dispossessed, arrested and detained without charges, or dehumanized as a result of Israeli occupation and colonization. Piers will demand a yes or no, not because he is oblivious to the nuances in that question, but rather a deliberate attempt to set up these guests for ridicule and to enforce a false stereotype.
When Israel began its onslaught on Gaza, the Western media justified it by saying, “Israel has the right to defend itself.” We were made to believe that a nuclear power colonizer was under existential threat from a refugee state that doesn’t even have a national army. Instead of sticking to facts and properly contextualizing their reports, they ignored almost every rule of ethical journalism and relied solely on propaganda briefings from Israeli authorities and spokespersons. Creating an excuse for the ensuing war crimes.
The Western news media have always been complicit in Western government war crimes across the world, but it is still astonishing to see them scramble to protect a genocidal occupying state, and the levels to which they have sunk to justify and defend this are beyond repulsion. It does get amusing to see them stick to their exposed priming and agenda-setting tactics even though we see these war crimes committed in real time on the new media. Even after Israel had killed several journalists and refused them access to the strip, they found no issues and continued to insist on their rights to the defense of stolen property.
Buju Banton said in a song that “woe be unto the United Nations, they are nothing but a fraud.” And I have been a strong critic of that organization because they always seem helpless when it comes to real issues, performing their supposed core mandates. Just like its preceding League, the United Nations has only been a theater of speeches and failed to maintain international peace and security, and to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. Ironically, the fundamental guilt seed that they sowed and nurtured with their superiority complex has grown to become a creeping thorn plant in every hall of that establishment.
We can’t begin the conversation of establishing a sustainable unifying body that will represent the rights, dignity, and sovereignty of all humans while still holding onto the ideas of superior powers and granting vetoes to a select group. A universal peace can only be built on equality, not equity. The League failed because of its superiority complex, and we must not act oblivious of this because whatever we might try to do with the ruins of this United Nations will just be a reflection of its failed past.
On October 6, 2023, 19-year-old Palestinian student was shot and killed in the occupied West Bank during an Israeli settler attack under the protection of the Israeli Defense Force. It was reported that the boy was standing on a roof. The rhetoric is that Israel has the right to defend itself as a military occupation, but is mostly mute on the inherent right of the Palestinian people to defend their territory and fight for their sovereignty. Maybe because most of us are blinded by our own guilt, or we just see it as a viable tactic of domination, because we are the pioneers of this barbarism.
The October 6 attack wasn’t a one-off incident but several decades of sustained occupation, displacement, and humiliation. In fact, there were sustained attacks on Palestinian territories between October 2 and 6, 2023. The Palestinian people, since the establishment of Israel, have endured unimaginable forms of settler occupation, and the world largely remained silent on these issues. Particularly the Arab world.
The Palestinian issue is not about religion because that spot is a melting pot of religion and has had Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together for centuries. So, the establishment of Israel is not in any form the creation of a haven for Jews because they already existed there and were regarded as the “protected people.” Before the Europeans wiped their Jew blood-stained hands on Arab lands, the Arabs regarded the minority jews as the protected people. It is rich for the same people to be now accused of a jihad to eliminate the Jews, when the only people who have faced constant humiliation and annihilation through these periods have been the Arabs.
When Russia attacked Ukraine, citing NATO expansion into the region as an existential threat, the already-sanctioned Russian state was ostracized, and a warrant for the arrest of its leader was issued. Western leaders were quick to condemn Russia, with the likes of Europe and America going to great lengths, including impoverishing their own people and further endangering their states to support Ukraine, and the Western media couldn’t run out of villainous adjectives for Putin.
There is a sharp contrast when it comes to the language in which these two momentous conflicts are discussed. We hear sharp criticisms of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, but these same experts, pundits, and hosts enter a moral quandary when the issue of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the occupied West Bank is mentioned. Russia is a nuclear superpower engaged in a war with a sovereign nation backed by another heavily armed nuclear superpower and other globally influential nations, yet the one posing a moral quandary is the ethnic cleansing of a refugee state by an occupying nuclear force, funded, supported, and protected by America and other Western countries.
The hypocrisy is thick to the touch. When President Putin went to Alaska, President Trump received all sorts of criticism for the befitting reception he gave the Russian leader. The reason was simple: they were of the firm belief that Putin is an irredentist who was engaged in an unprovoked, brutal invasion of Ukraine. He is a war criminal who has an arrest warrant served on him for war crimes, and even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wondered what Putin had on Trump to get such a reception. But when the Israeli leader, who is guilty by the same measure, shattering the scale even, turned up to the American Congress with his usual gas torch in July of 2024, it was reported that he received a minute-long standing ovation on his arrival and went on to receive about 50 more during his speech. Now I wonder what Benjamin Netanyahu has on the American Congress.
What Israel is doing in Palestine is a medieval level of barbarism. Even in Japan, it was a shameless nuclear bond. Never before have I seen this level of sustained bombing of lives, coordinated destruction of infrastructure, and an attempt to annihilate the history and existence of a group of people, only to occupy the piece of land on which they live. We can’t justify this unless we want to assert the notion that the concept of a rules-based world order is a fallacy. That our world has reverted to the pre-civilized era, where nations can invade other states to kill, plunder, and seize the land on which they live.
The British didn’t have the right to wipe out the Ashantis when Yaa Asantewaa rebelled against their disrespect and occupation. Neither did the Europeans have the right to obliterate South Africans when they resisted apartheid. So, why should Israel now have the right to kill and destroy to protect a settler state?
You don’t have to belong to a particular sect to be appalled by these happenings because it is an issue of human rights and dignity, and should be of concern to all, as dangerous precedents are threats to everyone. But I am perplexed at the deafening silence of the majority of the Arab world to this wanton destruction of Palestine. Even though I’ve heard several theories and reasons, I am still perplexed at their active inaction.
The inversion in this crisis is mind-boggling. The Arab leaders, as well as all people of the world, including, especially, the citizens of the occupying state of Israel, should know that the testimony of Martin Niemöller was poetic and true then, as it is poetic and true today, and so shall be tomorrow and the days to come after us. Keeping silent, aiding and supporting impunity and gross disregard for the universal right to life only feeds into a cycle of hate and anarchy, which will in turn consume everything we know and love.
When Israel recently bombed Qatar in an attempt to assassinate the Hamas leaders who were engaged in the supposed peace negotiations, their Prime Minister justified this middle finger gesture to Qatarian sovereignty by citing the United States’s clandestine activities in Pakistan to assassinate Bin Laden. This wasn’t the first time Benjamin used preceding events, albeit out of context, to justify his war crimes and acts of unprovoked aggression.
Tomorrow, it might not be crazy Benjamin, it could be mad John or a lunatic brother called Abu from the Sahel who will invade Spain to reestablish the Moorish rule.
Our world has come a long way, and we, the people, must learn to change our thinking so we can realize our full potential as a race by coming together and working to fight common hindrances like poverty and disease. It might sound idealistic, but the world indeed has enough to satisfy us all, and we must not continue to allow a crazy, greedy few to control these riches and use them as bait in keeping us in perpetual conflict.
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