For more than four months, the United States, Britain and other Western countries have staunchly supported Israel's war on Gaza. To date, Israeli forces have killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, including more than 12,000 children.
On January 26, the International Court of Justice ruled that “it appears that at least some of the acts and omissions that South Africa alleges were committed by Israel in Gaza may fall within the provisions of the International Court of Justice.” was lowered. [Genocide] It said South Africa's claim that Israel was committing genocide was “plausible”. Nevertheless, Western countries continued to support Israel.
Later, the United States, Britain, Germany and more than a dozen other countries withdrew funding from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Near East Refugees (UNRWA) staff after Israel claimed they had ties to Hamas. Gaza faced famine.
Despite the West's complicity in what the world's highest court has recognized as genocide, it still affords itself all sorts of advantages in civilized social behavior. The Western world still praises itself as “the good guys.”
“I've gotten in trouble many times for saying you don't have to be Jewish to be a Zionist, but I'm a Zionist. I don't apologize for that. That's the reality,” Joe said. President Biden spoke at a private campaign reception in Massachusetts in early December, when the death toll in the Gaza Strip had already reached 16,200. “we, [Americans] From this cancer treatment to everything we've done so far, we've never considered anything to be beyond our abilities. “I really think so,” he added.
For world leaders to declare themselves 50-year followers of a white supremacist ideology that condones apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide, and then turn to the United States and all its greatness? It takes a special kind of narcissism. Possibilities,” as if the United States had spent the past 130 years simply sprinkling fairy dust around the world and not intervening with brutal military and economic power.
But the president of the United States is not alone in his self-delusion. At a Conservative Friends of Israel gathering in London last month, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed unwavering support for Israel's attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. “There is a terrible irony in Israel, where every country is accused of genocide,” Sunak said, calling South Africa's case against Israel “totally unwarranted.”
The “terrible irony” is that Israel, as a Western ally, cannot be accused of genocide because it is one of the “good guys.” The “bad guys” may only be non-Western (actually non-white) countries such as South Africa.
Mr. Biden, Mr. Sunak, and others, as leaders of developed countries, do not act in an understandable and rational manner when they wage wars and kill people in the name of self-defense or under the guise of fighting “terrorism.” I still believe that I made the right choice.
Despite tens of millions of protests around the world and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and other crimes against humanity, and the neglect of the ongoing war in Sudan and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the West's Leaders still believe that Western capitalism and democratic systems will save the world.
In his 1996 book, The Clash of Civilizations, the late political scientist Samuel Huntington warned of the dangers of the West's delusion that the rest of the world should adopt its values. “The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and on Westerners accepting their civilization as unique rather than universal,” he wrote.
But what Huntington failed to understand about the West's quest for a single world civilization was that today's resentment toward the West did not begin in the post-Cold War era of the 1990s. These are the legacy of death, destruction, and resource deprivation that Westerners have left behind since Christopher Columbus reached the Western Hemisphere in the 1490s and Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route around Africa and into South Asia. It is a reaction to traces.
The rest of the world was destroyed, first through the plundering of gold, silver, and precious stones from newly invaded lands, then through the enslavement of millions of indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians, and finally through conquest. It has become a source of plunder for the West. old empire of the east.
The belief that Western civilization is superior and just because of its whiteness is so ingrained in their culture that young Westerners grow up in their lives without anyone ever questioning it. That is, until history professors like me came along and confronted this fundamental belief.
Throughout my years of teaching, students have often chimed in with me over my assumption that “Western Civilization” is an oxymoron.
“But the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice!” one student exclaimed, while a calmer student raised his hand and said, “It’s unfortunate that atrocities happened to the natives, but the Spaniards did it!” It is insulting to compare that with what happened in Rome.”
It happened a few years ago, in one of my world history courses, when I talked about the barbarity of Spain's conquest of the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century, and the similarities between those invasions and the Inca Empire, and some students This was a strong reaction from The Vandals and Visigoths contributed to the end of the Western Roman Empire.
I remember the fruits of civilization being destroyed, conquistadors and Spanish priests burning nearly all Mayan writings, desecrating Mexican, Mayan, and Incan temples, and forcing slavery and Christianity on their peoples. I pointed it out.
I have also heard vitriol from students who do not want to even consider the possibility that the United States and Western countries, which have committed barbaric acts against their own people and around the world, may commit similar acts in the near future. I have also endured.
“That's impossible, because…no civilized society wants that to happen to them,” one student said a few years ago. “Americans will never take up arms against the government, especially the military. It is not rational. We will not be foolish enough to make this mistake again.” January 6, 2021 “Despite evidence to the contrary during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, our military will quell any insurrection,” another student uttered last year.
Some students have become so entrenched in the belief that the West is a positive force that the West has become a nuisance for the 60 million indigenous peoples of whom up to 90 percent of the population was wiped out within 100 years of Columbus' first contact. Some thought about the coming apocalypse.
We couldn't even discuss other genocides committed in the name of empire, colonialism, and capitalism. 165 million South Asians who were starved, murdered, or worked to death by the British between 1880 and 1920. Or the estimated 10 million Congolese people exterminated by the Belgians. Alternatively, up to 100,000 Herero and Nama people were massacred by German forces in Namibia between 1904 and 1908.
Even when the genocide of World Wars I and II became a hot topic, my students remained strong in their belief in Western rationality. As many as 90 million civilians and military personnel were killed in these conflicts, including more than 200,000 in the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Western narcissism is why it is difficult for my students to accept that Western civilization is always contradictory. The late postcolonial scholar Edward Said wrote in Orientalism (1978): [Western civilisation] Intra-European hegemony: the idea that European identity is superior compared to all non-European peoples and cultures. ”
This belief in the superiority of the West means that it is always on the right side of history, despite the many examples of Western irrationality, barbarism, and brutality in its interventions in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Western narcissism means that the US and the West will only raise a finger in support of the Palestinians if forced to do so by the world and their own people.
While it is encouraging that nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, it is not enough to end American and Western complicity in Israel's crimes. do not have.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.