Cheering on Genocide, 'Civilized West' Plumbs New Depths of Inhumanity
A genocide is happening right now in Gaza. Israeli forces have killed more than 5,000 people living in Gaza since Oct. 7. Virtually every Western politician, corporation, and media outlet supports the perpetrators of this genocide.
If you express any solidarity at all for the Palestinians, the people the state of Israel is currently exterminating, you will be attacked and smeared in the most vicious, defamatory terms. You can lose your job, be suspended and threatened. If you’re a student, you may be blacklisted by future employers. If you’re a politician, even in a supposedly “left” party like the NDP, you will be kicked out of your party’s caucus and forbidden from speaking in the legislature, as Ontario MPP Sarah Jama found out this week. The powerful, high-tech imperialist power carrying out the slaughter of thousands of people who have nowhere to escape is presented as the victim. The civilians being murdered—even children—are demonized as villains, terrorists, and “human animals”.
These are dark times. The levels of sadism, cruelty, and hypocrisy are so off the charts, it’s difficult to find words to adequately convey them. Take Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who had the audacity to falsely accuse Jama of having “a long and well-documented history of antisemitism”—as if Ford had not been repeatedly photographed palling around with former Toronto mayoral candidate Faith Goldy, an open white nationalist and neo-Nazi.
Ford, like politicians up to and including U.S. President Joe Biden, repeated baseless claims that Jama supported “the rape and murder of innocent Jewish people.” Unless Jama moves forward with her threatened libel suit, Ford will suffer no ill consequences whatsoever from his smears and lies because they serve ruling class interests. Meanwhile, Jama has been made a pariah for speaking in support of a people suffering genocide at the hands of a racist regime—one backed to the hilt by Western imperialist powers including Canada.
The statements of top Israeli government officials are shocking in their open racism and collective punishment of Palestinians. Yet it makes no difference for Western politicians who blandly recite their mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh recently spoke at a conference organized by the pro-Zionist Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) which featured Arsen Ostrovsky as its guest speaker. Ostrovsky, who calls himself a “human rights lawyer”, recently shared a cartoon on Twitter/X depicting a blue boot with “IDF” written on it stepping on a Palestinian cockroach caricature. This didn’t bother Singh, just as Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians didn’t stop Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles from throwing Jama out of her caucus to appease the rabid right wing.
It doesn’t matter how many images and video clips emerge of Palestinian children wounded and shattered by Israeli bombs, screaming in the hospital as doctors operate on them without anesthetic because no supplies can get through to Gaza; or of Palestinian journalists learning that Israeli forces have killed their entire families. It doesn’t matter how many hospitals or churches or bakeries or homes the IDF bombs. Nothing will stop Western imperialist powers from supporting Israel as it carries out the most horrific atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Gaza—nothing except a mass movement of workers and youth and international solidarity with Palestinians.
Many politicians and pundits have found a convenient way to set aside any lingering moral qualms about their support for this unfolding carnage. Just look at the latest column by neoconservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, “Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in this War”. Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, as well as Fox News blowhard and Fred Flintstone lookalike Sean Hannity, have all repeated the same talking point. As Caitlin Johnstone observes:
This is about as blatant as war propaganda gets. These imperial narrative managers are using their massive platforms and influence to tell everyone “Remember kids, you’re going to see a whole bunch of innocent civilians get killed, and it’s going to look a lot like those civilians are being killed by Israel. But don’t you believe your lying eyes! They’re really being killed by Hamas. Just because the people dropping military explosives in areas known to be packed full of children are wearing Israeli badges and operating Israeli war machinery doesn’t mean Israel is involved in this butchery in any way. It’s really Hamas doing all that.”
And what’s great about this narrative is that there’s no upper limit on the extent to which it can be applied. If they wind up killing twenty thousand Gazans, then Hamas killed twenty thousand Gazans. If they wind up killing a hundred thousand Gazans, then Hamas killed a hundred thousand Gazans. If they wind up driving all Palestinians out of Gaza into refugee camps in the Sinai desert and seizing that territory as their own, then god damn you for ethnic cleansing the Gaza Strip, Hamas.
No matter how far they extend the bloodshed and abuse, they can still blame it all on Hamas. Per this logic there is therefore no limit on how far things can be taken before the cost of human life and suffering outweighs Israel’s strategic objectives and ceasefire negotiations become necessary. It’s a catch-all innoculation against peace.
But why should we be surprised that politicians are revealing themselves more than ever as the amoral ghouls most have always assumed them to be? In the case of Canadian politics, the same MPs who just weeks ago stood up and cheered for a Nazi who fought in the Waffen-SS are now turning around and accusing anyone who doesn’t support an ongoing genocide of being “antisemitic”. Those few who, like Sarah Jama, have the courage of their convictions and stand up for the oppressed people being mass murdered are immediately cast out, as bought-and-paid-for ghouls line up to attack them.
Sadly but inevitably, support for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians goes beyond politicians, corporations, and media. Some Israelis have made social media posts mocking the residents of Gaza for having no water and electricity.
These are the fruits of Zionism and generations of anti-Arab racism, nationalism, and xenophobia, which have only grown more intense in Israel in recent decades. Openly and gleefully applauding the killing of the “other” is the inevitable result of any kind of racism and nationalism. It’s the same attitude that led white Southerners to turn the lynching of Black Americans into a public spectacle, posing for postcards that show them smiling beside the burnt bodies of their victims. It’s the same attitude that allowed perpetrators of the Holocaust to still view themselves as the victims even as they committed mass murder. The genocidal mentality both dehumanizes the target group and depicts them as a mortal threat. To the perpetrator, mass killing thereby becomes an act of “self-defence”.
Another paradox of genocide is that the perpetrators tends to view themselves as superior to the targeted group—morally, racially, etc.—yet also under attack by them. If mass killing is believed to be carried out in “self-defence”, that tends to expand and encompass not just physical defence, but defence of a culture, nation, ideology, “way of life”, and so on. Supporters of the Israeli state invariably depict it in the most glowing (and false) terms, identical to the way Western imperialist powers have always portrayed themselves: as beacons of “democracy”, “civilization”, “freedom”, “human rights”, etc. fighting the dark forces of evil, tyranny, and barbarism. That these self-portrayals are at odds with reality is immaterial. What matters is that they maintain public support for mass murder carried out in the interests of the ruling class.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, chief architect of the current genocide, offered a classic example when he called Israel’s massacre of Palestinians “a fight between the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis of evil and the forces of freedom and progress. Light will defeat darkness.” How a brutal military occupation, a constitution endorsing racial discrimination, and the slaughter of thousands of children represent “freedom and progress”, Netanyahu does not explain. What really concerns Netanyahu is his political survival, for the cause of which he is preparing an invasion of Gaza that will result in an unprecedented bloodbath.
The good news is that while Western ruling classes and their lackeys plumb new depths of brutality by supporting genocide, more and more ordinary people are seeing through their propaganda. Millions of workers and youth around the world have mobilized in solidarity with Palestine. No amount of lies, repression, intimidation, and violence can stop a united and determined working class fighting for liberation of the oppressed. We will remember all those who supported and enabled the genocide of Palestinians, and we we will never let them forget their role aiding and abetting these crimes against humanity.