“The commander said, ‘Shoot them all.’ And they started shooting – pop, pop, pop, like that… I left everything behind and accepted that I was going to die.
“We are exterminated. We are being massively eradicated. And you claim to care about humanitarian rights and human rights, which is not what we are experiencing right now. To prove us wrong, do something.
It may surprise some, but these two current accounts describing active genocidal campaigns do not come from the same conflict, or even the same continent.
The first testimony comes from West Darfur, Sudan, where the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are targeting the Masalit community. According to human rights organizations, the RSF are going “door to door,” killing thousands of civilians, raping women and girls and burning entire neighborhoods. They raised the alarm that there is a systematic campaign to completely eliminate “an indigenous group from Darfur” and that the international community must stop the “ongoing genocide in West Darfur.” .
The second testimony is an excerpt from Palestinian doctor Hammam Alloh’s interview with Democracy Now on October 31. Two weeks after the interview, he was killed in his wife’s family home in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike. Alloh is among more than 23,000 Palestinians killed by Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip – a campaign that experts, academics and civil society organizations have called “genocidal” in that it systematically destroyed all facets of Palestinian life in the besieged enclave.
But curiously, many in the West seem to easily ignore such mass atrocities. And Western leaders have become adept at avoiding calling them what they are: crimes against humanity. For what?
This is partly because Western collective consciousness has long been socialized with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, overall, backwardness inevitable. This thought proliferated in the early writings of the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as scientific fact.
Let’s take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It aims to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policy maker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet its early textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas,” which imagined a racially hierarchical world order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the world’s darker peoples at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified by the natural intellectual and cultural superiority of whites. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we have started to use different jargon. But whether they are fragile or failed state indices, political stability rankings, or indicators of socio-economic growth and progress designed for the development sector, they often help establish white superiority and the victim status of the racial other.
So, whether there is a genocide in Gaza or Darfur, Westerners are often content to watch the atrocities idly and suffer from afar. They feel comfortable doing so because it confirms their premonition that the victims of genocide – whether in Africa or the Middle East – are savage victims who cannot help but languish in a state permanent unrest and deprivation. Likewise, when these victims inevitably turn to the all-powerful West for help, it reaffirms the perception of the West as the superior and deserving guardian of the world order.
Of course, Western inaction in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza also draws on a sordid history of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia.
Anti-Palestinian racism has been on full display since the start of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. There has been a worrying normalization of anti-Palestinian misinformation, as well as open calls for violence and hate speech on social media platforms. Pervasive media bias is also evident in the demonization of Palestinians and the underreporting of Palestinians killed as a result of the Israeli campaign.
Sometimes, on-air anti-Palestinian racism is even visceral, as during British journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s heated exchange with Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti. At one point during the interview, she exclaimed, “Oh my God. For the love of God, let me finish a sentence, man. Maybe you’re not used to women talking. I don’t know, but I’d like to finish a sentence.” Of course, this is only an extension of the racist and orientalist imagery of the Arab, and more broadly Muslim, world, which has long been anchored in Western consciousness.
Hollywood has regularly portrayed Arab and Muslim men as vile, violent, ignorant, chauvinistic, fundamentalist and incompetent. Arab and Muslim women have been widely portrayed as being overly sexualized and/or tiny and waiting to be saved from bad, dark-skinned men. Similarly, journalistic reporting on the Middle East portrays the region as devoid of any rational policy or political opinion. In fact, politics there is often seen as synonymous with angry, violent men marching in the streets.
When this presumption is superimposed on images of dark-skinned, masked, armed Palestinian men attacking innocent, unarmed, light-skinned Israeli men and women – contrasting imagery that has been central to Western coverage of the war on Gaza – the erasure of the Palestinians is starting to look more like a just war than a genocidal military campaign.
But is the West really capable of condemning mass atrocities and crimes against humanity? Of course, but only when it serves his interests. Western media coverage has been uncompromising in its condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance fighting the occupation. But that’s only because Ukrainians are European, “blue-eyed and blond-haired” and “look like us.”
International organizations, Western NGOs and film experts once spoke with one voice, condemning the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s and emphasizing the need to intervene. But the main goal of the “Save Darfur” campaign, which brought together many celebrities, was not really to “save Darfur”, but to facilitate the West’s atonement for its inaction during the genocide in Rwanda and to divert attention from human rights abuses and international humanitarian aid by the US-led coalition. laws in Iraq.
After all, truly ending genocide requires international action based on moral and ethical principles, whose priority is not self-aggrandizement but an immediate end to crimes against humanity. Yet as the most televised genocide in history continues unabated in Gaza, it appears that in the current international system there is no built-in moral commitment to saving the lives and humanity of people who do not “don’t look like us.”
Let us hope, however, that the genocide case against Israel led by South Africa before the International Court of Justice will prove me wrong.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
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