Writer Owen Jones in The Guardian newspaper said that Western political and media elites are complicit in the Gaza nightmare, and that they have lost the last vestiges of moral authority forever.
The writer explained that US President Joe Biden gave a specific answer last week in the statement he issued on the occasion of the 100th day since the start of the “current terror,” in which he showed his true sympathy with the plight of the prisoners of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), and with their traumatized families, but he did not issue a response. There is no mention of the Palestinians about him.
However, the lack of interest by politicians and the media in concealing their contempt for Palestinian life will have major consequences, even though it is not a new thing, as the writer believes; If the powerful countries of the world had not so impudently ignored three quarters of a million Palestinians who were expelled from their homes 76 years ago, with about 15,000 of them violently killed, the seeds of this bitter harvest would not have been sown today.
Massacres
Owen Jones wondered how many people knew that 234 Palestinians were killed last year, just before October 7, by Israeli forces in the West Bank alone.
He continued that if there was some value to the lives of Palestinians, perhaps decades of occupation, siege, illegal settlement, apartheid, violent repression and mass massacres would not have occurred.
Some may have expected that after this deadly massacre, the dam would eventually collapse, because violently killing 10,000 children, amputating legs, or removing the kidneys of others without anesthesia would arouse strong feelings, just as performing caesarean sections without anesthesia and the death of premature infants due to low blood pressure. Body heat and diarrhea would provoke unstoppable disgust.
Although predictions that a quarter of Gaza’s population might die within a year due to Israel’s destruction of the health care system alone should lead to a loud call to end this injustice, no one has taken action.
Deep impact
According to the writer, underestimating the value of Palestinian life is not a hypothetical matter, but rather a statistical fact, as a new study of coverage in major American newspapers says that Israeli deaths are mentioned at a rate of 16 times more than Palestinian deaths, and that human terms such as “mother” or “husband” They were used much less often to describe Palestinians, while emotional terms such as “massacre” were used for Israeli victims.
All of this will have a profound impact, as the writer sees; We must forget any future Western claims regarding human rights and international law, because a large part of the world views this self-justification with contempt, and considers it merely a trick to advance the strategic interests of countries that have become rich at the expense of the rest of the world, after centuries of colonialism characterized by genocide and pigeons. Recent bloodshed such as the Iraq War, and even arming and supporting Israel as it engages in mass murder in Gaza.
He continued that Western political and media elites should not panic about the condition of other countries, but rather about the moral collapse occurring in their countries, because the refusal to treat the Palestinians as human beings has made today’s nightmare inevitable, and has permanently torn apart the moral claims used to justify Western hegemony over the world. Consequences that will not be understood until it is too late.
