Gravity-defying Western double-standards are now on worldwide display, as the US and its liegemen line-up to support a vengeful Israel to the hilt. Which prompts this question: what is the difference, today, between the universal human rights gospel of the Global West and a Potemkin Village? Answer: Increasingly little.
As the United States expanded its geographic coverage from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to the Rio Grande, it undertook a far-reaching mission to subjugate and develop what came to be called “The Wild West”. Colossal disputation accompanied this project, much of which was settled by gunfire. The Colt firearm company even created a revolver, in 1873, known as the Peacemaker. As Hollywood has explained in countless films, in due course the West was won.
New, modern meaning has been steadily infused into that Wild West term over much of the last decade by the behaviour of the US and its posse of obedient allies. That infusion has just had a jolting lift as Israel has thrown itself into a fresh horrifying, revengeful onslaught against Gaza, following the intensely brutal Hamas assault on Southern Israel.
Almost all of the Global West has now lined up behind the US to express categorical support for Israel as it commences an extremely violent, total cleansing of Gaza using the huge range of battlefield weapons at its disposal. Even before the full Israeli invasion of Gaza has begun, the civilian kill-rate is massively worse than in Ukraine. The aptness of South Africa’s call, in 2022, for Israel to be classified as an apartheid state is being reconfirmed on a daily basis.
The world is now familiar with the dehumanising inflammatory Israeli rhetoric being used to justify and energise this wretched scheme. As Jeffrey Sachs recently noted: “The Israeli media carries calls to make Gaza a place where no human being can live”. A former Mossad chief said that Gaza’s Shifa Hospital must be destroyed so that the Israeli Defence Force can dig below it with bombs. Various top Israeli leaders from Prime Minister Netanyahu down have referred to Hamas members as “human animals” and “human beasts”. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said at a press conference about a week after the Hamas attack and soon after a warm-handshake meeting with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Certain leaders in Ireland and Spain have expressed serious concern about Israel’s planned avenging response but they are the exception. Around the globe, members of the US circle have been tirelessly expressing their empathy with and fealty to Israel, in the UK, across the EU, and in Australia, for example.
The Medical Association for the Prevention of War in Australia described the recent bombing of the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, with its appalling death toll, as an unconscionable war crime. Joe Biden has just visited Israel for major hug-in, with Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite (or because of) near uniform disbelief – not least across the mainstream media – of the ragged, twitchy Israeli cover story trying to shift the blame, Biden claimed that: the deadly explosion at a Gaza Strip hospital appeared to have been carried out “by the other team” and not the Israeli military.
Shortly after, the US vetoed a Brazilian, UN Security Council resolution condemning all violence against civilians in the Israel-Hamas war and urging the delivery of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, saying that: it was too early to craft an appropriate Security Council response to the crisis. You could not make this up.
Leaders from the EU and the UK are falling over themselves to fly to Tel Aviv and offer their resounding support. One of the UK’s more fevered Conservative Party members, Ian Duncan-Smith, argued lately that Pro-Hamas protesters are vile people and should be arrested.
Here is a final matter to consider as we reflect on the moral tilt of the American-led Global West. The US Navy has two, very large, superbly equipped hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort – each around 70,000 tons. Naturally, the White House saw zero need to send either of these vessels to help deal with the extraordinary Gaza crisis. Naturally, they urgently despatched, instead, two of the very largest, most lethal American warships to the eastern Mediterranean, the USS Gerald R Ford and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
During Biden’s latest fawning trip to Israel, the President instinctively failed to advocate a ceasefire as he described the Hamas attack on southern Israel as “pure, unadulterated evil”. John Whitbeck summarised certain consequences flowing from this visit, observing that: Future historians may mark today as a turning point in making the decline of the West, already well underway, irreversible [and this] may cause many in the Muslim world, the Global South and elsewhere to view Biden – and, by extension, rightly or wrongly, his country – as representing pure, unadulterated evil.
Gravity-defying Western double-standards are now on worldwide display, as the US and its liegemen line-up to support Israel to the hilt. Such an exceptional level of shamelessness prompts this question: what is the difference, today, between the universal human rights gospel of the Global West and a Potemkin Village? Answer: Increasingly little.
Richard Cullen is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Business Law and Taxation at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.