As We Speak, the Struggle to Save Civilization Is Unfolding in Palestine

While we paralyzed Westerners are staring into the abyss of unaccounted barbarity, the Palestinians show a miraculous perseverance against human extinction.

Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi being detained by Israeli officers. Ahed has spent much of her life in Israeli prisons, notorious for reports of severe torture and mass sexual abuse.

There is a sustained moral courage radiating from occupied Palestine that throws into searing relief the utter depravity embraced by the West. As we bear witness to an industrialized genocide unfolding in real-time over ten interminable months, we are forced to confront the aching question: What humanity remains in us when we are capable of allowing such unfathomable evil to go on for so long?

The ruling classes have cast off the tattered pretenses of upholding human rights and dignity. They have made a cold calculation that systematically butchering a civilian population trapped in the Gaza Strip is acceptable - even advantageous - to their geopolitical ambitions. With callous indifference, the most advanced military technology is being relentlessly deployed to carry out mechanized mass murder of the most vulnerable - infants, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents. It is now overt policy to normalize the industrial-scale extermination of innocent human beings.

And for what? To perpetuate the racist lie that certain peoples and civilizations are mere impediments to dominance by Western civilization over their lands, their resources, and their bodies. The dark truth we avoid admitting: This unaccounted barbarity is the rotten fruit borne from centuries of colonialism and imperialism hardwired into the Western cultural psyche.

Time and again we have witnessed the effects of this pure evil: The genocides that cleared the conquests of the Americas and Australia. The Belgian Congo's grisly brutality extolled by Christians as "civilization." The Bengal famines where British authorities watched impassively as millions starved. The industrial-scale exterminations of the Holocaust, Namibia, Bosnia, and too many other killing fields to recount.

Now this same evil pathology is brought to bear on the Palestinian people with an intimacy that strips away the ability to ignore it. The sheer scale of the atrocities, unrelenting in their graphic vividness for 300 days, demolishes the flimsy myths we told ourselves about human decency prevailing.

Do You Remember?

The sheer number of atrocities committed in such a short period of time makes it almost impossible to remember them all. A 6-year-old girl named Hind sits petrified in a bullet-riddled car, family members' corpses surrounding her, pleading for help only to be shot down along with the ambulance crew by laughing snipers. Food aid workers desperately leap between vehicles as bombs drop, only to be systematically hunted and finally exterminated. Mass graves uncovered around hospitals contain hundreds of women and children bound, stripped, and methodically executed with bullets to the skull.

Elsewhere, a father clutches the decapitated remains of his infant after Israel bombed their refugee camp, burning countless children alive in their tents. Doctors report a 400% increase in miscarriages as the deliberate targeting of hospitals leaves pregnant mothers to give birth amid the rubble without medical care, many dying from lack of post-natal resources.

The civilian infrastructure itself - hospitals, schools, universities - has been systematically demolished, guaranteeing an entire generation will grow up stunted mentally and physically if they even survive. While Israeli colonists hold celebratory music festivals at the Gaza border, four-year-old Palestinian children wander the destroyed streets alone, reduced to trying to eat grass and animal feed to survive as food and aid trucks are barred from entry.

For the Palestinian prisoners swept up and disappeared into a gulag of secret Israeli prisons, unimaginable tortures await - the systematic gang rapes with electrified rods and branding irons. It instills the same brute terror leveraged when white settlers cleared the Native American plains, or when British colonists massacred and displayed the corpses of resistance fighters and their family members from Kenya to Ireland.

The wickedness does not stop at Gaza's borders. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers are escalating their campaign of terrorizing the civilian population - invading homes, expelling families by force, then burning the dwellings to the ground in front of the owners' eyes. An entire culture of ethnic supremacist barbarity is being financially and militarily empowered by the full support of the United States and its European imperial allies.

And where are the voices of the good? The righteous? Those who should be raising a clamor to shatter the halls of power until this ungodly cruelty is stopped and the perpetrators held to account? Cowering in silence. Empty platitudes and unctuous odes to human rights occasionally muttered, swiftly drowned out by the ceaseless din of militarized occupation, the bombing campaigns, the anguished wails of the newly orphaned and dispossessed.

The Battle of Humanity vs. Depravity

No, the true humanity shines through those refusing to submit. The goodness weeps from the ambulance crews willing to traverse sniper-infested routes to evacuate the wounded, knowing the Israeli gunmen have them square in their crosshairs. It emanates from those young Palestinian boys, no older than the age at which kids in the West would be playing football in the park, who instead brave live fire without hesitation to retrieve the body of a fallen stranger—unknown to them except for the universal solidarity emanating from being oppressed. Just to grant that anonymous martyr one final shred of dignity denied by their unforgivably cruel persecutors.

This virtue born of ceaseless resistance runs through the veins of a people who have spent generations extending an endless patience in pursuit of any peaceful resolution. Despite having three-quarters of their ancestral homeland seized and illegally occupied. Despite being so grievously dehumanized - labeled "human animals" and vermin to be caged and culled by those bankrolled to do so. Despite the worst of Humanity's viciousness brought to torment them in an escalating frenzy each day. Still, there is a profound refusal to descend into the racist hatreds that inflame the colonizers: No calls to blame all Jews or white people en masse. A stubborn insistence on separating human decency from the societal decay devouring their tormentors.

Unfathomable Kindness and Compassion

Amidst the smoldering ruination of what was once a thriving society before Gaza was turned into the world's largest open-air prisoner by the Israeli blockade, one can still find heartbreaking grace: The kindness of families that have lost everything preparing meals to share with their new refugee camp-mates. Young Palestinians providing food, water, clothing and shelter for the newly displaced as Western nations look on impassively. Even now, in their darkest hours, innocent children spending what little resources remain to pen messages of thanks to those abroad willing to raise their voices in solidarity.

These glimmers of compassion shine in such vivid contrast to the scrapbooks of atrocity being compiled by the Israeli leadership and its ideological spawn. The unforgivable cruelty of serial killers collecting mementos like bloodied undergarments torn from their mutilated victims, or souvenirs of Palestinian limbs blown off by munitions. The unspeakable cultural rot of deviants sharing degrading photographs of imprisoned children in sexually depraved poses, circulating these images as a badge of ethnic pride. All the most base and barbaric impulses of an insecurity-laden racism indulged, then celebrated without compunction.

Good and Evil Exist and They Battle it Out in Palestine

Seldom in human history has the bifurcation between good and evil been so pronounced. So clear. On one side, a morally degraded world slouching toward the oblivion of rampant nihilism, selfishness, and depravity. The other an incredible incandescence of the human spirit that refuses to be extinguished even under the most unimaginable physical and psychological onslaught.

Out of the Palestinian struggle, we can finally see laid bare the unvarnished truth - that Western civilization is an immoral death cult fueled by rapacious greed, racial animus, and an unquenchable primal lust demanding increasing depravity to be normalized. Its evil poison once projected outward through colonial conquests and subjugation of the Global South. Now that pathology has turned inward, rapidly devouring any last pretenses of moral decency or democratic ideals from within the imperial core itself.

Where are the revolutionary voices from the art world? The poets, musicians, and cultural voices who should be transfiguring the darkness through their creations into searing indictments? Largely co-opted, self-silenced, or even openly celebratory about the suffering of the “savage Muslim hordes”.

What of the scholars cloistered in hallowed halls of academia, whose institutionally-enshrined role was once to speak truth to power? Perverted into an increasingly corporatized class of technocrats and policy adjuncts - tucking in their tasseled loafers to ensure their tenures are not jeopardized by crossing whichever philanthropic ethnic lobby most aggressively demands ideological fealty.

No, if luminous human virtue is to be found amidst this engulfing moral decay, it blazes forth from those for whom resistance has become the purest expression of faith. The unarmed medics strapping on gear to brave bombing campaigns just to check if any shred of life still flickers in the dismembered husks carbonized by white phosphorous. The solidarity activists chaining themselves to demolition equipment so Israeli bulldozers cannot grind another Palestinian home into rubble. The real social media warriors deploying every digital platform available as emergency beacons to shatter the mainstream media blackouts imposed by entrenched institutional powers.

And above all, the Palestinians themselves - whose tenacious defiance incinerates every feeble bigotry about "worthless Arabs", “violent Muslims” or "inferior stock" peddled by supremacist creeds to justify unremitting cruelty. Indeed, the Palestinians repudiate the racist lies that they are anything other than an inspiring prodigy of humanity's enduring vision for dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination against all odds.

This is the true face of decency set in diametric opposition to an encroaching Western death cult that is now the singularly greatest force of evil devouring the 21st century world. So all that can still be done is to bear witness with as pitiless an eye as possible. To illuminate the depths of moral bankruptcy and nadir of ethical decay we've allowed the power structures to drag us into collectively.

Miraculous Perseverance Against Extinction

Then, perhaps, we can finally awaken from this long slumber and rediscover that radical empathy which drove previous generations to break the chains of bondage, overthrow tyrannies, and upend odious systems of oppression. To tap into the moral reservoir that the Palestinian people today are so viscerally personifying through their miraculous perseverance against extinction.

Only with such an arousal of conscience can we hope to salvage the remaining flickers of human decency and goodness from the all-consuming evil being normalized among the world's power elite. An evil that if left to consume all in its path unchallenged, will ultimately immolate any remaining claim we have left to being dignified beings made in the philosophical image we so arrogantly presumed as our species' birthright.

The Palestinian struggle for liberation is the pivotal battle for the very preservation of human civilization's moral core at this harrowing crossroads. We can either sheepishly accept the descent into an abyss of nihilistic barbarity by succumbing to the seductive calls of racial animus, greed and demonization. Or we can uphold our supposed higher calling, join the just resistance against capitalist brutalities, and embrace our common fight for universal human emancipation before it's too late.

- Karim