The Unbearable Cowardice of the World

Future historians will look back on this moment as the point when the international community revealed itself to be nothing more than a collection of cowards.

The moral bankruptcy of our age has been laid bare in the slaughter house of Gaza, where more than half a million Palestinians— at least one in four of the Strip's population—have been systematically exterminated while the world's leaders issue hollow condemnations and retreat into the cowardice of bureaucratic procedure. We are witnessing not merely genocide, but the complete collapse of the post-war international order, the fiction of human rights, and the very concept of civilization itself.

For two years, we have watched the industrial slaughter of children—hundreds of thousands of them—their small bodies shredded by American-made bombs dropped by Israeli pilots who celebrate their kills on dating apps. We have seen hospitals destroyed, universities obliterated, prisoners raped, libraries burned, museums bombed. This is not war; it is the methodical erasure of a people and their culture, carried out with the meticulous precision of a colonial extermination campaign that would make the architects of the Bosnian genocide blush with shame.

Cowards

Yet the response from the so-called international community has been a symphony of cowardice that reverberates across continents. The Arab world, once the cradle of anti-imperial resistance, now prostrates itself before its American overlords with a subservience so complete it defies comprehension. When Israel bombed the capital of Qatar—a sovereign nation hosting the largest U.S. military base in the region—the response from the extraordinary Arab-Islamic summit in Doha was not resistance, but a pathetic appeal to Washington to please make the Israelis stop. It was the equivalent, as one observer noted, of Cinderella begging her stepmother to stop the abuse.

This is the same Arab world that once stood with Gamal Abdel Nasser when he nationalized the Suez Canal, that supported liberation movements from Algeria to Yemen, that provided weapons and sanctuary to Palestinian resistance fighters. Today, these oil-rich monarchies and military dictatorships have been so thoroughly colonized by American capital that they cannot even protect their own airspace. They have become what the Palestinians never were—truly helpless.

BRICS Inertia

The learned helplessness extends far beyond the Arab world. The Global South, including the BRICS nations that speak grandly of multipolarity and alternative world orders, have proven themselves equally impotent in the face of American-Israeli barbarism. China, with its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, cannot bring itself to cut economic ties with a genocidal state. Russia, which positions itself as the defender of “traditional values” against Western decadence, maintains diplomatic relations with the very entity that embodies the most depraved form of Western settler colonialism. India, despite its massive Muslim population, continues its embrace of Israel while a large proportion of its people are forced to watch their co-religionists being burned alive in real time on social media.

This paralysis is not accidental. It is the product of a global capitalist system that has so thoroughly penetrated national governments that sovereignty itself has become a cruel joke. These nations may wave their flags and sing their anthems, but when confronted with the raw power of American imperialism and its Israeli proxy, they reveal themselves to be nothing more than middle management in a global plantation economy.

European Racism

Half a million dead Palestinians—most of them women and children—generate less outrage in European capitals than a comparatively handful of casualties in Ukraine. The profound effect of skin color and ethnicity on empathy among the ruling classes of those classified as "white" shocks the conscience of even those who have spent their lives studying racism. The lives of brown and black bodies have been so thoroughly devalued that their mass extermination is treated as a statistical abstraction, a regrettable side effect of Israel's "right to defend itself."

When an Israeli official can openly describe Palestinians as "human animals" without diplomatic consequences, when soldiers can post videos of their war crimes as entertainment, when an entire people can be starved, bombed, and displaced while the world debates legal technicalities, we have moved beyond mere racism into a pathological dehumanization that treats Palestinian death as entertainment and Palestinian suffering as irrelevant.

“60K Dead”: The Greatest Statistical Lie of Our Times

The Western media, that supposed guardian of truth and accountability, has become an active participant in this crime against humanity. Day after day, they repeat the deliberately falsified casualty figures—figures that represent perhaps one-tenth of the actual death toll—while knowing full well they are participating in the greatest statistical lie of our time. When pressed, they add perfunctory qualifications about "probable undercounts," as if acknowledging that six Hiroshima bombs' worth of explosives might have killed more than 60,000 people in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth.

This is not journalistic malpractice; it is complicity in genocide. Every reporter who types those numbers, every editor who approves their publication, every anchor who reads them on air is participating in the erasure of Palestinian humanity. They know better. The calculations are not complex. The disaster specialists at The Lancet, the epidemiologists at various universities, the aid workers on the ground—all have provided the methodology to arrive at realistic casualty figures. But truth has become subordinate to the demands of Empire.

Meanwhile, Israel has crossed every conceivable red line with the casual arrogance of a power that knows it will face no consequences. It bombs Tunisia. It assassinates officials in Qatar. It annexes Syrian territory while the new government in Damascus, led by Al-Qaeda's rebranded Syrian franchise, speaks of normalizing relations with the very state that is stealing their land. It uses artificial intelligence to target civilians, employs rape as a weapon of war —and personal pleasure— and operates concentration camps where Palestinian prisoners are raped to death—all while its officials speak openly of their plans for "Greater Israel" and the final elimination of Palestinian presence from their historic homeland.

Dr Adnan Al-Bursh fought for Palestinian lives under most difficult conditions during the genocide before he was raped to death. / Others

The Complete Collapse of the Social Order

The speed with which every taboo has been shattered, every norm violated, every convention trampled, speaks to something deeper than mere Israeli expansionism. We are witnessing the collapse of the entire framework of international law and human rights that was supposedly constructed from the ashes of World War II. The institutions created to prevent another Holocaust have become accessories to one. The United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the various human rights organizations—all have been revealed as elaborate theater, powerless to constrain the violence of imperial powers and their proxies.

Yet in this darkness, there are glimmers of light that shame the cowardice of states and institutions. The Palestinian resistance, armed with little more than homemade rockets and an unbreakable will, continues to fight against impossible odds. The Houthis in Yemen, governing a country devastated by years of US/Saudi bombardment, have managed to disrupt global shipping in solidarity with Gaza—achieving more concrete results than all the diplomatic initiatives combined. These are not the actions of "terrorists," as the Western media labels them, but of people who understand that some things are worth dying for, that resistance to genocide is not merely a right but a moral obligation.

Sanaa, Yemen, December 20, 2024 [Khaled Abdullah]

The contrast between this heroism and the craven submission of Arab capitals could not be more stark. While Yemeni fishermen risk their lives to interdict ships bound for Israeli ports, the rulers of oil-rich kingdoms issue statements of concern. While Palestinian families emerge from the rubble to bury their dead and immediately return to the struggle for survival, Arab foreign ministers meet in five-star hotels to draft communiqués that change nothing.

This is not the Arab world that produced Saladin, that expelled the Crusaders, that stood against European colonialism. It is not the Arab world that built civilizations when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, that preserved and transmitted the knowledge of antiquity, that gave the world algebra and astronomy and architecture that still inspires wonder. That world has been replaced by a collection of oil-dependent slaves whose survival depends on American protection and whose purpose is to serve as a buffer between Israeli expansion and meaningful resistance.

The transformation is complete. Where once stood proud nations that could mobilize armies and inspire revolutionary movements across continents, we now find hollow states whose primary function is to suppress their own populations and facilitate the extraction of resources by multinational corporations. Their Islam has been reduced to architectural flourishes and ceremonial prayers, their Arab identity to folkloric displays for tourist consumption. They have become what the colonizers always intended them to become: a source of raw materials and cheap labor, governed by Hollywood stereotypes who mistake their chains for jewelry.

Entering the New Phase of Humanity

But the implications extend far beyond the Middle East. If genocide can be committed in real time, broadcast live, documented obsessively, and still meet with nothing more than symbolic gestures from the international community, then we have entered a new phase of human history. The rules-based order was always a fiction designed to legitimize American hegemony, but it at least provided some constraints on the exercise of raw power. Those constraints have now been obliterated.

What we are witnessing is the return of might-makes-right as the organizing principle of international relations, dressed up in the language of democracy and human rights. Israel's actions in Gaza are not an aberration; they are a preview of what awaits any population that stands in the way of Western imperial expansion. Today it is Palestinians; tomorrow it could be anyone whose land contains resources coveted by Empire, whose resistance threatens imperial designs, whose very existence challenges imperial narratives.

The silence of the Global South in the face of this systematic extermination sends a clear message: there will be no solidarity, no meaningful resistance, no consequences for genocide as long as it serves imperial interests. The post-colonial world has been re-colonized, not by direct military occupation but by financial penetration, technological dependence, and the corruption of local elites who have more in common with their colonial masters than with their own people.

This is why Israel can bomb Qatar with impunity, why it can starve two million people while the world watches, why it can speak openly of racial superiority and territorial expansion without diplomatic isolation. The system of international relations has been restructured to ensure that resistance is impossible, that genocide becomes routine, that the strong can devour the weak without constraint.

A Civilizational Tragedy

The tragedy is not merely Palestinian, though their suffering is incomprehensible in its scope and intensity. The tragedy is civilizational. We have created a world in which the systematic murder of children generates less international response than trade disputes, in which ethnic cleansing is treated as a real estate transaction, in which the very concept of human dignity has been subordinated to market forces and imperial calculations.

Future historians, if any survive, will look back on this moment as the point when humanity consciously chose barbarism over civilization, when the strong decided that the weak had no right to exist, when the international community revealed itself to be nothing more than a collection of cowards and collaborators. They will ask how half a million people could be exterminated while the world's leaders attended cocktail parties and signed trade deals, how genocide could be livestreamed while diplomats debated procedure, how the promise of "never again" became a sick joke told by the perpetrators themselves.

The answer is simple and terrible: because we let them. Because when the moment came to choose between profit and principle, between convenience and conscience, between complicity and resistance, the vast majority of those with power chose the easy path. They chose to look away, to issue statements, to believe comfortable lies rather than face uncomfortable truths.

Palestinians: the Last Remnants of Humanity

The Palestinians have become the conscience of the world. Their resistance, their steadfastness, their refusal to disappear quietly into the mass graves prepared for them, stands as an indictment of every government, every institution, every individual who has chosen silence in the face of genocide. They have shown us what courage looks like, what dignity means, what it costs to remain human in an inhuman world.

The rest of us, particularly those of us in the privileged enclaves of Empire, must live with the knowledge that we were present at this moment of ultimate moral test and found wanting. We must live with the knowledge that half a million people were murdered while we debated, deliberated, and ultimately did nothing. We must live with the knowledge that when barbarism came calling, civilization was nowhere to be found.

This is our legacy, our shame, our unbearable cowardice in the face of the greatest crime of our age. History will not forgive us. More importantly, we should not forgive ourselves.

- Karim

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