Amidst Gaza’s explosions American ideologies implode
Aysha Taryam
Editor-in-Chief, Gulf Today News and Media.
- 25 Apr 2024
It seems that yet again the war on Gaza has forced Western ideologies to self-destruct. Imploding once more in the face of a young America raising their voices in absolution, protesting the end of war on innocent people that has lasted more than 200 days and has taken with it countless souls with no end in sight.
Currently a wave of ‘Pro-Palestine’ protests is sweeping through universities across America, resulting in student arrests and expulsions. Their future jeopardized for simply exercising their right to protest. The West has always championed the idea that campuses are to be safe havens for self-expression and yet we are now witnessing the Ivy Leaguers like Columbia and Harvard take steps to stifle this freedom and silence its voice. For universities that were built on the core values that foster debate and encourage dialogue to then suddenly label any thought that contradicts or criticizes Israel as anti-Semitic is shameful to say the least. Equating a pro-Palestinian stance to an anti-Semitic one is rendering the cause undignified by smearing it with an unjustifiable hatred for another. It is a cowardly way out of a real debate and a productive dialogue.
The Biden administration is now knee-deep in support of an unfathomable retaliation on a genocidal scale as it struggles to navigate its way through these endless protests. Historically the Democratic Party has rallied the young voters and relied heavily on their contributions towards solidifying their numbers to win presidential votes and yet we see them compromise their position ever more in defence of Netanyahu’s own suicidal mission. With this maniacal stubbornness the US government is once again reaffirming to the world that the welfare of Israel is above all else, even above that of the American people.
As the war on Gaza continues and the number of casualties rise making way for a grave humanitarian disaster, we have seen America discredit numbers of innocents’ deaths, cast a blind eye to innumerable war crimes and justify it all with one sentence: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Anything the Israeli government decides to do is their right to do, a right bestowed only on this country and no other country in the world but it. A right given time and again by a single raised hand at every United Nations Security Council Assembly. An American hand raised in the face of humanity.
The West’s credibility as a reference for all things human rights related has waned and is now almost non-existent. The war on Gaza has cost them more than just weapons, it has set the West back hundreds of years and tarnished their image as the leaders of humanity. One must recall then US President Barack Obama’s position on the Arab-Spring protests that set fire to the Middle East in 2011 and led to the crumbling of many Arab countries, a Syrian civil war, the rise of the ISIL, an insurgency and civil war in Iraq, costly unrest in Egypt, and a Libyan and Yemeni crisis. Obama’s government, whose Vice President was Joe Biden himself, saw these protests as progressive and a birth sign for democracy. In Egypt, Obama opted to side with the streets and upended a long-standing relationship with one of its strongest allies in the region, washing its hands off President Hosni Mubarak almost instantaneously. The rhetoric was that of spreading freedom to the rest of the world and freeing the people from their ruthless dictators. The events leading to today’s world have proved that it was nothing but a ploy to divide and conquer. The Arab world is not the better for it, on the contrary some might not recover from that destructive spring.The Arab Spring started when a Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire; a moment Obama, in a statement to the UN General Assembly in 2012, described as an inspiring one: “We were inspired by the Tunisian protests that toppled a dictator, because we recognized our own beliefs in the aspiration of men and women who took to the streets.”
Yet in 2024’s America, under the governance of the same party, we see no inspiration sparked by those students who took to the streets or the campuses. Yet another ideal imploding on itself, not all protests are created equal it seems, on home soil some are neither welcomed nor tolerated.
One must hesitate when calling these protests pro-Palestinian because in that labelling, we lose their truth. They are protests against senseless killings, they are a rejection of regimes that support occupation and a cry for an end to war as a pathway to peace. These protests are pro-humanity in its true sense of the word, an all-encompassing humanity that is not cherry-picked by the powers that be. They are protests against hypocrisy and for a right to life.
If political rhetoric was the truth these brave young Americans would be honoured not expelled. Only great solace remains in knowing that the youth see the truth and that they are not afraid to speak it.
