Deep-Rooted Islamophobia Behind West's Unconditional Support To Israel
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
29 November
2023
France And
Germany Have Demonstrated Intense Hate Of Palestinians
Main
Points:
1. Western
world has legitimised the genocide in Gaza.
2. Solidarity
with Israel mutated to an uglier form of xenophobia.
3. Keir Starmer
said Israel was entitled to starve Gazans.
4. German film
director appealed to Berliners to join rally in solidarity with Israel.
5. Hamas has
become synonymous with Palestinians in Germany.
-----
Mr Mukul
Kesavan's article, Behind the Mask, rips off the mask of hypocrisy that the
West has put up and exposes its deep-rooted bias against the Islamic world.
Even as the people in the Western world are united in their solidarity with the
Palestinians facing death, destruction and genocide, the heads of the
governments of Europe have extended unconditional support to Israel. Rishi
Sunak and the US president 'Genocide Joe' visited Tel Aviv soon after the
October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and approved of Israel 's right to self defence.
Joe
Biden and Rishi Sunak and Olaf Scholz and Keir Starmer
Sourced
by the Telegraph
------
The heads of states of Italy, Greece and
Germany also patted at the back of Netanyahu and supported the imminent
genocidal attacks of Israel on the innocent people of Gaza. Millions of people
in their own country were protesting against Israel's bombardment of Gaza's
hospitals, refugee camps, schools and residential buildings but their leaders
blinded by their deep-rooted Islamophobia watched the massacre silently. Not
only that, the Director of the International Film Festival appealed to the
people of Germany to join a pro-Israel rally in Berlin. The governments of the
Western countries also tried to curb the pro-Palestine protests by banning
protests and blacklisting youth for jobs. This degree of hatred for
Palestinians and support for Israel was unprecedented. The solidarity with
Israel silently mutated to an ugly form of xenophobia. This has roots in the
local problem of immigration in Germany and France. Muslim immigration from the
Middle East has become a major political issue in France, Sweden and Germany in
recent decades. The immigrants are projected as potential security threat
because Muslims are stereotyped as extremists and terrorists. Therefore,
Palestinians
are
synonymous with Hamas. That's why Kier Starmer said on public radio that
Netanyahu had the right to cut off electricity and water to the Palestinians in
Gaza. This kind of sentiments against the Palestinians has its root in the fact
that the Western countries see Israel as a western country because the Jews
migrated to Palestine from Europe.
But the
main reason behind the West's unflinching and unconditional support to Israel
is its geopolitical importance. Israel serves as a buffer state between the
oil-rich Arab countries and the West. It has its own significance in
maintaining the balance of power in the Middle East. It has managed to prevent
any kind of unity among the Arab states. It has been able to pitch the Kurds of
Turkey and Iraq against the governments of the respective countries. It has
prevented the rise of the hardline Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the advantage
of the US. Together with Israel, The US and the UK have controlled the
geopolitical affairs of the Middle East. Israel defeated the Arab countries and
brought them down to their knees with the help of the US.
Gaza is
important to the US as much as it is to Israel. Gaza is controlled by Hamas
which has the support of Iran together with Hezbollah. The triple H, (Hamas,
Hezbollah and Houthis) pose a threat to the geopolitical interests of Israel
and the West. Iran, Syria, and Russia form a political bloc in the Middle East
that poses a threat to the interests of the US in the region. Hezbollah, Hamas
and Houthis are proxies of Iran. In the new political order, militant groups
play a significant role. From Wagner group of Russia, to the ISIS and Al Qaida
of the US to three H of Iran-Russia, non-state actors are increasingly being
exploited and used by powerful countries to shun accountability. Hamas is also
said to be a secret ally of Netanyahu government who have symbiotic
relationship. Both protect each other's interests. This is why, even after the
large scale destruction of Gaza after due to Hamas' attacks on Israel, Hamas is
being presented as the messiah of the Palestinians. After the prisoner swap,
its popularity has suddenly risen sharply in West Bank. In the near future,
Hamas will be helped by Israel to form government in West Bank and then Israel
will bombard West Bank after a similar October 7 like attack by Hamas. This
strategy has been adopted by the US.
The meeting
of the heads of intelligence agencies of Israel, US and Egypt in Qatar is not
to facilitate prisoner exchange. Political leader can do this. The meeting of
Mossad, CIA and Egypt's intelligence agency with Hamas leadership hint at more
important programmes for future. Prisoner exchange discussions are only a
cover. This also strengthens the stance of the Washington Post that Netanyahu
and Hamas have a symbiotic relationship. Hamas will continue to play in the
hands of Israel and the US in the hope that in the future, it will grow strong
enough to come out of their influence and can take their own decisions as an
independent political entity. But perhaps it may not be possible.
-----
By
Mukul Kesavan
26.11.23
At the time
of the truce or ‘humanitarian pause’, the number of people killed by Israel in
its pulverisation of Gaza was 14,532 according to the Gaza media office, with
an additional 7,000 missing, likely buried in the rubble. Forty per cent of
this figure is made up of children, and women and children together account for
approximately two-thirds of the death toll.
No conflict
in the 21st century has seen children being killed at such a rate. Eighty per
cent of Gaza’s population has been made homeless. Nearly every member of the
Israeli cabinet has made statements that rhetorically endorse genocide and/or
ethnic cleansing in Gaza. And yet, the leaders of the Western world, with a
couple of honourable exceptions, continue to legitimise and endorse Israel’s
slaughter as a natural extension of its right to self-defence or as the
inevitable consequence of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
The West
has chosen a side. Its sponsorship of Israel is not new; what is novel and
clarifying is the stark relief in which its partisanship can be viewed against
the backdrop of this bloody war. Gaza is so small and densely populated that
the cruelty of war is condensed into an easily understood graphic. The
atrocitiesvthat might have been obscured by ignorance in some other, more
complex, geography are brutally clear in Gaza.
A territory
stoppered at two ends by closed border crossings is bombed into submission. Its
northern population is forced south by Israel, allegedly for its own safety,
and then ordered to move again under the threat of more bombardment after the
north has been reduced to rubble. Twenty-one thousand dead and two million people,
living for the most part in tents as winter approaches, hungry, thirsty, and
threatened by disease, are classed as collateral damage proportionate to
Israel’s military aim of eradicating Hamas.
This is a
hard case to make. It doesn’t help that Israel’s rogue settler population in
the West Bank has declared open season on Palestinians with the active aid of
the Israel Defence Forces. Yet the governments of the United Kingdom and
Germany and, most notably, the United States of America have doubled down and
insist that there will be no call for a ceasefire till Israel has destroyed
Hamas. When this is set against the videos of hundreds of dead Palestinians in
blue body bags being buried in mass graves, connivance in collective punishment
mutates into something darker; it begins to seem like complicity in war crimes.
The
reputation of the West, such as it was, for championing universal values and a
rules-based order is unlikely to recover from this Gazan adventure. Gaza seems
like an inflection point in the shaping of world opinion because the West’s
leaders — Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz and Joe Biden — didn’t
pretend, this time round, to be even-handed. Starmer declared on public radio
that Israel was entitled to besiege Gaza and cut off water and electricity. The
German government threatened to deport immigrants who posted in support of the
Palestinian cause. Biden fast-tracked weapons shipments and promised fourteen
billion dollars in military aid.
It is the
brazenness of the West’s hostility towards the Palestinians, as opposed to its
traditional hypocrisy, that makes this moment historic. Why this happened now
will be argued over interminably by historians, but as contemporaries we can
guess at the reasons. There has always been a tendency in Western governments
to see Israel as a Western country in a rough neighbourhood. Israel’s
foundation in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the heart of Europe, the
crucial role of European Ashkenazi Jews in Israel’s creation, gave it a claim
to being a kind of honorary European nation.
Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine led to a circling of Western wagons. Before that, the great
fear about China, provoked by Xi Jinping’s assertiveness and stoked by the US,
had consolidated a sense of Western identity that had dissipated in the decades
after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. In this charged geopolitical
environment, Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians seemed both an outrage and a
cue for Western solidarity with Israel against the savagery of Islamists.
What began
as solidarity with Israel mutated into something uglier. As massive
demonstrations in the great cities of the West made the case for the
Palestinians and a ceasefire, Western governments and their intellectual
auxiliaries began to see the marchers, especially those that were migrants and
Muslims, as Trojan horses that threatened not just Israel but their own sense
of self. The absence of uniform solidarity with Israel seemed like the presence
of an insidious alienness.
The best
example of pro-Israel feeling being directed at the enemy within comes from a
German civil society organisation, not the State. The director of the
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Lars Henrik Gass, posted a
message on the Festival’s official Facebook page in which he urged Berliners to
join a rally in Berlin to express solidarity with Israel and to demonstrate
against anti-Semitism: “Half a million people took to the streets in March 2022
to protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was important. Please let us now
send a signal that is at least as strong. Show the world that the Neukölln
Hamas friends and Jew haters are in the minority.” (Emphasis added.)
The dog
whistle here is the place reference. Neukölln is the name of a borough in
Berlin which has a high percentage of immigrants. Eighteen per cent of the
borough’s population is of Middle-Eastern origin and it is host to a
substantial Palestinian community. Instead of straightforwardly asking for
solidarity against anti-Semitism and for Israel, the director of one of the
important short film festivals in Europe chose to smear Neukölln’s immigrant
community as Jew haters instead.
From Israel
being a European country in a rough neighbourhood, we have segued seamlessly,
thanks to Gass and his ilk, to rough neighbourhoods in European countries.
‘Hamas’ has become a synonym for Palestinians in general and a metaphor for the
Muslim immigrant, Europe’s favourite bogeyman.
The anxiety
about immigration as a political issue feeds into the hard line that countries
like Germany and the UK have taken against the Palestinian cause. If a hostile
critique of Israel amounts to anti-Semitism, Europe’s moral health demands
unequivocal support for Israel in times of trouble. Since Jeremy Corbyn was
indicted for tolerating anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has
performatively purged Labour of Corbynites and committed the party to a
strongly pro-Israel position. British Muslims, traditionally committed Labour
voters, are now treated by Starmer as a political embarrassment.
As European
governments of the Left and the Right move to restrict immigration, the face of
which is the Muslim migrant, they have chosen to use the charge of
anti-Semitism as a way of disciplining and punishing disobedient minorities.
The flip side of that coin is an Israel-right-or-wrong foreign policy that has
brought Gaza to the brink of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Source: Behind
The Mask
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/islamophobia-west-support-israel/d/131213
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism