WANT to test the true character of nations? Well, give them power and their real nature will be displayed for all to see. This is true of all nations, East or West.
But the West is doing particularly badly. And so are the institutions that the West helped set up. Start with the nations. There is no dispute that Western nations are too powerful for the rest of the world to go to battle with. But is might right?
Not when it is exercised unjustly. Two invasions — Russia's attack on Ukraine and Israel's attack on Gaza — show how unjustly the West have been exercising its might.
Let's begin with occupation. If Russian military presence in Ukraine is an occupation, so must be Israel's military presence in Palestine. There is just no legal or moral basis for the West to make a distinction. Ukraine, occupied as it is, is facing a mighty Russia. Palestine, occupied, too, is facing a mighty Israel.
While billions of dollars in weapons are being sent to Ukraine, a nation with a decent army, there is none for the Palestinians, whose only weapons are sticks and stones.
What is worse, US aircraft carriers, tanks and missiles were rushed to the aid of Israel. More — US$14.3 billion in air and missile defence — is expected to head there. For defence? More like for bombardments of Palestinians.
As this Leader goes to press, more than 11,000 Palestinians — mostly civilians — have been killed in the 37 days of Israeli annihilation. Of these, more than 4,300 were children, with at least 6,360 wounded.
Every ten minutes a Palestinian child dies. Here is a poignant plea by a group of Palestinian children on Wednesday at a video press conference held at Al-Shifa Hospital.
Speaking in English, a Palestinian boy voiced Gaza's cry thus: "We come now to speak and invite you to protect us; we want to live, we want peace… we want to live like the other children live." Yet the West, which never fails to champion human rights, just can't get the murderous Zionist regime in Tel Aviv to end the annihilation.
How many more Palestinian lives are needed to be lost before the West forces Israel to end the ethnic cleansing in Gaza and elsewhere? Israel is not going to stop until no Palestinian is left in the occupied territories. Otherwise why bomb homes, schools, churches, mosques and hospitals? They are not after Hamas.
In the words of the Zionists, Israel will not rest until all of Palestine is its. This shouldn't surprise anyone. What is surprising is the total and complete inaction of international organisations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), our second point.
Within a dozen days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ICC, led by a British chief prosecutor (a human rights lawyer, just for the record) opened investigations into war crimes committed by Russia. Soon after, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There has been no such arrest warrants against the Israelis, after all these years of war crimes. To be fair to the ICC, its former chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, did begin war crimes investigations into Israel and Hamas, but was bullied by the West into abandoning it. When a court becomes a tool of power, justice just has no place there.
