Especially when the facts are there in front of us.
You got to love the Israeli government’s ability to
turn the Western World upside down and pervert every value espoused by the West
into a joke. This is a shame because as much as colonialism and imperialism
were detestable things, the West (defined as America and Western Europe) have
actually led the world in trying to be a better place in the last 50-years.
Things like rule of law, rules-based order and human rights were concepts
championed by the West.
As a rule of thumb, Westerners (White People) are decent
and see indecency better than dare I say, many Asians. In the last sixteen
years of running this blog, I find myself getting more understanding from
Westerners than Asians when I talk about things like foreign labour. I think of
the Englishman who told me, “Your economy is run on slave labour,” and the
French investor who talks about “The Slaves” whenever the topic of foreign labour
comes up. In Singapore, the general attitude is “It’s better than where they’ve
come from.”
There’s one exception that, comes in the case of
Israel and its actions against the Palestinian people. In a way, I get it, when
it comes from anyone in my parent’s generation. Israel sold itself like an old
Western movie, where the cowboys were always the heroes and the Indians were
the bad guys. However, this shouldn’t play out for my generation, where things
like “international law” and “rules-based-order” were normal. It becomes
painful to watch otherwise decent people start defending the indefensible.
We’ve heard the lines. “Israel has a right to defend
itself,” and “Hamas shouldn’t have attacked on October 7 2023.” Whilst these arguments
are often used, the one that really strikes is “We don’t know what is going on.”
How does one come up with the idea that we don’t know
what is going on when things are being played out on TV? As one Irish guy I met
said, “You can’t see those kids dying on TV and not feel anything.”
Yet, despite everything being played out on our TV
screens, the line “We don’t know what is going on, “continues amongst those who
would want us to believe that Israel is fighting a just war in a just manner. The
most popular argument is that the media is biased and lies about everything.
Yet, the truth is that the media isn’t the only thing
telling us a story of that’s going on. The United Nations, Human Rights’ Commission
has stated that Israel is committing a genocide. This being the same body that condemned
Russia for committing crimes against humanity, a concept which many Westerners
accept as true:
Then there’s the issue of the fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued a warrant for the arrest of Israel’s Prime
Minister Benyamin Netanyahu for war crimes. In case one tries to argue that
the ICC is riddled with Anti-Semitism and thus irrationally hates Israel, the
fact remains the ICC has found both Hamas commanders and Israeli government
officials guilty of crimes against humanity.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/11/1157286
Yet, the “we don’t know what’s going on,” debate will
ultimately argue that the ICC also doesn’t know what’s going on. So, what can
we do?
The answer might be to look at Israel and Israeli
organisations themselves. One of them, B’Tselem clearly states that what Israel
is doing is called genocide:
https://www.btselem.org/press_releases/20250728_our_genocide
So, how is it such that people still argue “We don’t
know what’s going on,” when events are well documented by a variety of globally
recognised organisations? Perhaps it’s a case of people will believe what they
want to believe regardless of facts. As such, one might say that universities
should teach courses on how to make people believe what you want them to
believe regardless of the facts.
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