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Ukraine Conflict Highlights Western Racism and Hypocrisy, Evidenced in Supporting Israeli Occupation of Palestine and Devastating Wars in the Middle East

March 29, 2022

 

188 Palestinians Killed in Gaza, Including 55 Children and 33 Women, in addition to 1230 Injuries, in Attacks by the Israeli Occupation Apartheid Regime Forces, May 16, 2021

 

Ukraine conflict highlights West's racism, hypocrisy: Middle East

BY Daily Sabah and ASSOCIATED PRESS

 JERUSALEM MAR 29, 2022 - 

The West's double standards in the conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere have been exposed by nations in the Middle East as racism-filled hypocrisy that hinders the ability to embrace humanity as a whole

Daily Sabah, Associated Press, March 29, 2022

Within days of the Russian invasion, Western countries invoked international law, imposed crippling sanctions, began welcoming refugees with open arms and cheered on Ukraine's armed resistance.

The response has elicited outrage across the Middle East, where many see a glaring double standard in how the West responds to international conflicts.

"We have seen every means we were told could not be activated for over 70 years deployed in less than seven days,” Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki told a security forum in Turkey earlier this month. "Amazing hypocrisy," he added.

The United States-led war in Iraq, which began 19 years ago this month, was widely seen as an unlawful invasion of one state by another. But Iraqis who fought the Americans were branded terrorists, and refugees fleeing to the West were often turned away, treated as potential security threats.

The Biden administration said Wednesday the U.S. has assessed that Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine and would work with others to prosecute offenders. But the U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and staunchly opposes any international probe of its own conduct or of its ally, Israel.

When Russia intervened in Syria's civil war on behalf of Bashar Assad in 2015, helping his forces to pummel and starve entire cities into submission, there was international outrage but little action. Syrian refugees fleeing to Europe died on perilous sea voyages or were turned back as many branded them a threat to Western culture.

In Yemen, a grinding yearslong war between a Saudi-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels has left 13 million people at risk of starvation. But even searing accounts of infants starving to death have not brought sustained international attention.

Bruce Riedel, formerly of the CIA and National Security Council, and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it was "understandable” that many in the Middle East see a double standard by the West.

"The United States and the United Kingdom have supported Saudi Arabia’s seven-year-old war in Yemen, which created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in decades,” he said.

Israel's occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state is well into its sixth decade, and millions of Palestinians live under military rule with no end in sight. The U.S., Israel and Germany have passed legislation aimed at suppressing the Palestinian-led boycott movement, while major firms like McDonald's, Exxon Mobil and Apple have won praise by suspending business in Russia.

On social media, the world has cheered Ukrainians as they stockpile Molotov cocktails and take up arms against an occupying army. When Palestinians and Iraqis do the same thing, they are branded terrorists and legitimate targets.

"We resisted the occupiers, even when the world was with the Americans, including the Ukrainians, who were part of their coalition," said Sheikh Jabbar al-Rubai, 51, who fought in the 2003-2011 Iraqi insurgency against U.S. forces.

"Because the world was with the Americans, they didn’t give us this glory and call us a patriotic resistance,” instead emphasizing the insurgency's religious character, he said. "This is of course a double standard, as if we are subhuman.”

Abdulameer Khalid, a 41-year-old Baghdad delivery driver, sees "no difference” between the Iraqi and Ukrainian resistance.

"If anything, the resistance to the Americans in Iraq was more justified, given that the Americans traveled thousands of kilometers to come to our country, while the Russians are going after a supposed threat next door to them,” he said.

To be sure, there are important differences between the war in Ukraine – a clear case of one U.N.-member state invading another – and the conflicts in the Middle East, which often involve civil war and extremism.

"By and large, Middle East conflicts are incredibly complicated. They are not morality plays," said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Mideast adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations.

He said the Ukraine conflict is unique in its degree of moral clarity, with Russia widely seen as launching an aggressive, devastating war against its neighbor. The closest Mideast analogy might be Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when Washington responded by assembling a military coalition including Arab states that drove out the Iraqi forces.

Still, Miller acknowledges that U.S. foreign policy "is filled with anomalies, inconsistencies, contradictions and yes, hypocrisy.”

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a response to the 9/11 attacks, which Osama bin Laden planned while being sheltered by the Taliban there. The U.S. justified its war in Iraq with false claims about weapons of mass destruction, but the invasion also toppled a brutal dictator who had himself flouted international law and committed crimes against humanity.

Still, the invasion is regarded by most Iraqis and other Arabs as an unprovoked disaster that set the stage for years of sectarian strife and bloodletting.

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a White House adviser when the U.S. invaded Iraq, said there was a difference between Ukrainians battling Russian invaders and insurgents in Iraq who fought Americans.

"Iraqis who fought U.S. troops on behalf of Iran or ISIS were not freedom fighters,” he said, referring to the Daesh group. ”Making these moral distinctions is not an act of hypocrisy.”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back more than a century – long before the 1967 war in which Israel seized East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Most of the world considers those areas to be occupied Palestinian territory and Israel's ongoing settlement construction to be a violation of international law. Israel portrays the conflict as a territorial dispute, accusing the Palestinians of refusing to accept its right to exist as a Jewish state.

Russia's intervention in Syria was part of a complex civil war in which several factions – including the Daesh group – committed atrocities. As Daesh seized large parts of Syria and Iraq, many feared extremists would slip into Europe amid waves of refugees.

Still, many in the Middle East saw the harsh treatment of Arab and Muslim migrants as proof that Western nations still harbor cultural biases despite espousing universal rights and values.

Many feel their suffering is taken less seriously because of pervasive views that the Middle East has always been mired in violence – never mind the West's role in creating and perpetuating many of its intractable conflicts.

"There’s this expectation, drawn from colonialism, that it’s more normal for us to be killed, to grieve our families, than it is for the West,” said Ines Abdel Razek, advocacy director for the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy.

Ukraine conflict highlights West's racism, hypocrisy: Middle East | Daily Sabah

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How coverage of the Ukraine-Russia conflict highlights a racist double standard

The wave of solidarity with Ukraine is inspiring, but it shows how years of dehumanization have made the deaths of people in the Middle East seem more tolerable.

By Ahmed Twaij,

A journalist, filmmaker and doctor

NBC News, March 3, 2022

Russia's invasion of Ukraine stunned the world as full-scale war broke out. The atrocities in Ukraine have garnered widespread coverage across the globe. But this reporting has unsheathed the flagrant racist and biased attitudes toward the value (or the lack thereof) of non-European life.

"This isn't a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades," Charlie D'Agata, a senior CBS News correspondent, reported from Kyiv. "You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city where you wouldn't expect that or hope that it's going to happen."

The Western world values white lives over those dying in conflicts outside Europe.

His comments resulted in swift online backlash, forcing the seasoned correspondent to apologize. His remarks are not part of an isolated incident, but have underlined a worrying fact: the Western world values white lives over those dying in conflicts outside Europe.

The brazen attitude toward the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan is deplorable and legitimizes conflict in the Middle East. Let's not forget that Iraq is literally referred to as the "cradle of civilization," and Baghdad was once the world's science capital. I agree that Kyiv is a city I wouldn't "hope" for violence in, but neither would I "hope" for it in Baghdad, Kabul or any other city. The double standards are ludicrous.

"Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, third world nation; this is Europe," a visibly emotional Lucy Watson proclaimed for ITV News in Kyiv, as if 11 years ago Syrians had been expecting to wake up to a devastating war. Anyone would fear cruise missiles, but for one French commentator on BFM TV, it is only conceivable to have attacks elsewhere. "We are in a European city and we have cruise missile fire as though we were in Iraq or Afghanistan, can you imagine," he said.

Writing for The Telegraph, the British pundit Daniel Hannan penned, "They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts…War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations." Hannan or Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, to afford him his full-privileged title, who doesn't use Instagram (at least publicly), may be surprised to find out that outside of the Western world, many people do use the platform. If he'd care to find out, he'd surely know that in Iraq, for example, nearly 30 million of its 40 million population use social media — including more than 15 million Instagram users. Also, Netflix is available in the Middle East, where many are hooked on the streaming service.

The problem isn't that non-Europeans aren't like us. It is that the years of continued dehumanization have made their deaths tolerable — just a statistic confined to the midsection of newspapers.

Journalists report from Ukraine in shock as if bloodshed is exclusive to Black and brown communities.

Even in the entertainment world, the tendency to take war in the Middle East lightly compared to Ukraine has been very evident. For example, last weekend “Saturday Night Live” on NBC opened with a somber tone as the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York performed a prayer for Ukraine. When compared with the 2001 war party skit performed in the wake of the Afghanistan invasion, it becomes clear that solidarity can be discriminatory. In the sadistic clip, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Maya Rudolph and others prance as they sing, "no more bearded dudes." Twenty years on, the conflict is still no joke for the people of Afghanistan.

And had Hollywood, instead of focusing on content that represents the Middle East as an "impoverished" war-torn region, funded more positive representation, perhaps more people wouldn't assume war is endemic to the region, and maybe consider the loss of life there just as heartbreaking as in Ukraine.

If anything, the wave of solidarity with Ukraine across the world has been inspiring. But it has been impossible, as a person of color with parents from Iraq, to not see this as selective solidarity. One Ukrainian official on BBC News, unchecked by the reporter, made it clear, "It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blonde hair, blue eyes being killed, children being killed every day with Putin's missiles." These same missiles from Russian President Vladimir Putin also landed in Syria and Chechnya, but reactions were subdued.

The effects of such sentiments have spilled into policy with countries across Europe opening doors for Ukrainian refugees that were closed for others. The right-wing nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban referred to Middle Eastern migrants as "invaders" last year, but when it comes to Ukrainian refugees, he's said, "We're letting everyone in." Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov expressed the double standard even clearer. "These are not the refugees we are used to… these people are Europeans," he said. "These people are intelligent, they are educated people … This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists."

Reflecting the bigotry in the international media, African citizens living in Ukraine trying to flee the conflict have experienced racism at the borders, barred from crossing, unlike their white Ukrainian counterparts.

With Ukraine's whiteness, it has been difficult for Europeans to fathom a time when the region was ravaged by war and civilians were fleeing for their safety. Journalists report from Ukraine in shock as if bloodshed is exclusive to Black and brown communities. In reality, many Europeans have lived through the Yugoslav wars of the '90s. Their parents and grandparents can also remind them of the atrocities of World War II — but it is the Middle East that is deemed to be "uncivilized" and "impoverished." During the horrors of the World War II, it was this "uncivilized" Middle East that welcomed refugees without questions on education or affiliation with the Nazis.

The phenomenon to continually trivialize war in the Middle East and dehumanize the entire population is not new. Whenever violence erupts in the United States, pundits are quick to put out the message that "this is America, not the Middle East."

In the aftermath of the violent Jan. 6 attack last year on the U.S. Capitol, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer made similar remarks. He tweeted a photo of National Guard troops and wrote, "So many streets have been closed. It reminds me of the war zones I saw in Baghdad or Mosul or Falluja. So sad." In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, a former New York City Police Department commissioner compared scenes to those in the Middle East. "This is not Baghdad, this is not Mosul Iraq, this is not Falluja and it's not Afghanistan! It's Minneapolis, Minnesota…," he tweeted.

Heartfelt solidarity with Ukraine has shown hope for supporting a community in need, and journalism is vital for enlightening us on the atrocities happening in that country. Such reporting, however, should not be at the expense of others. Contributing to the problem is the fact that journalism is plagued with representation issues around the world. In the U.S., 40 percent of the population is nonwhite, but a 2020 Reuters Institute study examining 10 top online news outlets and 10 top offline news outlets found that only 11 percent of top editors are nonwhite.

With better representation in the media, maybe the errors by D'Agata and others would have been avoided. Bearing in mind that he chose his words "carefully," I shudder to think what journalists would spew when unhinged. We need to do better and combat this racism. No life is worth more than another.

Ahmed Twaij: The Ukraine-Russia conflict highlights a racist double standard (nbcnews.com)

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