“Israel’s war in Gaza and the world’s inability to stop it is a tragedy for humankind and a disgrace for civilisation.” – China’s Foreign Minister, wang Yi.
Indeed, that humans would one day, by conscious advertence, detonate a bomb to end their own existence on planet earth is evident in unrelenting stockpiling of very advanced weapons of mass destruction being accumulated as much in the western block as in the eastern. As America and Europe boast nuclear warheads and ICBMs, Iran, Turkey, China and North Korea only wait to be challenged!
Whoever fails to anticipate the prospective free for all should remember NNPT has both its signatories and that the UN came terminally caged! As the world sadly anticipates the maniacs that will enter the control rooms to pull levers of doom, global intelligentsia is brought facing one lifetime challenge: What suasive prescription for weaning bragging zealots into sanity?
That feared end of a globe-wide showdown, often somehow announced as World War 3, has never been this near and wondrously certain! How come such baffling mosaic of pain and devastation everywhere? Aside Israel’s unfounded aggression in Palestine, which has lately spread and compounding aged issues in Lebanon, Middle East parades yet subsisting conflicts in Yemen, while that of Syria has just been rested in a way. The Eurasian axis boils with Russia/Ukrain war, and the long-standing tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir persist in Asia. In India, the uprisings between majority Hindu population and minority Muslims remain a blight upon traditionally Hindu-controlled central administration in the country.
Intra-national spots particularly on the African continent have not been any less settled, as brothers in Ethiopia’s Tigray region and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to bicker over mineral resources and colonial exploitation, laying the beleaguered enclaves prostrate. Nigeria, in its north-east, north-central and north-west fringes, has, for the past two decades, welcome deadly insurgents who have killed thousands, disrupted institutions and upset homesteads, and the resultant overwhelmed refugee camps have been targets of bandits also! Note the minuscule, though just little less destructive, spills packaged as cultism, ritualism and kidnapping in other parts of the country.
By and large, especially for black Africa, if not killings, it is corruption. If the country-sides have deliquesced into literally ungoverned spaces where sociopathic neanderthals unleash stone age bestiality upon ill-fated humans, executive chambers and so-called assemblies have as well morphed governed capitals basically into ungoverned spaces of sorts.
Here, fearful litany of numbing larcenies foisted by those supposedly elected to superintend governance and deploy succour have created inexcusable, but actual, resource scarcities that have left peoples’ lives shredded on critical fronts. Across North, South, East, West and Central Africa, politically prompted and protected pilferages rampage with the virulence of stage three cancer, rubbishing standing institutions, and considering weight and scale of heists, calling into question executive sanities.
Factually, there are anti-graft structures here and there, but these – injected with sleep fluids – slumber on, while the reprobates – spread through, sometimes heading the tiers and agencies – remain wakeful, gluttonously packing everyone’s serving!
However, mother of maladies so far was the 15-month mass executions of Palestinians, alongside all non-indigenes, including aid workers, medical doctors/nurses and pharmacists, trapped in the Palestine space. The mastermind was no other than Israel which came armed to the hilt with every weaponry that attested to man’s inordinate longing for vanity. Entirely aware of the country’s haplessness, and ready to deliver on vile pledge to end a war which Hamas supposedly started October 7, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a blaze of relentless bombings and shootings he ordered, had, just before the latest ceasefire, mauled over 47,000 Palestinians. This figure comprises mostly babies/children, women and the aged.
Further, nearly 120,000 remain buried under rubbles of devastated structures, threatened by illness or missing across settlements of Gaza, Rafah, Khan Younis, Jabalia, Jenin, and others in West Bank. Factually, human history has been history of injustice: man’s inhumanity to man, they often say. It seems we all have been herded into a season of the Amalekites after all: such an age in which reason opposes sense and unbeauty is beauty – obstinate craving for the logic of/in lawlessness! Within the space of the madness, all appeals only left Israel killing, raping and maiming more, even as America continued to supply it critical munitions needed to further stoke the massacre.
America, ever vamping one pretext or the other, often engages in directly killing off Muslims in their own lands, as it did in Libya and Iraq. It also either abets or looks away from similar performance by other states, like it does Israel in Palestine, or did China in Uyghur, Myanmar in Rohingya, the Hindu nationalists in India, or even through cups of Islamophobic bursts from Canada’s Quebec to New Zealand’s Christchurch.
Clearly a world of unabashed double standards – what is wrong always depends on who does the wrong! A world that tolerates America-programmed and implemented killings and sundry abuses of Muslims in various countries as a matter of routine, often deploys misbegotten and crassly abusive phraseologies to condemn whatever manner of retaliation such as Al-Qaeda foisted on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001. The vengeance often also comes in form of tepid outrages of ISWAP, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Shabaab, among others. While in-coming President Donald Trump, during his first term, gifted India’s Narendra Modi, a state visit during one of Hindu bigots’ killing and burning of Muslims and their mosques, Joe Biden hosted Netanyahu minimum of two times in the recesses of the White House for the period Israel’s latest habitual large-scale slaughters of Palestinians lasted!
Truly, the argument the war against Palestinians is not a religious war appears plausible only to the extent that it helps to downplay grim expansionism and capitalism undercurrents of America’s moves. America remains the largest manufacturer and supplier of arms globally, while it owns and maintains minimum of 750 military bases in 80 countries, athwart continents! Is it therefore inappropriate for it to tinker with possibilities of spatially far expanded New Israel to cover all Palestinian land, after eventually killing off the aborigines? Such attainment will at least enable America protect and fester fortunes better for over-pampered invader-settlers, while it equally will allow it erect solid battle front in the Middle East, in readiness for near-certain all-out onslaught against Iran, which has become too militarily powerful and recalcitrant, and consequently dangerous for Israel.
Any wonder, few have been agitations against distressing conditions of humankind generally, and of Muslims specifically – see how so-called leaders bond in cool ostracism of Palestine! Those to change errors are themselves neck deep in error; they promote democracy only as a façade to the wiles of their ways. How they come to equity, but with soiled hands! Discomfort is unloosened upon the human race not precisely as the poor are difficult to bring to satiety, but because the rich always find excuses to advance further from it.
The psychos across world’s capitols, working upon Bretton Woods instructions, have unleashed hunger as never, applying instruments they find attractive, even exceedingly profitable. Subjects who cannot wait to expire at the home fronts that have worsted into hells through wars and famine, are electing to end it all via the high seas and famished deserts! As governance is compelled to run away from the governed, considerable fraction of those lacking patience to perish by strangulating decrees are engaging their bi-pedals, pedaling off to destinations of no return!
As mis-performances degenerate from savage capitalism oozing from the White House and other Houses to subversive Islamophobia, and grim unloosening of genocide upon Palestinians, should conscientious voices worldwide not be worried the existential fate of modern man with benighted, if regressive, enlightenment? From global North to global South, East to West, and entire spaces in-between, the spectre of unprecedented calamitous blitz looms with riveting intensity, no thanks to America which sells the mercantile as saviour, and promotes the mantra of free trade as sole liberating force!
Salawudeen, writer/freelance journalist, wrote via [email protected]
