The Crocodile Tears of Liberalism in Its Death Throes
Summary: Western liberal governments, including those of Germany,
Britain, France, and Canada, initially showed complicity and silence
over Israel's genocide in Gaza, only later offering timid protests. This
has exposed the hypocrisy of Atlanticist liberalism and contributed to
the rise of neofascism globally.
We thank Gilbert Achcar,
Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London, for kind permission
to publish today’s article which was originally published in Arabic in Al-Quds al-Arabi.
The leaders of Western liberal governments—Germany, Britain, France,
and Canada—waited for a year and a half into the Zionist army’s
genocidal war against the martyred people of Gaza before they began,
with noticeable timorousness, to voice some protest against the State of
Israel’s zeal in committing the heinous massacre. Yet, their behaviour
only served to highlight their previous silence, a silence of
graveyards, and even their blatant complicity with the Zionist
government. Indeed, they had all sided with the Biden administration,
not only in justifying that government’s re-invasion of the Gaza Strip,
but also in rejecting any call for a “ceasefire”—in this case, a
cessation of the genocide.
This pattern continued for several months, until shame began to
overtake them from this disgraceful stance in the face of popular
outrage over the massacre, which continued to expand with the passage of
time and the increasing number of victims of the Israeli killing
machine. Even then, their position did not differ from that of the Biden
administration in that they refrained from publicly criticising
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government or exerting any real pressure on it.
Instead, they accepted the various arguments advanced by that government
to justify its continued genocide, until they were forced to
differentiate themselves from the new US administration, the Trump
administration, when it became clear that it was even more complicit
with Netanyahu than its predecessor.
This sickening scene is one of the most striking expressions, if not the most striking, of what I called ten months ago “the fall of Atlanticist liberalism”.
The fact is that the genocidal war waged by the Zionist state has
surpassed in brutality and sadism anything we have known since the end
of World War II. That is because brutality and sadism in the present
case are not of the kind practised by frenzied gangs in “backward”
countries, such as the genocides witnessed in Rwanda and the Congo
before the end of the last century, or that witnessed in Darfur at the
beginning of the new, or that perpetrated by the “Islamic State”
organisation in Iraq about ten years ago. Nor are they of the kind
practised by governments classified as “barbaric”, such as the official
armed forces in Bangladesh or the “Khmer Rouge” government in Cambodia
in the 1970s. Rather, brutality and sadism are practised in Gaza by the
government of an industrially advanced country belonging to the global
club of the rich that claims to represent “civilisation” in the face of
barbarism, as Netanyahu constantly emphasises in the speeches he
addresses to Western public opinion, when describing the war he is
waging.
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