With a defense budget greater than the next 10 countries combined, the US naturally remains an international hegemon.
But it’s not the benevolent empire it once sold itself as to the globe. Now, as it transitions from post-9/11 forever wars, yet continues to engage in, finance and manufacture the weapons of a genocide, America’s decades-long spiritual decline has hit rock bottom.
Recently, a man approached me after a lecture, asking: “What makes Gaza different?” He was referring to the simultaneous international attention and inaction on the occupation’s barbarity in Gaza.
Of course, there are religious implications – Muslims naturally revere Palestine as a holy land, as do Jews and Christians.
There are historical implications, too, including an extensive history of over seven decades of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the continuous building of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as an ever-growing list of Israeli human rights abuses.
But the biggest difference that came to mind was that every detail of this genocide is being broadcast. It’s a “live-streamed genocide”, as Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, an adviser to the South Africa team at the International Court of Justice, put it.
“It’s the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time,” she said.
It’s televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media. A healthy conscience can’t simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children.
Arrogance and hypocrisy
But this isn’t the first time the US has been complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent civilians.
What if the victims of the American military machine in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq were able to livestream their own death and destruction?
How many massacres has the US been proxy to or carried out itself? How many victims will never be mentioned?
In 2020, under the Freedom of Information Act, the New Yorker sued the Navy, the Marine Corps and the US Central Command in an effort to obtain images from the Haditha massacre of 2005, a civilian slaughter in which US Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women and children.
The youngest victims included a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy named Abdullah, shot in the head from six feet away.
After a long fight lasting four years, in March, the US military apparatus released the images of the bloodbath. The perpetrators remain unpunished.
The Haditha massacre is a microcosm of not just the US occupation of Iraq, but the West’s brutal attempt to engineer artificial change, secure national security interests at the expense of local populations and impose its will in the Muslim world.
In an interview with Al Jazeera’s Centre Stage last week, Middle East Eye’s editor-in-chief, David Hearst, blasted the western world order amidst its complicity in Gaza.
“Nothing that the western [liberal] alliance has done in the last three decades has worked, and yet it’s still going on,” he said.
From forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to Barack Obama’s “no boots on the ground” that fueled a drone-strike heavy policy in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, the US’s spiritual death has been a long time coming.
And it’s not just the murder and destruction – it’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all.
Sinister defense
“They’re using extremely illiberal means to protect their liberalism, and they’re using it against Muslims,” Hearst added in his interview with Al Jazeera. “They wouldn’t dare to use that against Jews or synagogues.”
It is largely American bombs that have been dropped on the hospitals, mosques, churches and over 500 schools of Gaza.
It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide, and it is this sinister defense of Israeli terror – often at the expense of its own citizens – that is putting the final nail in the coffin of America’s spiritual death.
For decades, Washington has remained silent and dismissive of Israel’s murder of American citizens, going to bat at State Department and White House briefings for the occupation against their own citizens.
It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide
In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American activist, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. The bulldozer was an American one, sold to Israel through a Defense Department program.
In 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist, was killed by Israeli snipers in the West Bank in 2022.
Just this week, Israeli forces shot dead 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American taking part in protests against illegal Israeli settlements south of Nablus. Israeli officials stated they “would look into it”, a dismal response echoed for decades.
And the US response will remain the same: a shoulder shrug, a disapproval devoid of consequence.
The US is not a negotiator, arbitrator or by any means an objective voice vis-a-vis the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is the raison d’etre.
The Gaza genocide is an American one, and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity in the type of war crimes they so often associate with historical hegemonic rivals.
-Imam Dr. Omar Suleiman is a world renowned scholar and theologically driven activist for human rights. He is the Founder and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, and an adjunct professor of Islamic Studies in the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Southern Methodist University as well as member of the Ethics Center Advisory Board. He’s also the resident scholar of the Valley Ranch Islamic Center and Co-Chair Emeritus of Faith Forward Dallas at Thanks-Giving Square. His article appeared in the Middle East Eye.
