The well-known saying from the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus that “the first casualty when war comes is truth” has been based on the assumption that all the affairs in the world had been within the orbit of truth before the war and it is the war that sacrifices the truth.
But what if we’re faced with a world where the true concepts and values are distorted? Is the war the same as in Aeschylus’ saying in a world where resistance against occupation is labeled “terrorism”, the military operation leading to 20-year occupation of Afghanistan is sold as “Enduring Freedom”, and the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians are pictured as the white dove of peace?
The war in Ukraine is represents at least one of the examples above and proves that the answer to the aforementioned question could be negative sometimes, as it has put on display some of the truths concealed by the Western countries for years.
This article addresses the most important issues and concepts previously misused by the Western countries while being advertised as values in the Ukraine war.
Resistance and occupation
The Western countries have been supporting the Israeli regime financially, militarily and politically since the occupation of Palestine while verbally calling on the regime to end occupation of Palestinian lands.
The statements that the Western countries issued against the Israeli occupation were a hypocritic, artificial display from the very beginning that the West spoke of Palestinians’ rights but blocked any measure to make pressure against the Israeli regime in action.
The Western media and officials described the Israeli regime’s attack against media, medical personnel and civilians as “collateral casualties” and a result of Palestinians’ use of their citizens as human shield.
They almost always use the terms utilized by the Israeli regime to label the Palestinian movement terrorist. They have even dubbed Palestine’s diplomatic measures as “diplomatic terrorism”.
That was the trend until the war in Ukraine erupted. The Ukrainian women who built Molotov cocktails were called “heroes” by the Western media, officials and organizations. The Russian military was tagged as occupier and war criminal and standing up against them was called “resistance”. “There seems that resistance is allowed if you have blue eyes,” senior Palestinian journalist Dima Khatib told Al-Monitor.
“There seems that we [Palestinians] are not white enough and our eyes are not blue enough,” she said, “resistance has been legitimate and marching in the street while carrying guns has not only been permissible but also worthy of praise.”
“As Palestinians, our land has been occupied for more than 70 years, and we are attacked and expelled from our homes every single day, but the media does not shed light on these practices,” Rizk Atawneh, a political activist in Hebron in the occupied West Bank told Mondoweiss. “But in Ukraine, these acts were portrayed as a crime from the very beginning.”
“The Ukrainian resistance against Russia was instantaneously legitimized,” Atawneh said, adding that he was almost in disbelief when he first saw news reports praising Ukrainian citizens for taking up arms and practicing bomb-making.
“Palestinian children are imprisoned for throwing stones, and our resistance fighters are deemed as terrorists by the entire world, even though we too are fighting an occupation,” he said.
The double-standards became even more evident when the users in the social media published a video from a Palestinian girl standing against the Israeli forces and pretended that it was a Ukrainian girl standing against Russian soldiers.
The footage was for 2012 Ahed Tamimi, the 11-year-old Palestinian girl, was shouting at the Israeli forces, calling them to end occupation.
Many analysts highlighted the difference in public attention to the footage when it became viral as a Palestinian girl in 2012 compared to the recent false attribution.
Racism and equality
What was said seriously challenges the West’s claim on adherence to another genuine human value. Prior to the Ukraine War, Western claims that the value of human beings was not determined by their skin color, race, or religion had never been questioned.
From the earliest days of the conflict, a large number of Western media reporters who sought to highlight the consequences of war in Ukraine said that they were not talking about the loss of life of the Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni people, but the lives of "civilized" people, white people who have blond hair and colored eyes.
"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."
"These are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from Ukraine ... They're Christian, they're white, they're very similar (to us)," Kelly Cobiella, an NBC News correspondent based in London, recently said on video.
Such instances show how the self-centered mentality of Westerners has penetrated journalism that citizens of Western countries are considered to be "more civilized" than people in other parts of the world and their sufferings deserve more attention.
The paradox unfolds even further when we see the fact that governments in the very Western countries preach other countries about "human rights", claiming that they have made the slogan "human beings are born equal" a principle of their policy-making.
Refugees’ rights
When the people living in a part of the world are "dehumanized" in accordance with the thoughts outlined above, the first cornerstones of ignoring their suffering and even at higher levels committing crimes against them are laid.
When the mental system of a part of the world is formed on the basis of such stereotypes recognizing humans living in another part of the world as uncivilized, their sufferings will also be considered normal. This is what has been witnessed over the years in the West's treatment of the war-struck people in the West Asia and the outbreak of the Ukraine war has shed new light on it.
A few days after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the European Union passed an emergency bill, allowing Ukrainian citizens or a member of each Ukrainian family to live and work in a state member of bloc for three years.
The bill exempted Ukrainian asylum seekers from all visa requirements and the lengthy asylum application process and other cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles.
Muhammad Al-Badan, a community and youth activist from Bethlehem, said in an interview with Mondoweiss that it was “striking” to see the way Ukrainian refugees were treated at the borders of European countries, where they were largely welcomed with open arms, and provided with refuge.
“These are the same countries that closed their borders to Syrian refugees, and discriminated against Arab and African refugees,” al-Badan said. “These countries have shown their racism clearly now.”
“We sympathize with anyone who lives in a state of war, and with people who are forced to become refugees. But we wish that everyone would be treated like the Ukrainians.”
The latest figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) show that by the end of 2021, some 6.6 million Syrians had been displaced by the war. Currently, nearly 3.4 million Afghans have been displaced. Nearly 32 million people have been displaced on the African continent, according to the African Center for Strategic Studies. Caminando, a human rights NGO, reports that 4,404 citizens of West Asia and the Middle East have lost their lives in 2021while trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Spain.
Isabella Alexander-Nathani, the award-winning American writer, filmmaker, educator, and cultural anthropologist focused on human rights, writes in a memo on Sapiens.org: “As part of my work, I’ve had the privilege of documenting countless refugee journeys—mothers from Syria to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Venezuela who share a common courage as they gather what little they can carry on their backs and brave increasingly difficult journeys in order to bring their children to safer ground.”
“I’ve also documented the reception these women and children receive when their journeys finally reach the end. Instead of a welcome, they’re often greeted by armed border patrols ready to detain and deport them, and by citizens who protest new refugee arrivals—waving signs with slogans like ‘Go Home’ and ‘Secure Our Borders’.”
The world's twofaced treatment of Ukrainian asylum seekers and the people of West Asia and Africa has been so notorious that it has even raised the voice of Bill Frelick, Human Rights Watch's refugee and migrant rights director. Criticizing the Greek government's treatment of Ukrainian and Afghan refugees, he said: "The double standard makes a mockery of the purported shared European values of equality, the rule of law, and human dignity,"
Censorship and freedom of expression
Before the beginning of the Ukraine war, one had a difficult time if they wanted to present evidences such as the ban on posting a photo of the late Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by Instagram and other social media giants and convince an optimistic audience that the Western media was the soft army of capitalism to fight against any rival system of thought, values and cognition.
The "optimistic audience" can be right in some way of course. Although it is true that the Western media are effective and powerful ideological entities serving the purpose of "preserving the capitalist system" and that they decide whether to promote or censor content based on this general goal, they do not shout out their mission and expose it to the audience as long as possible. They rather hide it in a pile of layers made of attractive and deceptive slogans.
This is why we see censorship and repression of freedom of expression and opinion in Western countries, firstly, is applied with statistics exactly in accordance with the interests of the capitalist system which is unlikely to be accidental. Secondly, it is justified in a very subtle and mysterious way by deceptive slogans such as fighting violence and dangerous organizations and preventing harm to others, hatred, and insults to others, etc.
In a speech in 1987, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei interpreted the form of repression of freedom of expression in the Western world in a still interesting way: "If we look closely, we will see that the slogan of freedom of expression and opinion is not a real slogan in the Western world. There is something that is seemingly freedom, but it is not in fact the freedom in the sense they claim and there even exists censorship and oppression in a very subtle and insidious way in these countries.”
“The censorship that exists in the Western countries is almost similar in some way to the censorship and control imposed against revolutionary thoughts of the Prophet (PBUH) in the era of the advent of Islam in Mecca.”
“The Qur'an quotes the infidels saying: “And those who disbelieve say: ‘Listen not to this Quran, and make noise in the midst of its (recitation) that you may overcome,’.”
“The infidel advised each other not to listen to the Qur'anand the call of the Prophet, and when the Prophet was reciting the verses of the Qur'an, they would whistle, cheer, and create a chaos in a way that the voice of the Qur'an and the divine word coming out of the Prophet’s mouth could not be heard. The censorship in the Western media today resembles this.”
“It is true that no one is legally barred from speaking, but the propaganda they create does not allow anyone to hear anything other than what they want. As I said in one of the discussions in this series last year, the major media in the world today are run by the Zionist apparatus. They allow freedom in those issues are not related to their interests, but exactly in those moments that their interests are at stake, the media subtly obscure the truth and feed the minds of the people with false."
The war in Ukraine, however, was one of those moments when the Western countries lost the opportunity to do the subtleties and couldn’t cover up like the past. They took the mask off their face and tried to systematically remove the voices and narratives with the slightest deviation from the Western narrative of the war.
Removing Russian media from App Store, blocking Russian media coverage on Facebook and Instagram, allowing violent speech against the Russian military on Facebook, blocking Russian media advertisement on Google, and removing the .ru domain by some US ad European domain maintenance companies constitute just a few examples of the measures taken by the apparently non-political institutions of the West to silence the Russian media.
However, the scope of censorship was not limited to the Russian media, as analysts and activists in the United States whose narratives didn’t match that of the West were subject to coercive measures.
In a recent example, the twitter account of Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector and former US Navy intelligence officer, was suspended by Twitter for allegedly harassing US President Joe Biden after documenting the role of Ukrainian police in the massacre in Bucha.
Ritter had indirectly called Biden a "war criminal" and twitter said it considers Ritter's message to be in violation of its non-harassment rules. But Twitter never takes action against users, including US officials, who use the term "war criminal" for the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A more interesting measure took place when Meta announced that Facebook and Instagram users "in some countries" were allowed to publish violent content against Russian officials and soldiers, including "Death to Putin" and "Death to Russian aggressors"! In addition to permission to publish violent speech against Vladimir Putin, Meta allowed its users to publish similar words against Alexander Lukashenko, the President of Belarus!
Separation of sports and politics
In 2009, the Royal Spanish Football Federation fined the Malian striker Frederic Kanoute $4,000 for revealing a T-shirt showing support for Palestine with the word Palestine written in several languages on it. The action was met with a yellow card from the referee. Kanoute did so to support the people of Gaza who were under Israeli’s attacks and over 700 people have died. But the Royal Spanish Football Federation said the footballer's behavior was against the principle of separating sports from politics.
In the same year, the Egyptian midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika showed support for Gaza by revealing a T-shirt with words “Sympathize with Gaza” in English and Arabic on it. He received an official warning from FIFA saying that political messaging was forbidden in sports competitions.
A few years ago, Hammadi Ahmed, the Iraqi Air Force's soccer player showed the words "Al-Quds Lana" (Quds is ours) on his shirt in front of spectators and TV cameras after scoring a goal for his team in the match against Al-Samawah. His action was met with a fine by the Iraqi Football Federation's disciplinary committee for violating FIFA rules.
Again, the outbreak of the Ukraine war revealed a new definition of the political role of international sports organizations. The International Olympic Committee and world federations imposed tough sanctions on Russia.
The first official reaction was from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) which took place only one day after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an official statement, UEFA deprived Russia of the right to host this season's finale of the Champions League and passed it to France.
The statement added that the Executive Committee had decide during an emergency meeting that the clubs and national teams of Russia and Ukraine should hold their matches under the supervision of UEFA in a neutral field.
Also, FIFA announced in a joint statement with UEFA that the Russian national team had been excluded from the World Cup play-off games and also from European tournaments.
Prior to the decision, FIFA had announced that the Russian national team should meet other teams in a neutral country without raising the Russian flag or playing their national anthem. This was faced with Russia’s protest.
This joint statement was supported by some national federations. The president of the French Football Federation said in an interview with "Le Parisien" that Russia should be excluded from the 2022 World Cup due to the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
The question is if sports is separated from politics as the Westerners claim, why this separation is not witnessed in the issues regarding the Ukraine war? And, if the potentials of sports can be leveraged to prevent a war when necessary, why the use of this tool is it not allowed in showing the sufferings of Yemenis and Syrians and the aggression of the Israeli regime?
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