These last two years have shown us that western civilization doesn’t need protection, it needs redemption. It needs to save its soul.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
In October 2024 a Lebanese writer named Lina Mounzer wrote, “ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”
I’ve thought about that line a lot over the last year.
I thought about it as Israel hammered Lebanon with at least 20 airstrikes during a supposed “ceasefire”.
I thought about it during the Gaza ceasefire negotiations when the western political/media class kept calling the Israelis held by Hamas “hostages” while calling the innocent Palestinians held captive by Israel “prisoners”.
I think about it as the IDF continues to murder Palestinian civilians every day during the Gaza “ceasefire” when they are deemed to be traveling into forbidden areas, because Palestinians are so dehumanized that Israel sees bullets as a perfectly legitimate means of directing civilian foot traffic.
I think about it as these daily ceasefire violations and acts of military slaughter barely make a blip in the western news media, while any time anything happens that makes western Jews feel anxious or upset it dominates headlines for days.
I thought about it while the western political/media class solemnly commemorated the second anniversary of the October 7 attack, even as the daily death toll from the Gaza holocaust ticked along with its victims unnamed and unacknowledged by those same institutions.
I thought about it when all of western politics and media stopped dead in its tracks and stood transfixed for days on the assassination of Charlie Kirk while ignoring the genocide he had spent the last two years of his life actively manufacturing consent for.
Day after day after day we see glaring, inexcusable discrepancies between the amount of attention that is given to the violent death of an Arab and the attention that is given to the violent death of an Israeli, a western Jew, or any westerner.
These last two years have been a time of unprecedented unmasking in all sorts of ways, but I think that’s the one that’s going to stick with me the most. The way western civilization came right out into the cold harsh light to admit, day after day after day, that they don’t truly view Arabs as human beings.
Ours is a profoundly sick society.
One of the main arguments you’ll hear from rightists about why the west needs to support Israel is that Israel is helping to defend the west from the savage Muslim hoards — a sentiment that Israeli pundits and politicians have been all too happy to feed into of late. It’s revealing because it’s just coming right out and saying that slaughtering Muslims is a virtue in and of itself, so anyone who kills Muslims is an ally of the west.
But any time I come across this argument all I can think is, why would anyone want to defend the west if this is what the west has become?
Even if we pretend these delusions that Arabs and Islam pose some kind of threat to western civilization are valid, why would it even matter? This civilization does not deserve to be saved. Not if we’re going to be living like this.
If we’ve become so detached from our own humanity that we can’t even see innocent children as fully human just because they live somewhere else and have a different religion, then we are the monsters. We are the villains. We are everything the craziest Zionist pretends the Arabs are.
These last two years have shown us that western civilization doesn’t need protection, it needs redemption. It needs to save its soul.
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