For Muslims around the world who are watching the genocide of Palestinians being endorsed, either through open calls or through silent complicity, it is tremendously difficult to push down the bile of hatred for the Israeli war criminals who are leading the charge. It has become harder to fight the disillusionment with the international comity of nations that blindly support Israeli atrocities and give them cover for the murders they commit, and it is increasingly difficult to hold on to the reminder that much of the vitriol being regurgitated by Western masses is the result of disinformation, not a ruthless disregard for human life.
Muslims are an unusual community. With all our political differences, our web of internal religious divisions, our myriad of cultures and languages, and our varying degrees of commitment to the faith, there is one heart-string that runs through all of us. When tugged at, we become one voice and of one mind; there are no fault lines in our belief that for Muslims under oppression anywhere, their suffering and the suffering of those of us who are "free" is the same.
With a war yet again raging on in the Middle East, we stand by in disbelief as the bulk of the self-labeled civilized international community of nations cheers Israel on. And every collective memory that this ummah has of colonial injustice, political repression, enforced regime change, destruction of innocent Muslim lives, destruction of centuries of history and irreplaceable cultural heritage, racial and religious injustice, crimes against humanity, and so much more, comes crashing down around our ears again. We have not had a moment of reprieve in decades, to take a breath and begin moving past the last injustice because countless new ones spring up in their place, like the mushroom cloud of a forbidden weapon of mass destruction.
There is no Western equivalent for the millennia of grief we carry with us. I do not refer to the loss of lives alone. I refer to the double standard the West adheres to, the entrenched belief that the lives of those who do not look like them and who do not carry their faith – our lives – are worth less than their own. It is such a blatant rejection of our humanity that it is impossible to ignore, absorb and move on from as if it did not matter.
They tell us that Kashmiri lives and the lives of Muslims in India matter less than theirs. They tell us that the lives of men, women and children – entire generations – in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan, matter less than theirs. They tell us that Palestinian babies being murdered, and Palestinian civilians struggling to hold on to shreds of a dignified existence, is not as bad as we cry about.
The current crisis makes it abundantly clear, once again, that Muslims' lives and Muslim rights are not worth an atom’s weight in the court of international opinion.
It is not possible for us to see it any other way. Not when this is the repeated reality of millions of us, for generation upon generation. And Western responses to the current horror that is unfolding over neighborhoods that have become graveyards, reaffirms everything we have come to expect.
The collective Western leadership, and the Muslim leadership that has willingly been co-opted by them, is willfully turning a blind eye to the dangers of this global segregation. The divide and disillusionment will worsen. I remember every Western diplomat and scholar we have met since February 2022 who expressed shock and disbelief at our lack of outrage over Russia’s actions against Ukraine. And they were unable to understand, even then, that while we mourned the loss of innocent Ukrainian lives, we were reminded at every step that Ukrainian lives mattered more to the global North than Muslim lives ever have.
We are grateful for those in the West who stand with the Palestinians at this time, many of them Jewish voices calling for an end to the massacre. And we are grateful to those who have stood with Muslims over decades and spoken out for them at every platform and at every opportunity. But those who continue to spread seeds of violence, hate and destruction have paved the way for an irreconcilable divide. These are the same voices that have lied to the world in the past and that continue to lie about their commitment to a just cause that does not exist.
I fail to see a time when Muslims will be able to recover from this disillusionment. With lies that have warped the fabric that may have bound us to each other across civilizations, and with injustice of words and action that have ripped apart a human solidarity we insisted on adhering to, we are already continents apart. And nothing good will come of this.
