TEHRAN - As Israel’s seismic assaults continue to devastate more than 2.3 million people in the besieged Gaza Strip, people around the world have begun to question the sincerity of human rights proclamations from Western leaders.

Leaders throughout the Western world have been praising the regime's forces for their dedication to "defending" Israeli citizens, all the while offering a feeble response to the profound suffering experienced by the Palestinian population.

With the world now caught between two wars, one in Gaza and one in Ukraine, people have begun to wonder whether Western leaders’ support for human rights has anything to do with the racial backgrounds of the victims, or the financial interests of the West. 

At the outset of 2022, no one could have foreseen that by year's end, Russian President Vladimir Putin would be widely characterized as an archetypal villain, while his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would emerge as a primary symbol of heroic resistance in defense of democracy and freedom.

“We can never let the crimes Russia is committing become normal… bombing schools and hospitals and apartment buildings is not normal,” U.S. Secretary of States Antony Blinken said during his impassioned speech at the United Nations Security Council in February of 2023, appearing to exude shock and outrage at the extent of devastation caused by Russian forces in Ukraine.

His words came as the U.S. was directing more than 75 billion dollars in military and financial aid to Ukraine. While U.S. and European politicians toured international bodies and different summits to villainize Putin as the ultimate breacher of human rights, they began a parallel diplomatic and media campaign to tout Zelensky as a courageous soldier who is fighting for the freedom of his people. The Ukrainian president, who rose to power following a Western-backed coup, received standing ovations for his anti-Russia speeches in Western parliaments and posed for fashion magazines with his wife to capture the “portrait of bravery”. 

However, Blinken’s apprehension that “we must not let President Putin’s callous indifference to human life become our own” shockingly waned in just a few months when he began to address the conflict that broke out between Palestinians and the Israeli regime on October 7. 
 
During his 4th trip to the occupied territories since October, Blinken once again failed to question Benjamin Netanyahu about the atrocities his regime is committing in Gaza. He now seems to be indifferent to the bombing of packed hospitals, schools, homes, and places of worship, and does not care that those who get to survive Israeli bombardments might eventually lose their lives due to a lack of food, water, and medical care.

The foreign secretary's impassioned appeals for "No seizing land by force”, “No erasing another country's borders", "No targeting civilians in war", and "No wars of aggression" during Russia's conflict with Ukraine are nowhere to be found in the face of Israeli onslaughts on Gaza, even though an Israeli minister has called to strike Gaza with a nuclear bomb.

Meanwhile, Hamas fighters are being labeled as terrorists left and right. Western media outlets, which like to refer to Zelensky in a manner that portrays him as a living god, begin their questions directed at their guests by asking whether they condemn Hamas for carrying out an operation in the occupied territories. According to these media outlets, Zelensky has all the right in the world to defend its people, even if it entails the use of UN-banned cluster bombs, but Hamas fighters should not dare hit back at Israel, no matter how many Palestinians are displaced, humiliated, tortured, or killed across the region over decades.

Essentially, it seems that in the international law that Blinken and his fellow Western colleagues espouse, blue-eyed and blonde Ukrainian children are worthy of security, but the ones living in Gaza are too brown for justice and peace.

Of course, there have been some outliers in the European Union that have been asking for an end to the war in Gaza. But the majority of Western leaders have decided to refrain from ruffling feathers in Israel.

Israeli spokespersons that appear on Western media have sought to justify their military crimes, claiming to have announced "safe-zones" for civilians in Gaza, a proposal that effectively forces residents to make life-and-death decisions about remaining in their homes or relocating to supposedly safer areas. But these so-called safe-zones have proven to be equally susceptible to Israeli bombardments. In its latest round of onslaughts on the territory, Israel dropped leaflets on Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, where it had told Palestinians to move to, asking them to evacuate to the vicinity of the Egyptian border. 

But with Israeli crimes becoming more heinous by the day and over 15,000 Palestinians, among them more than 8000 children, now dead, many in the Western world are coming to their senses, warning that there will be a whirlwind to reap for Europe and Washington’s double standards over Gaza and Ukraine. 

“The West is now suffering. Western allies are suffering damage to their reputation in the rest of the world because the rest of the world is saying ... there's a double standard here…,” BBC’s diplomatic correspondent suggested last week, adding that the West is reaching a point “where perhaps something needs to shift”.

The warning by the British government’s mouthpiece was another indication that Western leaders are all about optics and have little to no care about human lives. 

Were it not for the courageous reporting by journalists who refuse to leave Gaza and the widespread use of social media, Western leaders might have succeeded in legitimizing Israeli transgressions by disseminating falsehoods and portraying the regime as a victim through mainstream media outlets. However, the evident brutality of Israeli actions, coupled with the abundance of compelling evidence readily available on the internet, has effectively unraveled the deceptions of Western politicians, exposing the glaring discrepancies in their standards and commitments.

By Mona Hojat Ansari