TEHRAN - Despite claims, Western countries, particularly the United States which considers itself the leader of the free world, don’t care about human rights, public views, and freedom of speech.

The West’s disregard for these values has been clearly proven as it has been backing Israel in its cruel war in the Gaza Strip.

According to polls conducted, the percentage of people who are opposing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza is rapidly increasing. A survey by the Harvard University Institute of Politics shows that a majority of young Americans express solidarity with the Palestinian people. Only 18% of young people find the Biden administration's performance regarding the Gaza conflict satisfactory.

Student protests and encampments against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza have spread across the United States, extending from New York City's Columbia University to institutions such as George Washington University, Fordham University, the University of Alabama, Yale, Harvard, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Texas, Rutgers University, and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. However, after more than two weeks of anti-war protests, President Joe Biden on Thursday said the demonstrations had not prompted him to reconsider his approach to the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

Even though police have arrested about 2,300 students for protesting the Gaza war, Biden claimed, “The U.S. is not authoritarian”. Biden tried to justify the arrest by saying that “order must prevail”.

Some figures and American lawmakers have gone further. For example, Mark Dubowitz, director of the pro-Zionist lobby Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has ridiculously linked the protesters to Hamas and insinuated that they were acting as "Iranian proxies." Shockingly enough, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday to expand their perceived definition of anti-Semitism.

These remarks and moves show that the United States has lost its direction and is risking degenerating into the extreme right.

“Anti-Zionism is not inherently anti-Semitism”

The blind support for the bloodthirsty rulers in Israel has even caused dismay among some Jewish members of Congress and politicians. 

Sara Jacobs, the youngest Jewish member of the House, said, “I do not believe that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitism.”

Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of the House, also said, “This legislation threatens freedom of speech, one of our most cherished values, while doing nothing to combat anti-Semitism.”

The UN human rights chief said on Tuesday he was "troubled" by heavy-handed actions taken by U.S. security forces during attempts to break up protests on college campuses.

"I am concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts," Volker Turk said in a statement sent to journalists, Reuters reported.

While students’ feelings over the genocide in Gaza were boiling, the House of Representatives and Senate overwhelmingly voted to grant 26 billion dollars in military aid to Israel.

This amount of military aid to a regime that is butchering Gazans coupled with the approval of the bill to suppress students under the pretext of “anti-Semitism” is a mockery of public opinion, the muzzling of the freedom of speech, and a total disregard for the agonies of others, particularly the unthinkable sufferings and griefs of the Gazans.

While signing the military aid package on April 24, Biden, a self-declared Zionist, said, “My commitment to Israel, I want to make clear again, is ironclad.” 

A few days earlier, Biden had called protesting students “anti-Semite” though protestors are from different backgrounds and faiths, including Jews. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson has also accused protesters of intimidating and threatening Jewish students. Johnson also scolded the protesters, demanding them “go back to class and stop the nonsense.”

Democratic lawmaker Nadler has dismissed “political theatrics” by Johnson and top Republicans in the House.

Sherif Ibrahim, a Columbia University student and organizer of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has said politicians like Johnson “are getting it completely wrong because they want to get it wrong, and they want to label us as anti-Semitic when it couldn’t be further from the truth.” 

Two key organizers of the student protests, Hadeeqa and Sara from the City University of New York, who requested to be identified only by their first names out of fear of reprisal, told the Tehran Times that “Palestine has united us across religious, political, racial, and ethnic lines, including Arab, Jewish, White, Black, Latino, South Asian, and more.”

According to Reuters, organizers have widely disavowed violence against pro-Israel counter-protesters, although some Jewish students have said they feel unsafe on campus.

Actually, classifying liberal-minded students based on their faith while they are loudly crying out against war crimes in Gaza originates from primitive and medieval thinking.

“Empty slogans”

Senior American political analyst Yuram Abdullah Weiler strongly believes that the United States’ claims of support for human rights are empty.

“By supporting the Gaza genocide and viciously cracking down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the U.S. has shown the entire world the stark emptiness of its set of alleged moral values,” Weiler told the Tehran Times.

Weiler also said students feel morally obligated to express opposition to Israel’s barbarism in Gaz. “Motivated solely by shared humanitarian values, the protesters at the leading universities are calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and divestment of university funds from companies profiting from the carnage being carried out by Israeli Occupation Forces in Palestine.”

Also in France, which is considered more democratic than the United States and freedom of opinion is tolerated more, police broke up the protests by students at Sorbonne and Sciences Po in Paris. “The evacuation was quite brutal, with around ten people being dragged to the ground,” said Rémi, a 20-year-old student from Sorbonne who took part in the protest, France 24 reported on April 29.

And while more protests have been held outside factories across the UK by campaigners against military arms being sent to Israel, Foreign Secretary David Cameron says his country will not halt arms sales to Israel by British companies.

"The latest assessment leaves our position on export licenses unchanged. This is consistent with the advice that I and other ministers have received," Cameron said at a press conference with his U.S. counterpart Antony Blinken in Washington on April 9.

Last year, Germany became Israel's second-largest arms supplier after the United States. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), around 53 percent of the weapons imported by Israel came from the U.S., around 47 percent from Germany, and 0.6 percent from Italy.

Before the escalation of student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, capitals and big cities in the West were the scene of anti-war protests but were ignored by the Zionist-Chistian rulers.

The Western world, with the U.S. leadership, has for years been loudly boasting about support for democracy, freedom of opinion, human rights, and respect for public opinion, yet it has been helping the criminals in Israel to go on with their war crimes in Gaza. Instead, these Christian Zionists are stifling dissenting voices under absurd pretexts.

If public opinion and human rights had been really important for the West, they should have immediately stopped exporting arms to Israel.

Former Western officials, including Tony Blair, had said they should not have allowed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. But now, the West is aiding and abetting genocide in the tiny enclave of Gaza and showing that the views of the people are not important, especially when it comes to Israel.

Our only hope is that reasonable Jewish voices in the West would win over the bigoted Christian Zionists and put an end to the suffering of the Palestinians.