Content area
Full Text
The war on Ukraine by a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has done more to expose the Western world's double standard than all the Palestinian activists and their supporters have been able to do in decades. While the effort to end the Israeli occupation of Arab lands has received a tremendous number of words, little action has accompanied those public positions. In the Ukrainian crisis and on every level, one can see the world move past lip service and into action. This is seen with most of the world punishing the aggressor both politically and economically and enforcing political and financial sanctions against Russian companies, Russian military leaders, and Russian assets in the West.
All these actions not seen in other conflicts clearly indicate the absence of political will toward simmering crises such as Palestine. While there is plenty of will for Ukraine, the more troubling results are with organizations that are supposed to be independent and free of the political pressures of governments. Here also we can easily see how the world has failed a serious test and shown that business companies and the media, as well as world sporting federations, are not as free and independent as they claim to be. When it comes to the critical need for such organizations to keep their distance from the positions of governments, they have miserably failed.
Adopting Israeli Phraseology
Palestinians and their supporters have for years insisted that the attitude of Western countries is nothing more than lip service paid to the issue of ending the Israeli occupation. At the very same time, the same countries that speak of the Palestinian right to be free are financially, militarily, and politically supporting the Israeli occupiers.
For decades the international community tried to legally ban boycotts and declared that politics should not touch sports and that sanctions are not to be used against a country that professes to be a democracy. Army attacks on media, medical personnel, and civilians was dubbed as either unintentional collateral damage or the result of the occupied people using their own citizens as human shields.
Western countries and media often used the exact terms of the Israelis to describe dissent and resistance, whether violent or nonviolent, as acts of...