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When Genocidaires Become Heroes: The Collapse of Global Morality | Countercurrents ;
New Age | The world that failed Bosnia, fails again;
When Genocidaires Become Heroes: The Collapse Of Global Morality - OpEd - Eurasia Review
In September 2025, nine countries launched the Declaration for the Protection of Humanitarian Personnel. Australia explained its important if dark inspiration in pursuing it: the slaying of Zomi Francken, along with six of her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen charity on April 1, 2024 by Israeli forces in Gaza. All perished to an attack consisting of three missiles fired from a Hermes 450 drone in a stated “deconflicted” zone, despite clear logo markings on the convoy vehicles and extensive coordination regarding their movements with the Israeli authorities.
The declaration, while lacking teeth, is at least a concession that individuals dedicated to protecting and preserving the vulnerable in conflict deserve a heftier shield of protection in international humanitarian law. It is all the more important given the systematic, weasel-worded libelling that the IDF have pursued against the WCK workers. Behind the cover of bureaucratic plausibility and spread-sheet analysis, the Israeli authorities have conveniently packaged the charity worker with combat or terrorist groups, giving them equal standing in targeting.
The disgraceful nature of this is evident in the refusal to consider any legal action for the events of that April. On August 19, the IDF announced that it had found “no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct that would justify opening a criminal investigation or the taking of additional measures against any of those involved in the incident”. The spokesperson’s remarks initially gave ballast to the worthiness of the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism (FFAM), charged with making “factual assessments of exceptional operational incidents, while using a range of tools and methodologies.” It became very clear that these methodologies were heavily slanted to conflating combatants and humanitarian workers on mere inferences.
Consider, for instance, the IDF’s alleged identification of “a gunman on a truck in the humanitarian aid convoy while it was on route to a warehouse for the unloading of the aid.” The troops had “identified vehicles surrounding the trucks in a manner that, in their assessment, and based on accumulated operational experience, corresponded to a scenario in which the Hamas terrorist organization had taken control of the convoy.” Despite “serious failures in the process that led to the assessment that Hamas operatives were travelling in the vehicles”, the decision to strike the convoy raised no “reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct”. There had been, in the circumstances, a sufficient number of “suspicious indicators”.
Much is done to shift the blame to the humanitarian workers. They had, for instance, “hired an armed security force to accompany the convoy until the completion of the operation in order to protect it from seizure by armed actors in Gaza.” This “was not coordinated with the IDF authorities.” The IDF had also “attempted to contact WCK representatives in order to verify their assessment that the people in the vehicles were indeed not members of WCK.” These efforts – so it is claimed – were made during the half-hour period that the vehicles were being tracked. (The assumption had already been made that they were Hamas operatives or workers in league with them.) The someone sickening insinuation here is that these humanitarians brought it upon themselves.
Much the same view was expressed by the chief commander who ordered the strike, Colonel Nochi Mendel. He has faced no legal proceedings, merely administrative action in the form of dismissal from his role as chief of staff of the Nahal infantry brigade. Mendel had been remiss on the IDF’s rules of engagement and standard operating procedures.
In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation conducted in October 2025, Mendel had not favoured killing the WCK employees but was “not sorry” for what happened. Echoing the eventual findings of the investigation, the Colonel blamed “an intermingling between the WCK and Hamas operatives” that took place in an environment of evolving complexity. The suggestiveness, and the euphemisms, are all standard: that WCK had also made mistakes; that it was not “really a neutral organisation. Not really an organisation you can say is innocent and completely clean.” This lack of political sanitation was evidenced by “ties to Hamas.”
The apologia is accordingly built up and inflated: operational fuzziness, the expediency that a conflict situation demands. No mention of the protocols governing such humanitarian convoys seemed to warrant discussion. Instead, Mendel could see, in a video feed, “armed terrorists getting out and firing from the trucks.” After the convoy arrived at a warehouse at Deir al Balah to unload the aid, “We see them all mixed together – both the WCK guys and the Hamas terrorists with weapons.” He cites a claim to being noble: that he could have ordered the attack there and then but preferred to wait “so as not to harm the WCK.” That turned out to be a cautionary note with little effect.
Mendel then claims that the IDF did contact the WCK – but not those in the convoy. A WCK representative from Europe was reached. The answer came: “there aren’t supposed to be armed guards.” The WCK personnel, after leaving the warehouse, then deviated from a coordinated prearranged route – so says Mendel. This aided the decision to strike, but an investigation into the events by Australian Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin suggests that the decision had already been reached by that point. It came as no surprise that WCK, in a statement on Mendel’s ruminations, regarded them as “slanderous” and lacking “credibility”.
The decision not to initiate criminal proceedings, or to conduct a truly independent inquiry, baffled the governments whose nationals had died in the attack. The Israeli ambassadors of several countries were called in to give answers. A joint statement by the foreign ministries of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom called the decision to close the case “shameful”. The Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski was almost livid. “Partnership requires respect,” he stated. “The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, as well as the failure of accountability for IDF’s excessive use of force are undermining public support in even pro-Israel nations.”
The goal of these operations, irrespective of the deaths they cause, is ultimately captured in chilling words by Mendel. There was no room to feel remorse here. The situation was “very complex”. Besides, the IDF had gone into Gaza “to win, to eradicate this evil from the whole world, not just for ourselves.” They were doing it for us. How easily does the righteous rhetoric of civilization justify the unspeakable.
On 2 September, fragments from a US missile tore through the roof of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, in Iran’s southern county of Sirik. Four people were killed, including a child, and sixty-eight were wounded. The United States has made a custom of bombing weddings – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Iran. When US Vice-President J. D. Vance was asked about the dead, he shrugged: ‘Things happen’. The sentence should be entered into the record of this war. Imperialism turns other people’s catastrophes into the passive voice.
The attack on the wedding was part of a new round of US strikes along Iran’s southern coast and around the Strait of Hormuz. Washington said that it had targeted missile and mine-laying capabilities. Tehran replied with missiles and drones against US facilities in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. This was not a ceasefire marred by occasional violations, as much of the North Atlantic press insists on calling it. For six months, the conflict has followed a recognisable cycle: the United States attacks, Iran retaliates, there is a pause and some indirect diplomacy, both sides prepare again, then Washington attacks once more. A pause between blows is not peace.
The Trump administration continues to claim that Iran’s navy, missile forces, and military infrastructure have been destroyed. Yet the evidence of Iran’s repeated retaliation refutes this boast. Iran’s systems have certainly been damaged by ferocious bombardment, but damaged is not disarmed. On 4 September, Iranian army spokesperson Brigadier-General Mohammad Akraminia told IRNA that the first Iranian missiles and drones had been launched within fifteen minutes of the US attack. He said that the army struck four US bases in three countries: two in the UAE, Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain, and a base in Kuwait. In separate communiqués, Iran said it hit satellite communications, equipment stores, and aircraft hangars at Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, as well as troops and radar systems at Al Minhad in the UAE. The activation of air defences and acknowledgements by regional governments of these strikes establish the central fact: Iran retains both the capacity and the will to reach the US base structure.
This is the war’s most important development. The United States built its power in West Asia on an asymmetry. It could bomb a country from protected airfields and command centres scattered across the region, while the attacked country was unable, or unwilling, to touch those bases. Iraq fired Scud missiles towards Israel in 1991 but did not systematically attack the vast US military architecture in the Gulf. Baghdad feared that striking US bases would bring down even greater destruction. Greater destruction came anyway. Iran studied that lesson.
Iran has now begun to reverse the asymmetry. The expensive network of bases designed to project US power has become a collection of targets. Al Udeid in Qatar, the headquarters of US air operations across the region; the Fifth Fleet facilities in Bahrain; air bases and logistical hubs in Kuwait and the UAE; Camp Titin in Jordan; and installations in Iraq and Syria can no longer be treated as a secure rear. An Arabic-language assessment
The vulnerability is political as well as military. Every US facility sits on another country’s territory. Governments in the Gulf must ask whether Washington’s military presence is a shield or a lightning rod. Iran need not destroy every base, only demonstrate that the bases impose danger on the states that host them. Gulf governments might then restrict the use of their territory for US attacks, pushing US operations towards distant facilities such as Diego Garcia, the UK’s base in Cyprus, and to US aircraft carriers (increasingly vulnerable themselves to long-term deployment fatigue).
Iran’s Escalation Ladder
Iran, moreover, has not climbed far up its escalation ladder. It could increase the volume of its launches, widen its targets to logistical hubs, ports, surveillance systems, and fuel depots, or encourage allied forces in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen to enter the conflict fully. It could further obstruct the Red Sea or close the Strait of Hormuz. Any step would deepen the economic crisis produced by the war. This is something that is not wanted by Trump, who faces mid-term elections in November.
Iraq is an especially important hinge. Arabic-language reports
Then there is the highest rung: the nuclear question. The last verified figure from the International Atomic Energy Agency was that Iran holds 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, recorded before inspections were disrupted by attacks on Iranian facilities. Nobody outside Iran now knows with confidence where all that material is, what condition it is in, or whether enrichment has advanced. Tehran has not declared that it will produce a weapon. But in August, Ebrahim Rezaei of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee argued that withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would be the best response to Trump’s intensified economic war. A withdrawal proposal has already circulated in parliament.
This uncertainty is itself a form of deterrence. US planners contemplating a nuclear or overwhelmingly destructive first strike cannot be certain that Iran has no small weapon or capacity to assemble one. Iran may decide to enrich above 90 per cent, test a device, and demand that attacks cease, the path taken by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after watching Iraq and Libya. That decision would carry immense dangers and has not been taken. But Washington’s war is making imaginable what decades of US policy was meant to prevent.
Iran’s advantage does not lie in possessing greater explosive power. The United States retains the ability to inflict appalling destruction. Iran’s advantage lies in its capacity to impose costs, disperse its forces, keep Washington guessing, and endure blows without surrendering its sovereignty. The US military, meanwhile, is consuming scarce interceptors and long-range munitions while arming Israel and Ukraine, defending installations spread across an enormous arc, and facing an electorate that does not want body bags or another endless war. Iran has converted the US’s geographical reach from an advantage into an exposure.
This does not mean that Iran has won, nor that escalation is safe. A wounded empire is exceptionally dangerous. Trump wants an Iranian surrender that he can display before the US midterm elections, but coercion has not delivered it. The White House has force without a sequenced political strategy: it can strike harder, but each blow opens additional Iranian options. Tehran, by contrast, can move step by step while presenting each action as retaliation. Iran has informed the United Nations that the United States began the attacks and that its own operations are reciprocal acts of self-defence. The civilians dead at the wedding make Washington’s moral position more threadbare still.
The road out is not mysterious. It would require the United States to stop attacking Iran, end its blockade and coercive sanctions, and return to negotiations based on the June memorandum rather than seek capitulation. It would also depend upon regional states declining the use of their territory for further attacks. A credible diplomatic process would be strengthened by a United Nations investigation into the bombing of the wedding and other attacks on civilians. Otherwise, the institution, which is seeking a new Secretary General, risks becoming an accountant who arrives only after the building has burned down.
Trump is caught between an opponent that will not surrender and an election clock that will not stop. He may yet order another spectacular strike in the hope that violence can manufacture victory. But Iran has shown that US bases are not sanctuaries, that US weapons are not inexhaustible, and that US escalation does not command the final move. The old asymmetry has been reversed. Washington can still destroy. It can no longer dictate.
Let’s be done with the pretence of decency and soggy references to just resolution in the face of extreme circumstances. Be done with the hilarious stage acts of referring to legal doctrines that either do not exist or cannot exist in the bloodied context they are being forced to refer to. The State of Israel is intent, with every arm, administrative faculty and office bearer of consequence, to achieve ethnic effacing and utopic bliss with the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, with the former going first.
Speaking on September 2 at a conference organised by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz returned to a theme so rapidly hardening it is likely to ossify at any given moment: that a Gaza filled with Palestinians is not a tenable proposition from the perspective of his country’s interests. Whatever dubious tag is attached – immigration, migration, or depopulation – the current populace could simply not remain. “In the end, there is no real solution for Gaza without this migration.” The emigration of Palestinians would take place “by any means” (“by sea, by air, by every way possible”), the process having only been put on ice by US President Donald Trump.
It had been one of those moments of mental arrest, but Trump engendered a sharp frisson in the ranks of the Netanyahu government with his February 2025 proposal to relocate the residents of Gaza. Once done, developers and builders could come in and turn the strip into a tourist destination replete with the vulgar fripperies typical of such resorts. By October 2025, Trump’s peace plan envisaged something else; the relocation-development scheme seemed to have not so much stalled as died in its sleep, with the promise that the residents could stay and engage in the process of rebuilding the devastated territory. Point 12 of the plan is explicit on this: “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return. We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.” Not so, according to Katz. “The [depopulation] plan hasn’t been cancelled; it is being discussed all the time, even now, and I think there is no other solution for everyone’s good.”
When asked when this odious object might be facilitated, Katz airily suggested that the conduct of Hamas could be the catalyst, notably “when it becomes clear that [it] is not fulfilling its commitment[s]” under US peace plans. “Then we will get a green light to advance militarily, territorially, and in other areas as well.”
During a visit to an IDF post close to the Yellow Line demarcating Israel’s area of control from the rest of the Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared his firm intentions. “We are not withdrawing,” he stated in a video message distributed by his office. “We are staying on this line. We control 60% of the Strip. And there is still more to come, because we are eliminating the terrorists who threaten us – we do this day in and day out.”
Gallingly, Katz had the temerity to suggest that the Gazans wished to leave – some 80% – making passing reference to vague, unsubstantiated surveys that had been conducted by Israeli authorities. (It’s always curious how the rabidly patriotic always assume that no other group can cling, so desperately and tenaciously, to a strip of land, whatever the cost.) If only other countries were willing to accept those apparently willing residents of Gaza, the problems would vanish. “Hamas isn’t allowing them [to leave], and there are no countries in the world taking them in. President Trump put the issue on the agenda. Now every country needs to take people in – and that’s the big issue.”
This deplorable language, condemned by US Democratic Senator for Maryland Chris Van Hollen, received a boost of patriotic umami from Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The minister tends to make a habit of going to prisons to gloat about their ruinous conditions, all the time threatening Palestinian inmates with impending death, ensuring the deprivation of basic human rights (they, the reasoning goes, do not deserve them) while encouraging the inexorable de facto annexation of the West Bank. On September 3, he also advanced his oxymoronic version of a “voluntary emigration” plan dubbed “Disengagement 710”, a nod to Israel’s exit from Gaza in 2005 and the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
The plan entails the removal of 250,000 Gazans in the first year, 1.11 million within three years and 1.86 million within seven. A sinister “Emigration Ministry” will oversee the process. “Instead of [Gazans] digging tunnels, it’s time to pack suitcases,” reasoned Ben-Gvir. To sweeten the abuse, emigrants would receive an “absorption package” comprising “assistance with travel, initial housing, vocational training, employment and support for up to 24 months”. Payments would also be made to recipient States.
In his remarks, Ben-Gvir also had room to draw inspiration from Trump. Ignoring the Gaza Peace Plan, the minister preferred to focus on the President’s initial proposal to “encourage emigration [as] a solution to the Gaza issue.” From being “treated as a delusional extremist”, he mused about his own standing, plans of removing Palestinians had “become legitimate. Suddenly, everyone became Ben-Gvir.”
The second part of the Palestinian eradication program involves the full assertion of sovereign control over the West Bank, though the process there is necessarily staggered, a form of slow-motion extermination of a culture and people that is taking place before an international law system petrified and mostly silent. So far, things are coming along nicely – from the settlers’ perspective. They are the spear carrying proxies for an ethnic cleansing regime. The Israeli authorities have their backs and, when they do intervene to curb any zeal, a mild slap on the wrist is the best to expect. The consistently promoted narrative is that the more violent perpetrators are errant buffoons with a death wish yet sporting a good heart, buffoons in good standing with the broader annexation drive that has been approved by the Knesset in a non-binding motion.
A word, to finish off, on the very euphemistic term “ethnic cleansing”. To say cleansing is a ghastly concession to the supposed wickedness of impurity. Something needs rinsing, the stains need removal. This application of ideological detergent assumes that there is something deficient or suspect in a race, an ethnicity or a religious group, a people, in short. It follows that what is happening to the Palestinians is ethnic in nature and not so much cleansing as eradicative.
Anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise in the United States, and yet Muslim political candidates are enjoying a banner year.
Zohran Mamdani was elected the first Muslim mayor of New York City in 2025. This year, Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in Michigan and stands a good chance of becoming the country’s first Muslim senator. The number of Muslims in the House of Representatives could rise to as many as seven after the upcoming November elections. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a record 255 Muslim elected officials now serve in 26 states, including four members of Congress, 11 mayors, and 46 members of state legislatures.
At the same time, however, America experienced a major increase in Islamophobia last year—8,683 cases of discrimination, the highest since CAIR began tracking such developments in 1996. The surge has been particularly visible in states such as Florida, Minnesota, and Texas. One Republican candidate for state office in Texas, Bo French, wrote on social media this summer that “I won’t rest until every Muslim is gone” from the state.
This sentiment, however, isn’t restricted to the level of the states. Nancy Mace, a Republican member of Congress, has said that “every single Muslim holding public office in America” is “a threat to both national security and our republic.”
The rise in anti-Muslim discrimination—and the sheer virulence of it—certainly owes much to the policies and rhetoric of Donald Trump. His campaign to deport all undocumented residents of the United States has unleashed xenophobia at all levels of society, but it has taken an anti-Muslim form when applied to the Somalis, Sudanese, and Afghans that the administration has targeted for removal. Trump has said, for instance, that Somalia “stinks” and that Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali-American member of Congress from Minnesota, “garbage.”
The war against Iran has also contributed to the ratcheting up of Islamophobia. Although the Trump administration has maintained close relations with a number of majority-Muslim countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates—it has often framed the war in Christian nationalist terms. Referring to Iran, House Speaker Mike Johnson stated that “we’re the Great Satan in their analogy and their misguided religion.” The Center for the Study of Organized Hate has reported a spikein Islamophobic content on social media that coincided with the outbreak of hostilities.
Through his own abusive rhetoric, Trump has encouraged more open expressions of bigotry. In the last major outbreak of Islamophobia in the United States after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush made an effort to calm the waters by visiting a mosque and, for the most part, avoiding statements that demonized entire cultures. Trump, however, delights in just such forms of bullying.
Trump’s policies have naturally produced a backlash. Communities targeted by his administration have mobilized politically, and that includes Muslim Americans. In Minneapolis, for example, Muslim clergy have organized to defend the Somali community, and they have received support from an interfaith coalition. During Trump’s first term, Muslim Americans came out in large numbers to deny him a second term.
These aren’t the first such mobilizations. The earlier wave of Islamophobia in the early 2000s prompted Muslim Americans to seek political power. At that time, conservative activists were deploying widespread misinformation and invective in their high-visibility campaigns to stop the construction of mosques and ban “sharia law” at the state level. But these campaigns also pushed Muslim Americans to fight back. In 2006, five years after the September 11 attacks, voters sent the first Muslim American, Keith Ellison, to Congress.
Although most Muslim Americans tend to vote for and run as Democrats, they also refuse to be taken for granted by the party. During the 2024 elections, Muslim Americans in Michigan launched the “Uncommitted” campaign to deny Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden their votes. They were angry that the Biden administration had failed to advocate more effectively for Palestinians during the Israeli war in Gaza. This frustration with mainstream Democrats has also motivated a number of Muslim Americans—including Mamdani and El-Sayed—to run as progressives. To compensate for their lack of support from the Democratic Party apparatus, they have bypassed traditional media outlets by releasing viral videos, like those of Mamdani walking around Manhattan and El-Sayed dancing at a Zumba class.
The political success of Muslim Americans, particularly those on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, stems in part from the shift in public opinion on Israel and Palestine. The brutality of the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2022—killing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, accelerating settlements in the West Bank, and launching military operations in Lebanon, Syria, and against Iran—has caused a reversal of sympathy among Americans. According to a 2026 Gallup poll, 41 percent of Americans now view Palestinians more favorably while only 36 percent sympathize more with Israelis. Only a year ago, Israelis had a sizable lead in American affections, capturing 46 percent compared to 33 percent for Palestinians.
This shift is evident among American Jews as well, with 61 percent believing that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and nearly 40 percent labeling Israeli actions “genocide.” The disaffection has become so dramatic that American Jews now feel considerably more positive toward Zohran Mamdani than toward right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a June 2026 poll.
The backlash to Trump’s policies goes well beyond his policies on Israel and his deference to Netanyahu. The U.S. president and his MAGA coalition have aggressively promoted the viewpoints of white, Christian conservatives. They have imposed on the United States precisely the kind of religious extremism that they have falsely accused Muslims of preparing to unleash. The religious war initiated by Trump allies has stripped women of their reproductive rights, mandated Christian texts and teaching in public schools in several states, and dramatically increased the power of churches in public policy. The Trump administration has also passed laws that have allowed the rich to grow incomparably richer while hurting the middle class and the working poor.
It’s not just Muslim Americans who are jumping into politics to fight these trends and ensure that America reembarks on its long journey toward a more just and pluralistic union. In Michigan, where the Latino community helped Abdul El-Sayed winhis primary, Latino voter turnout increased dramatically since the last midterm election and helped propel eight Latino candidates to victory in their primaries. As Abdul El-Sayed said on the day after his primary victory, “This is the best place in the world to be Abdul.” He was speaking of Michigan, but he could have been talking about the United States as a whole. Muslim Americans, alongside everyone who belongs to groups demonized by Trump and his cohort, are fighting to make such statements true again.
Originally published in Gad World.
