Afrasianet - Dr. Marwan Alghafouri - 2023 will clearly have a profound impact on the Middle East, and perhaps the world, for decades. It was the year in which Israel, with direct Western assistance, inaugurated the largest human holocaust since the Second World War. The image from Gaza shook the certainty of everything, peace and justice, democracy and international order.
In the face of the horror of what is happening, talk of the possibility of integrating Israel, the government and the people, into the Arab region has become crazy. In the Western world, forces and currents interacted, and the democratic government found itself forced to wage a culture war against local, cultural, academic and media elites.A sign of uncertainty was a Pew Center poll in 2024, in which only 19% of Americans said their country's democracy was an example to follow. Liberal democracy, which claimed to be the "professorship of the world", followed the Holocaust step by step, supporting it at all levels, from arms factories to legal platforms.
Among the consequences of 2023 will be the collapse of Western moral propaganda and the decline of liberal seduction. America is losing its status as the custodian of the rules-based world order, instead taking the form of a "nation hijacked by Jewish money," as Dong Manyuan, former vice chairman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's advisory committee, argued in a televised interview on November 1, 2023.
In New York City, Zahran Mamdani, the Democratic mayoral nominee, dared to repeat words that American politicians are afraid to even think about.
In his memoirs, Obama said any U.S. politician who wants to keep office in the next election cycle should not upset Israel. Echoing words that would upset Israel, Mamdani said during a face-to-face debate with his rivals that he would not consider visiting Israel after his victory.
Instead of coming to his political future, as Obama claimed, that phrase brought him to the fore and made him win the race within his own party. The surprising result reflected the reality of what is happening in the lower classes: the great discontent with the system of government that their country's democracy creates, and, of course, the American policy laboratory is inseparable from the impact of Gaza.
New York is the major American city and the largest Jewish city in the world. There are between one million and one million and 300,000 Jews, almost twice as many Jews as the capital of the Israeli state.
There also live a million Muslims. There are attempts to crucify Mamdani ahead of the autumn election, according to Margaret Sullivan, the American author, in her latest article on the Guardian.
The New York Times is leading the campaign against the man, and most recently obtained his academic file through a "hack" of Columbia University database. It was noted that Mamdani wrote in the ethnic category "Asian-African-American".
The man lied about ethnicity in order to benefit from the privileges enjoyed by black Americans. Interestingly, the man was not accepted to study at Columbia University, and the privileges that blacks receive at American universities seem to resemble other moral claims that liberal democracy makes in its way.
US media have previously refused to publish embarrassing personal data related to Vice President J.D. Vance. According to Margaret Sullivan, in her article, the hacker who provided the press with information about Vance was Iranian, which made the press ignore the content and provoke talk about the ethics of journalistic work, and the sanctity of privacy.
Liberal morality does not work at the same level in all directions, and this is what the world knows more than ever.
Zahran Mamdani's victory seems significant, in more ways than one. Democracies have been able to impose an ideological harmonia through their direct and indirect dominance of traditional media.
The liberal market owns and spends on the media, and between the liberal market and liberal governments there is a deep intertwining where the market spends on the state, guarantees it resources, and gives the market freedom, climate and other privileges.
At the right times, the tone is unifying between what is private and what is public, between the regime and all the fields outside it. It is enough for German Chancellor Meretz to say that he no longer understands Israel's strategy in Gaza until the analysis studios rise from the next day to play the same tune, with the same sudden audacity.
Mamdani's victory exposed a gap in the liberal firewall: the grip is no longer as tight as it once was, and new narratives are able to penetrate the cracks of the wall and reach the public. The narrative of Gaza is an example. This necessitated the direct intervention of the US president himself, as he threatened to deport Mamdani, or arrest him if he wins.
The year 2023 interacts sequentially, and in America the question has been raised: "Who rules us?" by the same mechanism that saw the birth of the question: "Why do they hate us?" a quarter of a century ago. At that time, American elites were able to contain the question of "hate" and distance it from its political origins.
Al-Amriki found himself faced with scattered answers telling him that the Arabs attacked the New York Towers because they hated Western civilization, and that this hatred was free and fed on Islam. The media perpetuated that impression in a favorable cultural context.
An American study of more than 950 American films between 1950 and 2000 presented the Arab as a villain prone to violence, hating Western civilization because of its high values, and representing the antithesis of all Christian-Jewish civilizational achievement.
Technology has changed the shape of the world and Hollywood can no longer monopolize answers, not even hide questions. Shortly after the Al-Aqsa flood, American activist Lynette Adkins appeared on TikTok and read part of a "Letter to the American People," a speech bin Laden published in November 2002. Adkins got her hand on the password: the clear political content of the message.
The letter did not present any religious pilgrims, nor did it put the conflict with America in the category of war with infidelity. On the other hand, it has made the continuous American aggression against the countries and peoples of the Arab region, America's protection of the Israeli occupation, as well as its tireless work to abort the Palestinian right, a direct cause of what happened in New York. The revival of the letter nearly a quarter of a century later, which was published on the Guardian website, sparked controversy and the newspaper took the initiative to remove it from its website.
Deleting an article is no longer enough to hide the information, nor even programming AI on the official Western narrative as is done with ChatGPT.
Recently, there has been a wide debate about the Grok robot designed by Elon Musk's XAI. Grok questioned the numbers of Jewish victims in the Holocaust, giving answers such as "There is no reliable evidence about the numbers, and the numbers are often manipulated for political reasons."
The research robot has been widely accused of anti-Semitism. This conflict reveals what we have said earlier, namely that the firewall that liberal democracy has built around its narrative is full of cracks.
The Gaza Holocaust represents the collapse of civilization in its liberal version, one that was deeply confident not only in its values and rules but in its eternity. If democracy is the visual nerve of this civilization, 64 percent of the population of 12 Western countries, according to a 2024 Pew Center poll, said they were dissatisfied with democracy.
Trump's defense secretary has been clearer in defining the nerve center of today's civilization, arguing that "Americanism and Zionism" are leading this civilization.
On the other side of civilization, 91% of Chinese people said they trust their political system, according to a study by the Edelman Trust Barometer between 2022 and 2023. This percentage put the Chinese system at the top of the 28 countries surveyed.
Liberal democracy struggles to maintain its face and prestige. None of this always seems to work. If Germany takes as an example, what Chancellor Meretz said that he is willing to receive Netanyahu in Berlin and ensure that he is not arrested, is a blow to all the claims of the German state about belonging to a rules-based world.
As soon as he forgot this situation, Meretz returned to say that Israel was doing the dirty work for the benefit of the Western world. The debate over these ethical dilemmas goes so far as to ask fundamental questions such as in whose interest does the state sacrifice its moral obligation? Beyond that, social media is teeming with questions from Western influencers asking a fundamental question: Who rules us?
Between 2013 and 2022, Germany was ranked first globally as the best international image according to a list of criteria, including its balanced foreign policy and generous support for development in the Third World. The Gaza test revealed the fragile nature of the morality of the democratic world, or the free world.
Hypocrisy is the word German diplomats have come to hear in the Global South, according to Der Spiegel in April 2024. In January last year, the Doha Institute published the result of a survey of eight thousand people in 16 Arab countries.
Among the poll results, 75% said they have a negative image of Germany in light of what is happening in Palestine. Similar surveys from Africa and Latin America revealed a negative image of the West among the people of the Global South.
Under the title "Global South Solidarity with Gaza," the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) published a report arguing that what is happening in Gaza has brought down the moral authority of the Western world. 60% of Indians and 70% of South Africans said Western countries were involved in crime.
The shining face of liberal democracy has lost its luster at home and abroad. The cultural conflict within Western countries, with its horrific manifestations – such as Reporters Without Borders' assertion that "fear fills newsrooms" in Germany – is one manifestation of the collapse of the West's moral authority.
The televised meeting between American journalist Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz from Texas is the center of the new image of the free world that he has managed to hide since the end of World War I, or that he has healed every time she is deeply injured.
At the meeting, Ted Cruz asserts that his country has no choice but to unconditionally support Israel in compliance with a biblical command in Genesis. There is no place for the rules-based world order, not even for the "global" moral codes that America itself has formulated since the end of World War II.
In Germany, the Federation of Evangelical Churches issued a statement saying it would disengage from evangelical churches in Jordan and Palestine for their "provocative" comments about the war in Gaza. It is as if there are two versions of Genesis, the least of which is the Arabic translation.
In the Gaza Holocaust, people died, and with them a long list of Western claims about secularism, human rights, a rules-based international order, and freedom of expression were buried.As the body of Western civilization is seen on fire from everywhere in the world, German politician Jens Spahn stands in the parliament chamber and speaks with unparalleled enthusiasm about Germany's decisive commitment to supporting Israel, "the only place in the Middle East where gays feel safe." It is at this unbridled level of triviality that Western liberalism still preaches itself, and explains the world.
Yemeni writer and novelist