Why did the March 2025 UN report on Israel's "acts of genocide" receive little attention?
Afrasianet - Mazen Al , Najjar - If the "protection of Jews" in Israel justifies any crime committed by the Zionist "state" against the Palestinians, why does the "protection of the Jews" also justify the illegal behavior of Western countries towards their own people?!
Although fascism is one of the four main components of the Western project: imperialism, capitalism, racism, and fascism, it is the most ambiguous and disguised component of the Western experience. Western intellectuals agree that it comes only clad in the national flag and carries a cross or disguised as a composite ideology of racism, religion, and socialism in the name of "national socialism," or "bringing back a great America," the restoration of white supremacy and the "fabrication of consensus."
Western fascism has finally repressed freedom of expression, academic freedom and peaceful protest against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, under the pretext of "fighting anti-Semitism" and "protecting Jews"!
The return of fascism in disguise
British writer Jonathan Cook recently writes in "Neo-Fascism: Israel is a Model for Trump's and Europe's War on Freedom" that fascism would never have returned to Europe or the United States in Nazi garb. She would never have arrived wearing military boots and a Nazi swastika. In fact, he was perfectly expected to arrive disguised, in elegant and attractive tuxedoes, on television, portraying her opponents, not herself, as evil Nazis.
Herein lies the benefit of Israel once again: it has not only become a model of fascism, preserving and renewing ideas of supremacy, ethnic superiority, colonialism and genocide. For decades, it has also allowed the West to morally legitimize Israeli fascism. Israel's racial hierarchy, which sacrifices entire Palestinian lives, has been promoted and supported as a necessity to "protect Jews."
In turn, this premise allowed genocide to become a morally "respectable" cause. This is precisely why British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been able to say that Israel has a "right" to deprive more than two million Palestinian men, women and children of all kinds of food, water and fuel. The genocide that Starmer would have rejected in other circumstances (and indeed did) is acceptable as long as Israel is carrying it out.
For this reason, the UN's March 2025 report on Israel's "genocide" received little attention in the Western media. The report shows how Israel has made sexual assault and rape – against Palestinians it arbitrarily detains – routine as bargaining chips for Hamas hostages in Gaza.
It is also for this reason that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court and others and a fugitive from justice, continues to be welcomed by Western capitals, as well as his genocidal generals in Gaza.
Distorted calculations
The West's continued tolerance for the diversity of Israeli-Zionist fascism has allowed its ideas to quietly seep into its societies, where Zionism is still treated with near-reverence respect.
If racial hierarchy is a good thing in Israel, why not in the United States and Europe? For this reason, much of Trump's base proudly calls themselves "white Zionists." They see the fortified Jewish "State of Israel" as a model for the United States as a white state immune to their fears of a "great replacement."
If the "protection of Jews" in Israel justifies any crime committed by the Zionist "state" against the Palestinians, why does the "protection of Jews" also justify the illegal behavior of Western countries towards their people?!
"Protecting Jews" means that any speech critical of Israel, even when it has committed war crimes and genocide, must be criminalized because such criticism offends local Jewish organizations that encourage Israel.
Academic freedom must also be crushed, to protect the feelings of Jewish students and professors who believe that the mass slaughter of Palestinian children is an acceptable price to reaffirm Israeli military deterrence.
By self-justification, Western Jews who do not bow down to Israel with enough enthusiasm are considered "the wrong kind of Jew" or "Palestinian," as a new insult Trump has directed at Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic minority in the U.S. Senate.
In these selfish distorted calculations of human rights, the sensitivity of Zionist Jews is placed at the top, and the Palestinians' right not to be killed at the bottom.
It is precisely for this reason that US federal authorities are seeking to set a precedent by kidnapping and deporting Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident, for his role in leading student protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
He is accused, without any evidence, of "aligning with Hamas," "supporting terrorism," "espoused anti-Semitic views" and wanting to destroy the West with Islamic extremism.
Just as Israel has mobilized AI to select those targeted for execution in Gaza, using the broadest categories it can create as algorithmic catalysts, the White House uses AI to choose as widely as possible who is pro-Hamas, terrorist, and anti-Semitic.
Federal government grants to U.S. academic institutions are also being revoked on the grounds that they are not doing enough to tackle "anti-Semitism," i.e., not crushing protests against genocide. Obedient universities are rapidly joining the government's crackdown.
The Trump administration is envisioning these moves, and there is no doubt that more are to come, as part of the "war on anti-Semitism," an extension of the "war on terror."
In the process, Washington is creating a ground for demonizing large segments of American students and the Jewish community, especially young Jews who refuse to commit genocide in their name. Everyone now faces defamation for "aligning with terrorism".
The Trump administration is not alone in this. Britain's Starmer government, like its predecessor, has carefully created a political climate that discredits journalists, scholars, students, protest organizers, politicians and activists – many of them Jewish – as Jewish-haters, and considers their protest against genocide anti-Semitism.
The British government has expanded the scope of harsh terrorism legislation, with vague and overly broad wording, to investigate and criminally prosecute and charge those it accuses of expressing opinions or telling facts that are highly critical of Israel – and the government argues that criticizing Israel may "encourage support" for Hamas.
Currently, freedom of expression and the right to protest and academic freedom – as fundamental principles of liberal democracy – are hastily rejected, supposedly a threat to democracy!
Human Value Vastities
A remarkable and recurrent pattern of fascist practices is becoming more and more apparent.
The Trump administration reinstated the Aliens Act, an ambiguous eighteenth-century legislation designed to give the executive branch extraordinary powers to conceal (detain) aliens during the war without due process. This law has only been used in three historical periods – the last of which was to detain tens of thousands of people of Japanese descent without trial during World War II.
Trump tried the law for the first time on a group that no one would supposedly defend: people his officials describe as Venezuelan criminals. But what is certain is that the administration is keen to expand its application.
The first Trump administration also invoked another vague law, the Espionage Act of 1917, to use it against Julian Assange, a non-citizen, calling his journalistic work exposing U.S. and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan "espionage." The law was hastily passed during World War I.
Washington's goal in targeting Assange was to set a legal precedent that would enable it to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and detain them indefinitely as a spy.
To be sure, Trump administration officials are digging through old law books in search of long-neglected laws that could be reused to suppress dissent and imprison those who stand in the way of the Trump administration.
But the worst precedents already exist, and Israel is advanced.
If Israel can exterminate the Palestinian people it has oppressed for decades to prevent what it claims, unreasonably, to be a future existential threat from a small militant group, while receiving strong Western support, why can't the United States and Europe follow suit?
They can resort to similar claims of an existential threat to normalize concentration camps, deportations, or even genocidal programs.
German Jews considered themselves German citizens until Adolf Hitler's government decided that they were an intruder to whom different rules applied. It didn't happen overnight. Rather, it was a gradual cumulative slippage in legal norms, eroding the ability of target groups to resist being considered scapegoats and eroding the ability of their supporters to protest, while the majority blindly obeyed.
Jonathan Cook asserts that in fact, fascism has never disappeared. The West has entrusted it to a vassal state whose mission, on behalf of the West, is to promote the same ugly ideas about the hierarchy and inequality of human values and rights in the Middle East. We sympathize with Israel because we are told that it represents us, our values and our civilization.
The truth is, and that is why the 18 months of genocide in Gaza are our responsibility. This is our genocide. And before it's complete, you'll come back to hurt us!