When the West Permits Violence in Our Lands

The West — that is, the U.S. and Europe — is gambling with the fate of our nations and societies when it allows an increase in the number of armed opposition movements that advocate “the fall of regimes.” These groups seek the fall of the state and civil society; they want to unite the national entity and incite sedition and civil war in the name of “democratic change.” The West allows this, not for the sake of these opposition groups, nor to establish democracy for our people — currently trampled by the very authoritarian regimes that are allied with these Western states — but rather for the sake of Western goals.

But in our land, the right to political stability and political activity, the security of the people and their institutions, infrastructure, neighborhoods, homes, hospitals, schools — it is all so cheap that no one cares. It is all easily ignored amid the war raging between the sons of a single nation, in their headlong rush into hell, as they attempt to secure the goals of their great “masters.” They disdain the goal of a decline in Israel’s regional stature; the allocation of regional and international power goes instead to those who are slaves to the pursuit of money.

We do not know how the West can justify its positions morally — how it can make our ears tired of the principles of democracy even as we denounce violence in politics; how it can present us with lessons in civilian democracy from its peaceful, civilized leaders — while encouraging violence in our homes and generously supplying weapons, money, communications equipment and especially political support.

How is it that the lives of our people are less meaningful to them than the lives of the pet animals in their homes and the wild animals in their gardens? They can watch our blood being spilled on the news without batting an eyelid. Yet, they are up in arms when a Zionist soldier falls while destroying our homes and killing our children. Do the morals of their leaders show the same degree of prejudice on the question of who deserves life and who deserves genocide; which societies deserve peace and security and which deserve civil war; which states deserve longevity and which deserve destruction?

There are double standards — polite words but no real civility — in the description of the shoddy morals of Western politicians. In all the dictionaries of human languages, we do not find any words that are adequate to describe the political actions that these Western politicians perform without the slightest embarrassment. It makes us laugh that, 30 years earlier, Ronald Reagan called the Afghan mujahedeen “champions of freedom;” we chalked it up to exaggeration and aggrandizement or a shortage of facts and intelligence until we recognized — too late — this blatant abuse of justice in the political doctrines of the Western mind. They are the terrorists. The U.S. and Europe stopped calling them terrorists and turned instead to killers for the pursuit of freedom and democracy in certain Arab countries that were plagued by imperialist and Zionist sabotage! And those members of the resistance who fought for national freedom from the Zionist occupation turned — speaking in the terms of the hypocritical Western lexicon — into terrorists. In a situation like this, it is impossible to see things clearly.

How can Westerners refer to the curse of violence with such naiveté? They are feigning belief in a new doctrine that declares civil war as lawful if it leads to political change, and they are providing such a war with reasons for widening its scope. Do they forget that, in the 1970s and 1980s, their actions in armed resistance campaigns created new regimes in the name of movements of revolutionary terrorism such as the Red Brigades in Italy, Direct Action in France, Bader-Meinhof in Germany, The Irish Republican Army in Britain, the ETA in Spain, the Red Army in Yemen and many others?

Western countries, with their tools of war and excisional security, fought relentlessly against these armed opposition groups because they used their leftist ideas as tools for armed violence, rejecting the logic of the state and making hollow the logic of democratic resistance — that is, peaceful, civilian resistance.

Western states have also faced violent extremist right-wing organizations, such as the Nazis, for the same reasons. No one is able to deny the rights of Western people to enjoy security and stability; nor can anyone deny their governments the right to react to domestic sources by limiting security and stability, despite the awareness that “revolutionary terrorist” organizations tend to respond with weapons in the face of bourgeois, capitalist regimes only when they obstruct their own democratic systems.

Violence is forbidden for these organizations but permitted for us. Security and stability is permitted for them but denied to us.