Anti-Arab racism flares up over Gaza
I DEPLORE THE killing of two Israeli Jews in Washington. Human life is sacrosanct. Young Yaron Lischensky and Sarah Milgram were about to get engaged. Their deaths at the hands of a Hispanic-Americangunman were a tragedy.
The two murders have, understandably, outraged Jews and non-Jews in the West. Many Jews have, however, attributed the incident to antisemitism. It’s a too-obvious attempt to distract people from the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
It reminds me of two incidents that took place in America soon after Hamas’s Oct 7, 2023, incursion into Israel. A six-year-old Palestinianboy in Illinois, who wentoutdoors with his mother, was killed by an American gunman. The other incident was the killing of three Palestinian American students in Vermont by another American man. None of the four murders created a ripple in American society or administration.
Many in the Arab world are celebrating the murder of the Jewish couplebecause the shooter, Elias Rodriguez, was a pro-Palestinian activist. He roared, “Free, free Palestine,” as he started shooting the two Israelis. The Arabs should not gloat over the murders. But they (except their repressive kings, kissing President Donald Trump’s behind)were outraged, seeingthe Gaza genocide as blatant anti-Arab racism.
While the Trump administration ignoresthe carnage in Gaza, Europeans are yawning.Would they allow a massacre like this in Europe?
The Bosnians are white Europeans. From 1992 on, Serb militias from Serbia waged a hair-raising orgy of slaughter of Bosnians to drive them from their land. It was like today’s Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, through which Israel wants to clear the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population.
In 1995, I was invited to an international conference on Bosnia, in Bonn, Germany, to help Bosnians with money and logistical support. I was the treasurer of the Bosnian Task Force in Washington. I arrived in Bonn on Aug. 29, and went right into a meeting. The delegates, mostly European and American, went on a tangent criticizing President Clinton, for his inaction in the face of a “genocide taking place on European soil,” as one delegate put it.
The next day,American fighter jets began rainingbombs on Serb targets. Over dinner,Antoine Guiguard, a French delegate, joked that Clinton had been “scared into action by our blitz,” angry denunciation. The American bombing spree silenced Serb guns right away.
In the Serb genocide, 10,000 Bosnians perished in three years, but the genocide in Gaza has cost the lives of 55,000 Palestinians in 19 months. Why doesn’t Trump act to stop the worst genocide in the Middle East? The answer: anti-Arab racism. The Bosnians are white Europeans, but the Palestinians have a brown skin tone.
Israel is the last vestige of racist colonialism in Asia and the Middle East. All the previous colonial powers, including the British Empire, on which “the sun never set,”were rolled back by the willpower of brown-skinned natives. Seeing the Palestinians’ unswerving resolve, sacrifices, and patience, I don’t see white Ashkenazi-dominated Israel being an exception.
~Mustafa Malik, the host of the mustafamalik.com blog site, worked 36 years for U.S., British and Pakistani newspapers and two American think tanks. He writes mostly about international affairs.