Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at robertazzitheother.substack.com

We were a small group gathered for dinner; diverse in our interests, origins, and traditions, privileged in our comforts and commonalities: journalists, academics, business people, mentors, students, and friends who’d been gathering for years to renew friendships and discuss current affairs and concerns — and the Red Sox!

Before we sat down to dinner a friend asked, “What’re you writing about next?”

Barbarism, I answered, barbarism as an instrument of genocide and suppression in order to dispossess and oppress occupied and vulnerable peoples.

There was a momentary silence as my friends looked at each other and one, reflecting concern, turned to me and said, “You can’t write that. You’ll be accused of supporting terrorists, or worse.”

“What could be worse?” I asked. There was no answer.

Today, as NATO ends its 75th summit with its unanimous condemnations of Russian depredations in Ukraine my time has come.

Today, after a July 8 Russian strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv was condemned by President Joe Biden as “a horrific reminder of Russia’s brutality” while being silent about similar depredations occurring nearly daily in occupied Gaza, I decided to call it all what it is — Hypocrisy. War Crimes. Barbarism.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

‘They can do it elsewhere’: Advocates rally against special education cuts to local schools

How does a purple Concord trash bag compare to a name-brand bag? The Monitor tested them to find out.

Concord residents frustrated over pay-as-you-throw program’s purple trash bag mandate

State investigators in Andy Sanborn’s criminal case disqualified

Merrimack Valley High School student killed following Andover crash into watery ditch

New cost estimates: Rebuilding at Rundlett would cost $8 million more than at Broken Ground

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

I remember reading a contribution by political scientist Eliot Cohen, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, published in The Atlantic on October 12, 2023, shortly after Hamas’ criminal and barbaric attack of October 7:

“There is a place for geopolitical and strategic analysis of Israel’s war with Hamas and its allies and associates,” Cohen wrote. “But such discussion will miss an essential element of this war, a conflict that is not solely, or even primarily, about politics or desperately conceived purpose. It is about barbarism.”

“Americans have fought barbarians in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Ukrainians have been fighting them for years and particularly since [Russia attacked Ukraine] February 24, 2022,” Cohen continued. “Sometimes, as in Rwanda, we merely note them with embarrassment and eyes averted. Other times, as during the massacre at Srebrenica committed by Serbian forces, we flinch, and act belatedly and inadequately. We express pity for the dead, but often fail to fight for the living.”

I accept that there is a tension between civilization and barbarism and that defending civilization against the passions of barbarism is an existential. But it is not one-sided.

The calling of primarily non-Western peoples “barbaric” is not uncommon. It is as though the passions of barbarism — vengeance, retribution, anger, dominance, racism, intolerance, and hatred of the intellect — the very passions today infecting America’s political process, are somehow exclusive to the Other, to peoples seemingly not enlightened by the Enlightenment.

After Hamas’ attack, I remember all the racist attacks that conflated Hamas and its criminality with all Palestinians, all Arabs, all Muslims.

I remember those attacks well; well coordinated attacks previously witnessed after 9/11, after the invasion of Iraq; even during the pro-Palestinian uprisings on university campuses after October 7.

The reality, however, is that barbarism, and the racist and political instincts that drive such discourse, is not exclusive to one people or one ideology.

For example, I remembered, as I read Cohen’s piece last October, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, America’s first female secretary of state who, during a 60 Minutes interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl, discussed the effect of sanctions on Iraq following 1991’s Gulf War.

“We have heard that half-a-million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

500,000 dead Iraqi children in the Middle East. Worth it?

800,000 dead Tutsis in Africa. Worth it?

8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys separated from wives, mothers and sisters, slaughtered by Serbian forces in Europe. Worth it?

Nearly 40,000 dead Gazans, nearly 100,000 wounded, at least 10,000 missing, all infrastructure, medical, historical, educational, and cultural institutions deliberately destroyed. Famine is spreading. Worth it?

Not one of those barbaric confrontations changed the outcome.

Unless Biden and NATO and assorted allies are willing to demonstrate equivalent levels of concern and empathy when it comes to olive-skinned mostly Muslim civilians in occupied Gaza, 90% of whom have been internally displaced, as they have demonstrated toward the white civilians of Ukraine these are the empty words of racists.

If NATO and the West wish to support Ukraine because it’s acting in defense of international law it’s what they must do for occupied Palestine. We must demand for Gaza as we do for Ukraine.

Let me say it plainly: If you don’t accept Palestinian victims of barbarism as equal to Ukrainian victims of barbarism it means you embrace an unacceptable Western model of barbarism, a racist settler-colonial hierarchical alignment of peoples that favor the oppressor.

Such an alignment is uncivilized, an unacceptable form of hypocrisy, a double standard, that says that some people, by virtue of their color, ethnicity, or faith, are more worthy than others. That itself is barbaric.

Since the start of Israel’s offensive in occupied Gaza most Western governments, and corporate media, have rightly been accused, repeatedly, of having double standards for fully arming and supporting — indeed, in some circles cheering on — an ethnic cleansing and genocide offensive in occupied Palestine while condemning Russia’s similar atrocities in Ukraine.

Others have stood for justice.

The Turkish government accused the Biden Administration of not fully reflecting “the ongoing inhumane attacks in Gaza” in its annual rights report.

Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide criticized allies for “[hesitating] to use the same type of language against violations of international humanitarian law [in Gaza] that we easily apply when they are violated by Russia in Ukraine.”

After recognizing Palestine as a state, Spain also was the first European nation to join South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel. Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said, “We cannot ignore what is happening in Gaza, which is a real genocide.”

Genocide is barbarism and, as Portsmouth-born Thomas Bailey Aldrich published in 1903, “Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades.”