“This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.” This is what the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz told the press on the sidelines of the G7, that alliance of the world’s colonial powers.
The grandson of a senior Nazi whom he admired, Merz had recently explained in another interview how antisemitism in Germany was imported through Muslim migrants. The same migrants who fuel his country’s economy and pay the taxes that keep the aging population alive.
At the same meeting, the G7 issued statements parroting the now-routine defense of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” even as the state continued its live-streamed genocide in Gaza, where it is starving and systematically killing 2 million people, while occupying Syria, Lebanon and Palestine and bombing them along with Yemen and waged war on Iran.
But who is “us” in the German Chancellor’s statement? Is it the so-called West, white people, capitalists, colonial powers, or all of the above?
What is certain is that this collective West, with its rich history of genocides across continents and scientific, obsessive destruction of the planet and its ecosystems, is addicted to war, destruction, and violent power.
Selective Humanity
There is something inherently terrifying in colonial practices and discourse. It is terrifying because it does not even see its murder as murder; it sees it as a necessity or a good. It does not even acknowledge the humanity of those it murders. In fact, it is not murder that it sees—it sees the eradication of a disease.
This is why it is “dirty work”, a term that reminds of testimonies of Nazis when justifying their own actions: it is cleaning those undesirables off the planet in order to turn it into a clean, organized, sanitized, plastic terrain that serves their desires and feeds their power.
This is why it is only they who have a right to defend themselves—they are the only ones who are humanized in their own discourse. They grieve and have names; they have feelings and hopes. The others are insignificant objects, microbes that need to be eradicated and sanitized.
This is why they can bomb nuclear facilities and risk a nuclear disaster that would kill millions of people and destroy rich, vital ecosystems of plants and animals. They feel nothing towards nature. In fact, they hate its uncontrolled disorder and seek to control it, discipline it.
This is how Nazis built on the colonial ideological heritage of control, classification, and racism.
This is why Israel can have nuclear weapons and refuse to have any oversight over its nuclear facilities, while bombing another country that does not have such weapons and is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty—because it accuses it of having intentions of building the very weapon it itself owns. This is why Israel’s allies do not even mention this, as they are willing to destroy populations for such bias.
The alliance of “us”, by conducting a genocide and yet another illegal, murderous war against yet another country—regardless of how horrible that country’s government is—has once and for all destroyed whatever was left of the short-lived international order that was meant to prevent the colonial powers from destroying the planet yet again.
Anyone who thinks this is only about Iran or West Asia should think again. What we are witnessing or living in this region is the future of humanity. This time the bullies are going to mass murder us; next time, it will be you. Just remember this as you watch us burn—for “you.”
Global threats
There are currently two states openly threatening other countries with war with no repercussions—launching attacks without legal justification, outside the framework of the United Nations and international law. The US threatening to invade or forcefully annex Canada, Panama, Greenland, after having invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, and attacking a dozen more countries in the past few decades while Israel, another settler colony built on genocide, is attacking half a dozen countries and threatening a few more.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the same powers hailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attack on Iran as a right, “self sefense”, or a “pre-emtive strike”, immediately reacted, imposing sanctions and activating international institutions.
We are at a point in history where the heads of these two states—the US and Israel—can openly threaten to assassinate heads of other states or bombing their nuclear facilities, with utter and absolute silence from the international institutions or open support and approval from the states that are supposed to safeguard the planet from nuclear apocalypse or at least pay lip service to the concept of international law and diplomacy.
This is not about Iran, whose authoritarian regime has been the cause of much death and suffering both inside and outside its borders. What is happening today takes us back to a legal and moral standard that resembles colonial times and with this normalized anyone can be next and anyone will be.
Yet the so-called West and its media outlets constantly parrot the same lies: That the only threat to the world are the “evil scary Muslims”, whether they are the millions of migrants, so-called terrorist organizations, or occasional states that compete with the global hegemon—rather than the nuclear powers brandishing their arsenals and threatening the world with apocalypse and with countless recent precedents of attacking, invading, violating international law, using nuclear bombs, and openly declaring their intentions to do more.
If there was any sense of law and point to the UN, there should be a global emergency to stop the biggest threat to the planet today and to impose severe sanctions on the US, Israel, as well as on Germany, the UK and the few complicit states that are threatening the world with an earlier than expected complete destruction.
Normalized Horror
The West’s outrage is always selective. When Gaza’s hospitals were turned into execution chambers and mass graves, when Palestinian doctors, medical workers, and babies were murdered—there was silence. Or worse, justification.
Let us not forget the former German foreign minister, now president of the UN General Assembly, who defended bombing hospitals. An accomplice to war crimes presiding over what’s left of international diplomacy.
This is the world we live in: Every day, among the many reports of Israeli crimes in Gaza, a new norm emerges to be added to the vocabulary of genocide: “X number of aid seekers killed”. A news item that slips quietly into the daily news cycle.
Like so many grotesque terms invented to describe the sadistic reality of Israel’s war machine—remember “wounded child, no surviving family,” “decomposing babies in incubators”—this phrase is yet another reminder of the horror being normalized. This is the “dirty work” that Israel is doing for “all of us”, invoked by the German Chancellor. That same “us” Trump also invoked when speaking about Israel’s attacks and later his own on Iran.
Meanwhile, the “international community”—the “us” they are referring to, the Global North, the colonial powers, the so-called West, or however we choose to describe the forces backing the settler colony’s sadistic violence and the Empire’s unchecked hegemony—tramples what little remains of international law and the post-WWII diplomatic order.
And who are the men leading this charge? Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu—both facing a litany of accusations and court cases: corruption, sexual abuse, war crimes, crimes against humanity. One even has an active ICC arrest warrant, the other has threatened and sanctioned the ICC judges.
This is the reality of colonial powers that have long presented themselves as “civilization”—even as they perfect the technologies of killing, destruction, and the gruesome erasure of all they seek to dominate.
Nuclear Hypocrisy
As bombs fell on Iran, the hypocrisy deepened. Why is Israel’s nuclear arsenal exempt from oversight? Why is there no international outcry demanding it join the Non-Proliferation Treaty or allow IAEA inspections?
Israel is the only country known to possess nuclear weapons “in secret”, outside any international framework, with zero IAEA involvement?
Meanwhile, Iran’s nuclear program has triggered global alarm, intrusive inspections, and massive resource deployment by the IAEA with a vastly disproportionate share of resources including under the JCPOA.
Furthermore, the IAEA itself, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, repeatedly confirmed: there is no evidence that Iran is weaponizing its nuclear technology.
In contrast, Israel—a state currently committing genocide, led by a prime minister wanted by the ICC for war crimes, engaged in wars of aggression, and occupying at least three countries—faces no comparable scrutiny. The other country leading the charge—the US—is the only one known to have used nuclear weapons as well as to have used lies about weapons of mass destruction to invade and occupy another country—Iraq—leading to the death of millions just over 20 years ago (Israel had previously bombed Iraq’s nuclear programme in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007).
If there is any state whose nuclear program demands oversight, it is Israel. A global demand to bring Israel under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and place its facilities under IAEA safeguards should be central to any regional or international negotiation. Anything less is simply about domination rather than non-proliferation.
War not Liberation
In 2003, millions across the world stood against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The war, waged under the pretext of a lie about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction— known to be a lie back then and later confirmed as such, the brutal war was an affront on international law as was the US invasion of Afghanistan two years prior.
Those who opposed these wars were not defending the Taliban nor Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule, but trying to prevent the devastation that followed: millions killed, entire societies shattered, and a chain reaction of violence and suffering that continues to this day.
Now, new lies and another pretext were used to justify yet another illegal war of aggression—this time against another authoritarian state: Iran. If history has taught us anything, it is that such wars bring only more death, more displacement, more destruction, and set the people affected back years. They do not liberate; they annihilate, extract, and subjugate. And each time they are allowed to happen, they further entrench a world order where violence, not reason, reigns—where the strong are above the law, and the rest of us are left to burn.
Broken Treaties
The US once again violated international law by bombing Iran’s nuclear sites, even as Iran was invited to negotiations by European states. But this is nothing new.
Colonizers have always reneged on their promises—on treaties, agreements, and diplomacy. They conquer through violence and destruction, then invite negotiation on their own terms. They impose agreements designed to cement subjugation, only to break them whenever it suits their interests.
In the United States alone, hundreds of treaties were signed with Native American nations—every single one of them was broken or violated. The Trail of Tears, the forced relocations, and the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek are not isolated acts of cruelty but part of a systematic betrayal.
Similarly, in Africa, colonial powers like Britain and France promised independence and self-governance in exchange for loyalty during the world wars, only to brutally suppress anti-colonial movements when those promises were called in. In Palestine, the Balfour Declaration laid the foundation for a century of dispossession based on lies and colonial arrogance.
Colonizers create rules to guarantee their victory—but if they lose, they simply change the rules or disregard them altogether. Institutions like the UN are tolerated only when they serve the interests of those powers. When they pose even a symbolic challenge, they are defunded, discredited, or ignored.
So how can anyone, in this region or anywhere else, still believe in diplomacy with colonizers? How can corrupt Arab regimes and other complicit governments across the planet continue to act as if Europe, the U.S., and the alliance defending genocide have ever been trustworthy partners?
These powers have long been the greatest threat to global peace—rampaging across continents in the name of empire, fueling genocides, launching two world wars, and willing to steer us toward a third through reckless violence, resource extraction, and endless militarization.
This is a moment of reckoning. If the global majority—especially in the Global South, those countries that are at risk of being next on the list—does not respond with clarity, courage, and unity, the whole planet will bear the cost. What we’re facing are not exceptions. It is the rule of empire which offers nothing but subjugation or death. And history has already shown us where that road leads.
