In a report published by the British website “Middle East Eye,” the writer Hamid Dabashi called for imagining that a Middle Eastern country, militarily and diplomatically supported by Russia or China, had the will and means to bombard Tel Aviv for three months, day and night, and kill tens of thousands of Israelis, maim a countless number of people, displace millions, and turn the city into an uninhabitable pile of rubble, much like Gaza today.
A professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, Dabashi emphasized, “Just imagine this for a few seconds: Iran and its allies intentionally targeting populated areas in Tel Aviv, hospitals, Jewish temples, schools, universities, libraries – or in fact any populated place – to ensure maximum civilian casualties.”
He continued, “Consider now the fact that since the 7th of October last year (and decades before that date), Israel’s Western allies have not only witnessed what Israel has done to the Palestinian people but have also supplied it with military equipment, bombs, ammunition, and diplomatic cover, while American media have provided ideological justifications for the slaughter and extermination of Palestinians.”
The Iranian philosopher and historian, who is also an American citizen, believes that the existing world order will not tolerate the above-mentioned imaginary scenario for even a single day. With the full military support provided by the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada to Israel, we, as helpless people of the world, similar to the Palestinians, do not matter. This is not just a political reality; it is closely linked to the moral and philosophical imaginary world of something that calls itself “the West.”
Dabashi considers that “those among us who live outside the European moral imaginary have no existential reality for their European philosophers, except as a metaphysical threat to be overcome and silenced.”
He also highlighted, “Starting from Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Žižek, we are exceptional cases and known things for the Orientalists to decipher. And accordingly, being killed by tens of thousands at the hands of Israel, or the United States and its European allies, does not disturb the minds of European philosophers in the least.”
The Tribal European Masses
If you doubt that – Dabashi continued – just take a look at the leading European philosopher Jürgen Habermas and a few of his colleagues, who came out with a disgusting and astounding work of utter debasement to support the massacre Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians.
The writer believes that this absolute neglect of the Palestinians is deeply rooted in the German and European philosophical imaginary. The prevailing wisdom is that the Germans, due to the Holocaust’s guilt, have developed a strong commitment towards Israel.
However, according to the author, as evident from the document submitted by South Africa to the International Court of Justice, there is complete consistency between what Germany did during its Nazi era and what it is doing now during its Zionist era. Dabashi believes that Habermas’s position aligns with the German state’s participation in the Zionist massacre of the Palestinians. It also resonates with their view that non-Europeans are not fully human or are “subhuman,” as proclaimed openly by the Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The writer added that the moral bankruptcy charge continually made against European philosophers’ worldviews is not just based on cognitive error in their thinking, as he sees it, but it is a constant sign of moral decay.
He concluded, “Ultimately, Habermas has not said or done anything surprising or contradictory, but quite the contrary. He has been perfectly consistent with the irredeemable tribalism in his philosophical lineage, which mistakenly adopted a global stance.”
The author noted that the world is now waking up from the slumber of false European racial philosophy. Today, people like Félix Mwembo and Walter Mignolo or Enrique Dussel in Argentina or Kojin Karatani in Japan have far more legitimate claims to universality than Habermas and his likes.
The ethical insolvency of Habermas’s statement regarding Palestine represents a turning point in the colonial relationship between European philosophy and the rest of the world. The world is indebted to this liberation for the global suffering of peoples like the Palestinians, whose historical heroism and sacrifices have unraveled the sheer savagery on which “Western civilization” was based, as Dabashi described it.
