My wife and I moved to the UK one and a half years after the First Gulf War. In our new homeland, and the West generally, Iraq and its people were reduced to a caricature: Saddam Hussein. The economic sanctions that devastated Iraq, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children according to UNICEF, were framed as sanctions against Saddam. Bombing Iraqi sites, even post-war, was similarly marketed as targeting him. This was a stark example of othering, where an entire nation was effectively erased and replaced by its dictator.
Saddam’s brutality, familiar to us, was unsurprisingly a media focus. Also expected was the use of misinformation to further vilify him. The wholesale demonisation of an enemy was not a surprise. However, what came as a true shock was the explicit and implicit suggestion that Saddam was uniquely reprehensible for “killing his own people”. This condemnatory label, which the West had invented for Saddam and similar brutal dictators, revealed a disturbing moral double standard.
What was shocking about this specially vested title is not what it purported to say about those dictators but what it unintentionally revealed about the West’s moral bankruptcy: minimising the crimes of its “democratic” leaders against foreign populations. Saddam was deemed particularly evil for killing his own people. Bush, Blair, and other Western leaders who were responsible for far greater Iraqi casualties through bombardment and indiscriminate sanctions were not awarded a similar damning title. Why? Because they killed “foreign” people, not their own.
This othering and dehumanising are a form of supremacy that is intrinsic to Western democracies. A democratically elected leader has the right, and even the responsibility, to use extreme military force against a dictator’s country without any fear of accountability. Put differently, when the citizens of a Western country exercise their democratic rights to appoint their leader, that leader can somehow acquire rights over foreign populations. For the target foreign people, the difference between their ruler and those Western leaders is nominal: the former is a “national dictator” whereas the latter are “international dictators”! Both have given themselves the right to determine what happens to the country and its people—including the level of destruction and deaths it suffers, when, and how—without the people themselves giving them that right.
The distinction between killing “one’s own” and “others” underpins the common defence of Israel as “the only democracy in the region”, used to deflect criticism of its persistent genocidal actions against Palestinians. The implication is that Israel’s democratic status somehow makes its murdering and destruction of the lives of millions of Palestinians acceptable. If such crimes against the Palestinians were committed by a Palestinian dictator, the moral West would rush to condemn him in the strongest terms possible, impose sanctions, and so on. This form of supremacy, inherent within Western democracy, explains the long history of military and cultural colonisation of other countries.
Islam, on the other hand, does not differentiate between victims based on their race, colour, religion, gender, or any other discriminatory criteria. The Qur’an states:
مِنْ أَجْلِ ذَٰلِكَ كَتَبْنَا عَلَىٰ بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ أَنَّهُ مَن قَتَلَ نَفْسًا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِي الْأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا وَمَنْ أَحْيَاهَا فَكَأَنَّمَا أَحْيَا النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا.
“Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul or corruption committed in the land, it is as if he had killed all people. And whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved all people” (al-Māʾida 5:32).
As ironic as it is sad, this immutable divine law was revealed to the Israelites! It is not found in the Hebrew Bible but in the Talmud, specifically within the Mishnah, known as the Oral Torah. Even more significant is the specific way in which the text is distorted:
“Whoever destroys a single Israelite soul is deemed by Scripture as if he had destroyed a whole world. And whoever saves a single Israelite soul is deemed by Scripture as if he had saved a whole world” (Mishnah, Sanhedrin, 5:9) (Source, “The Jerusalem Talmud”, Jacob Neusner).
Speaking about “Israelite” souls exclusively reflects the ethnocentrism that dominates Jewish scriptures and theology. The authors of these scriptures employed human-constructed supremacy to reinterpret divine revelation. Unlike most religious beliefs, regardless of their veracity, the assertion of ethnic superiority is inherently dangerous. As the whole world has witnessed, the descent from ethnocentrism to ethnic cleansing can be catastrophically swift.
