MURDER, JUSTIFIED: HOW THE WEST ENABLED ISRAEL’S WAR CRIMES
By Vincent Lyn
In his poem Campo dei Fiori, written in occupied Warsaw, Czesław Miłosz sears into memory the grotesque contrast of a merry-go-round spinning next to the ghetto wall — riders soaring skyward through the smoke of burning corpses, their laughter and the carousel’s jaunty tune drowning out the cries of the dying. For me years later, growing up in Surrey, England, while the U.S. military unleashed a firestorm of death upon Vietnam, slaughtering hundreds of thousands, Miłosz recognized the same sickening complicity in unimaginable barbarity — an atrocity he likened to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin.
For months, Israel’s extermination of Gaza — armed and funded by Western democracies — has thrust millions into that very abyss. They have been forced to bear witness to an act of political evil, to hear the endless screams of the dying, to live with the torment of knowing and yet doing nothing. They have allowed themselves, if only briefly, to feel the fragile relief of being alive — only to be yanked back into horror by the shrieks of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.
The Shoah left an unhealed wound across generations of Jews. For Jewish Israelis in 1948, the birth of their state was a matter of survival — again in 1967 and 1973, as annihilationist threats from Arab states loomed. For Jews raised with the knowledge that Europe’s Jewish population was nearly exterminated for no reason other than its existence, the world can only seem perilously fragile.
On October 7, 2023, the massacres and hostage-taking by Hamas and other Palestinian groups reignited the deepest fears of another Holocaust. But from the very start, Israel’s most extremist Zionist leadership in history seized upon this omnipresent sense of violation, grief, and terror. They invoked the right to self-defense, yet as Holocaust historian Omer Bartov recognized in August 2024, their true objective was clear from the outset: “to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.”
And so, for months after October 7, billions of people watched an unprecedented assault on Gaza unfold — an assault whose victims, as Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, representing South Africa at the International Court of Justice, put it, were “broadcasting their own destruction in real time in desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.”
The world — or, more precisely, the West — did nothing. In Gaza, victims foretold their deaths on digital media, only to be executed hours later. Their killers, in turn, broadcast their atrocities on TikTok with impunity. Yet the live-streamed liquidation of Gaza was not only ignored but actively distorted, if not outright denied, by the very institutions that uphold the West’s military and cultural dominance. From U.S. and U.K. leaders attacking the International Criminal Court to editors at The New York Times instructing their staff — via internal memo — to avoid terms like “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” and “ethnic cleansing,” the machinery of Western power worked tirelessly to sanitize genocide in real time.
Every day was poisoned by the unbearable knowledge that while we carried on with our lives, hundreds of ordinary people were being slaughtered — fathers, mothers, children — or forced to witness the execution of their own loved ones. The pleas came ceaselessly from Gaza: desperate messages from writers, journalists, poets, warning that they and their families were about to be killed. Then came the inevitable confirmation of their deaths, a relentless cycle of horror that deepened the humiliation of our own impotence.
Those tormented by guilt, by the sickening complicity of inaction, searched Joe Biden’s face for some flicker of conscience, some sign that the massacre might end. They found nothing — only an eerily smooth mask, broken by the occasional nervous smirk as he unflinchingly parroted Israel’s grotesque lies, claiming Palestinian fighters had beheaded Israeli babies.
Hopes, however fleeting, were crushed — whether by yet another toothless UN resolution, the desperate pleas of humanitarian organizations, the rulings of judges at The Hague, or even the faint prospect of Biden being replaced as the Democratic nominee. Each flicker of possibility was snuffed out, leaving only despair.
By late 2024, many far removed from Gaza’s killing fields felt a creeping numbness, as if they had been dragged through an epic odyssey of suffering, helpless to alter its course. Some might call this an exaggerated reaction from mere onlookers. But then came the image — one image, more harrowing than words could ever convey: a father cradling the headless corpse of his child. And in that moment, whatever distance remained between Gaza’s agony and the rest of the world collapsed.
The war will eventually recede into history, and time may dull the sheer magnitude of its horrors. But Gaza will bear its scars for generations. The wounded bodies, the orphaned children, the skeletal remains of obliterated cities, the masses of homeless and dispossessed — everywhere, the presence of mass bereavement will linger like an open wound that refuses to close. And those who watched, powerless, as tens of thousands were slaughtered and maimed within a besieged strip of land — while the powerful either cheered or turned away — will carry within them an anguish that will not fade.
Yet even now, in the cold calculus of Israel’s moral and legal violations, the unmistakable signs of the ultimate atrocity — the prelude to full-scale genocide — are glaringly evident. The open and routine declarations by Israeli leaders of their intent to wipe Gaza from existence. The tacit approval of a public that demands ever greater retribution, outraged only when the slaughter is deemed insufficient. The dehumanization of the victims, reduced to enemies beyond redemption. The sheer scale of destruction — proportionally more devastating than the Allied firebombing of Germany in World War II. The relentless, industrialized pace of mass killing — graves filling by the day, bodies buried beneath mountains of rubble, extermination carried out both by cold, impersonal AI-driven targeting systems and by the calculated brutality of snipers who execute children with precise shots to the head — often twice.
The atrocity is everywhere, in every act of calculated cruelty: the deliberate starvation of an entire population, the blockade of life-saving medicine, the grotesque torture of prisoners — hot metal rods shoved into their rectums as they lie naked and broken. The obliteration of every marker of civilization — schools, universities, libraries, museums, churches, mosques, even cemeteries — all methodically wiped from existence. The puerile, sadistic spectacle of Israeli soldiers gloating over their conquests, dancing in the lingerie of murdered or fleeing Palestinian women. The sickening popularity of these images in Israel, where genocide is not just committed but gleefully broadcast as entertainment.
And through it all, Israel’s meticulous documentation of its own annihilation campaign — a record of its crimes so thorough that no future denials will ever erase them. The world has borne witness to the obliteration of Gaza, not in secrecy, not as a buried historical footnote, but in real time. The crime is being committed in the open, and the wound it leaves — on Gaza, on those who watched, on history itself — will never heal.
The world has endured much in recent years — natural catastrophes, financial collapses, political upheavals, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and vengeance. But nothing — nothing — has weighed on us with such unbearable grief, shame, and moral devastation as Gaza. No other disaster has exposed, with such pitiless clarity, the cowardice, moral inertia, and intellectual bankruptcy of those who claim to lead and inform us.
A whole generation of young people in the West was thrust into moral adulthood, abandoned by its elders in politics and journalism, left to grapple — almost alone — with acts of pure savagery committed with the full backing of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful democracies. The complicity was not hidden. It was proud. Brazen. Western leaders had a clear, simple choice: they could have withheld unconditional support from an extremist Israeli regime while still demanding justice for the victims of October 7. Instead, they embraced the annihilation of Gaza without hesitation.
Why did Joe Biden repeatedly claim to have seen atrocity videos that do not exist? Why did Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, declare that Israel had the right to “withhold power and water” from Palestinians and then punish members of his own party for demanding a ceasefire? Why did Jürgen Habermas, once the champion of Western Enlightenment values, leap to the defense of those openly advocating ethnic cleansing? Why did The Atlantic, one of America’s oldest and most prestigious magazines, justify the murder of nearly eight thousand Palestinian children by arguing that “it is possible to kill children legally”?
Why did Western media, supposedly dedicated to truth, twist language so grotesquely that Israeli atrocities became nearly invisible — reduced to vague, impersonal phrasing that obscured the perpetrators and the victims alike? “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome,” read a BBC headline — hiding the fact that Israeli soldiers had unleashed an attack dog on a defenseless disabled man, tearing him apart.
Why did American billionaires bankroll smear campaigns against college students protesting genocide, fueling ruthless crackdowns on young people demanding justice? Why were academics and journalists fired, artists de-platformed, students blacklisted from jobs — all for daring to challenge the pro-Israel consensus?
And perhaps most damning of all: why did the same West that wrapped Ukrainians in a mantle of solidarity, defending them from a brutal invasion, so effortlessly exclude Palestinians from the very concept of human worth? Why was the principle of human rights — so loudly trumpeted in one war — so politely discarded in another?
The answers to these questions are not elusive. They are staring us in the face, drenched in blood, and history will not be kind to those who turned away.
Vincent Lyn
CEO & Founder of We Can Save Children
Deputy Ambassador of International Human Rights Commission (IHRC)
Director of Creative Development at African Views Organization
Economic & Social Council at United Nations (ECOSOC)
Chief International Director at 365 Security Services
Rescue & Recovery Specialist at International Confederation of Police & Security Experts