Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

Who Protects the People from the Human Rights Protectors?
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
26 Feb 2025
Palestinian human rights
Photo: Adameer

Can Palestinians get a little Humanitarian Intervention?

Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.

The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped and destroyed cultures and peoples in a war of extermination. The people that were spared, or who escaped or resisted, were enslaved alongside Africans brought by the millions to provide free labor that would result in consolidation of  riches and capital key to the development of what has been characterized as  Western civilization.

In this process of conquest and subsequent global colonization there is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that what is referred to as Western civilization possesses any ideas that propels collective humanity forward. Every intellectual and religious production, from Christianity to the so-called enlightenment period was undermined and distorted by a fundamental flaw in European culture and thought. That flaw was graphically captured not by the cartesian assertion of Western “man” as rational, but by Thomas Hobbes’s accurate characterization of European society reflected in a “state of nature” or in civil society that life was, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

This characterization was for life in Europe. For non-Europeans, the assumptions were even worse. Non-Europeans did not even qualify to be included in the category of “human.” The conquest, slavery and colonization institutionalized conceptual and moral frames that defined who belonged in the category of human and who was to be excluded. They defined who was human and, thus, deserving of inalienable rights and who were “killable” as Europeans “discovered” new lands and peoples, and exercised their “God given” providence of “manifest destiny.”

This exercise of power, of “white power” defined and informeds to this day by the colonial/capitalist, racialized, gendered world views of Westerners who still believe they have the right to determine who lives and who dies, who is provided for and who is not, and what kinds of governments should exist and whose lives count.

Native Savages, Niggers and Amalek: The White Supremacist Normalization of Genocide

Charles Mills argues that to understand the material base of global white supremacy it is necessary to understand the economic importance of the Global South in the rise of Europe and “the structuring of “whiteness” (and those racialized-as-white) as power.

The Indigenous peoples from the territories that became the United States have always expressed amazement by how after they were hunted down like animals. The scalps of Indigenous men, women and children used as evidence to confirm their deaths so as to collect a bounty, women raped and their lands stolen and villages burnt to the ground – how, after all of that, they, the Indigenous, were labeled as the savages. But that is the psychopathology of white supremacy. The victims of white colonial violence become the aggressors preserving the innocence and victimhood of whiteness.

Benjamin Netanyahu, representing the newly minted white people who make up the Israeli settler ruling class, pimping Judaism to rationalize their own present-day campaign of nazism against Palestinians,  reminds the population of “Amalek,” the biblical enemies of Israel, that they deserved to be completely erased from history. He reinforced this idea by  unleashing over four hundred and eighty days of bombings, burnings, starvation, rape of men and women by Israeli soldiers, forced displacement, and torture in Gaza.

But even with a temporary ceasefire in Gaza, the killings continue, as does the conquest for “Greater Israel” evidenced by land grabs in the Occupied West Bank and even extending into Southern Lebanon and, more recently, Syria.  Palestinian children are now freezing to death in Gaza because the Israeli colonists refuse to allow more tents and mobile homes by restricting and weaponizing critical humanitarian aid. And, in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli fascists are unleashing a military assault that appears to be the largest since the war of 1967. 

The response to this criminal activity in the West Bank from those in the West who purport to stand for and protect human rights  – silence.

Donald Trump laments about all of the deaths in Ukraine and sayshow he just wants to see the killing stopped. However, for Palestinians his message is literally, “bombs away,” especially  if Palestinians do not surrender their legal and human right to resist and defeat their oppressors.  Friedrich Merz, the newly elected Chancellor of Germany, just declared that he will invite Netanyahu to Germany even though he is an indicted war criminal and executing an active genocide of Palestinians.

Merz is proud of his invitation. Palestinian lives do not matter for Merz and, for that matter,  most of the leadership in Europe.  Therefore, the International Criminal Court Indictment of Netanyahu is seen as illegitimate. Moral outrage is reserved for real human beings, not Amalek. That is why Trump is more concerned with “white” Ukrainians and Russians even though both are “Slavs” and occupy one of the lowest rungs on the ladder of whiteness.

There can be no International Peace as long as the West has disproportionate power

The White Westernized left must rid itself of Eurocentrism and white supremacist biases.

I start from the very simple but tragic position that the disproportionate power of the ten percent of the human population that racialized itself as the white western world represents an existential threat to all the rest of us. This historic reading is not a call to genocide the peoples of the West but instead is a call for a serious confrontation with the rationalizing logic of white dominance, of the white supremacy ideology  that prevails in societies of the West but is even more pronounced in white dominated settler societies like the U.S. and Israel.

When I read that the families of the over 600 Palestinians scheduled to be released by the Israeli occupying power are still in limbo, camping out in the cold waiting for their tormentors to release their loved ones, I am reminded of the very simple proposition that he who has the power to define is master.

In a world still characterized by the imposition of normalized white supremacy, who counts as human and whose lives count as lives is informed by the categories of existence informed by colonization, patriarchy, race ideologies and capitalism – the white supremacist, colonial//capitalist patriarchy as enemy of collective humanity. Understanding this and the contours and the driving material and non-material forces of “global white supremacy,” must be seen as critical to any left political and theoretical project, if it is a serious project. 

The determination of who is a human with rights that are to be recognized is still a prerogative assumed by the leaders of the white West.

For the families of the Palestinians waiting to be released in Gaza, families already subjected to unspeakable horrors from the Israeli authorities that defined them as “Amalek” – The true nature of Israeli society and the White West is not mystified. They understand that Western civilization is a myth and is why there will be no humanitarian intervention for them, only more death and struggle. That is the lesson we all must take from the exposure of white West with its irrational support for racist fascism in the state referred to as Israel.

If the West can justify to itself the support for genocide against the occupied Palestinians, no colonized, exploited people or nation attempting to exercise their rights to national liberation and dignity is safe. In order for the world to live, the idea of Europe must die!

That is why for those of us who believe in universal dignity and the collective right to resist by any means necessary, we will be standing shoulder to shoulder with the resisters in Palestine and in Chicago and Atlanta and throughout the colonized world.

Ajamu Baraka is the Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition.

Human Rights
Palestine
Israel
Genocide
Crimes Against Humanity

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Editors, The Black Agenda Review
ESSAY: The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism, Edward Said, 1977
28 May 2025
“In theory and in practice, then, Zionism is a degraded repetition of Europ
Brett Wilkins
Video Shows Girl Trying to Escape Inferno as Gaza Family 'Burned Alive' in Israeli Massacre
28 May 2025
The story of Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil is a horrifying reminder of the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
ESSAY: Towards Lasting Peace, Shirley Graham DuBois, 1970
21 May 2025
Shirley Graham Du Bois on the liberation of Palestine.<
The Cradle News Desk
Israel Kills Five Journalists, Over 100 Civilians in One Night as ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ Begins in Gaza
21 May 2025
The Israeli army has intensified attacks on hospitals as part of the new operation, which aims to displace the entire population of Gaza.<
The Cradle News Desk
US Abandons 'Hamas Disarmament' Demands in Gaza Truce Talks: Report
14 May 2025
A reported rift between Trump and Netanyahu continues to widen ahead of the US president's first visit to West Asia since regaining power. 
North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights , Black Alliance For Peace
The Black Alliance for Peace Calls for International Popular Mobilizations to Stop Israel’s Genocidal Campaign to Starve Palestinians to Death!
30 April 2025
The Israeli state’s starvation campaign in Gaza—backed by the U.S. and Europe—is a livestreamed genocide.
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
U.S. and Israel Gangsterism Has Created a Hobbesian International State of Nature
23 April 2025
Gaza has exposed the West’s ‘human rights’ as a colonial farce.
Nora Barrows-Friedman
Rafah “obliterated” by Israel’s attacks
16 April 2025
Israel is intensifying its genocidal assault on Gaza—starving civilians, bombing hospitals, and burning journalists alive.
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti
Remembering Mario Joseph, BAI Managing Attorney
09 April 2025
The world has lost a champion of justice with the passing of Mario Joseph, a Haitian human rights lawyer who spent nearly three decades fightin
Palestine Chronicle Staff
Sole Survivor of ‘Paramedics Massacre’ in Rafah Exposes Israeli War Crime
09 April 2025
Monther Abed, the sole survivor of the Israeli attack on paramedics in Rafah, reveals the details of the crime in which 15 humanitarian workers

More Stories


  • BAR Radio Logo
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio May 30, 2025
    30 May 2025
    In this week’s segment we talk about jails and prisons in New York City and State and the end of city control of the infamous Rikers Island jail. But first a Washington DC activist analyzes how the…
  • Democratic party where are you
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Afeni on Fighting the Bipartisan Fascist Consensus
    30 May 2025
    Afeni is an activist and lead organizer with Herb and Temple in Washington, DC. She joins us from Oakland to discuss politics in the U.S. and how the people can fight the fascism produced by the…
  • Rikers protest
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Eric Adams Loses Control of Rikers Island to Federal Receivership
    30 May 2025
    Our guest is Melanie Dominguez, Organizing Director, New York with the Katal Center for Equity, Health, and Justice. She joins us from New York City to discuss the federal takeover of Rikers Island…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Charles Rangel and the End of Black Politics
    28 May 2025
    The late Charles Rangel served as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus for more than 40 years. But the goals of Black politics and electoral politics are not necessarily the same.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism, Edward Said, 1977
    28 May 2025
    “In theory and in practice, then, Zionism is a degraded repetition of European imperialism.”
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us