{"id":307236,"date":"2025-11-10T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307236"},"modified":"2025-11-10T07:07:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T07:07:24","slug":"reading-genocide-in-gaza-voices-of-global-conscience-at-the-british-parliament","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/reading-genocide-in-gaza-voices-of-global-conscience-at-the-british-parliament\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading \u201cGenocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience\u201d at the British Parliament"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The dying Western Civilization (or \u201cThe West\u201d) has not learned a thing during its 500-years of failed attempts to subjugate the Global Majority: The elite or rulers may submit, but the people never surrender to the invading colonizers. Palestine will be free. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

9 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>– Two weeks ago, I went to a Palestine book launch by Ahmet Davuto\u011flu, hosted by a few British MPs at the Houses of Parliament in London.<\/p>\n

\u201cGenocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience\u201d (Clarity Press, 2025, 448 pages), which Ahmet Davuto\u011flu co-edited with Richard Falk, the renowned international law professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is a gold mine for many activists and citizens.<\/p>\n

Our conscience has definitely been awakened by Israel\u2019s livestreamed genocide in Gaza, but many of us feel we really need to school ourselves about the long-running historical, legal and fundamental issues regarding the 100-years of colonial dispossession, death, displacement and destruction of indigenous Arab Palestinians at the hands of what the Iranian scholar at Columbia University and \u201clifelong supporter of Palestinian liberation struggle\u201d Hamid Dabashi<\/a> called \u201cthe Western civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A British-born, Yemenese pro-Palestinian liberation activist from Birmingham, asking a question to Professor Ahmet Davuto\u011flu, Committee Room 17, 21 October 2025 (photo by Bilgehan Ucak<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, the justly proud father of the newly minted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, has this to say about the volume:<\/p>\n

\u201cOctober 7 shattered the assumptions underlying our understanding of politics in the Middle East, urgently calling for an intellectual and political rethink. With great scholarly imagination and political insight, Richard Falk and Ahmet Davuto\u011flu, have put together a remarkable collection of writings from writers and activists, insiders and neighbours in this hour of need.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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The speaker, Professor Davuto\u011flu, has had a very distinguished career, both as a scholar of international relations<\/a>, and as a politician, first as the Chief Advisor to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, then as Minister for Foreign Affairs and subsequently as the 26th\u00a0Prime Minister of Republic of T\u00fcrkiye.<\/p>\n

Besides the calibre and distinguished background of the speaker, the subject matter, the genocide in and occupation of Palestine, is very close to my heart. It is one of the two issues that keep me awake at night. The other is the civil war in my native Myanmar, yet another mess which the British colonial policies produced and left behind. Along colonially refashioned ethnic lines, Myanmar has plunged into the war at home, initially fought with left-over WWII weapons since 28 March 1948, just weeks before the Zionist militia groups declared the establishment of Israel, via ethnic cleansing of 750,000 native Palestinian Arabs (2\/3 of the total indigenous population), on 14 May the same year.<\/p>\n

A word about the venue itself: the British Houses of Parliament.<\/p>\n

I generally avoid these colonial monuments such as the British parliament, Westminster, etc., because I am visceral, beyond words, towards any symbols of imperialism, including landmarks which remind me of Britain\u2019s global crimes, past and present.<\/p>\n

For me, as a Fanon-inspired brown man from Myanmar, Nazism or Fascism and British (or French, Dutch, Spanish or American) imperialism differ only in degrees, not in kind. What the British Parliament or 10 Downing Street, or Whitehall or Westminster Abbey signifies is as criminal and evil as the Third Reich\u2019s Swastika.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s contemporary crime is its direct participation in Israel\u2019s genocidal war of extermination in Gaza.<\/p>\n

This livestreamed textbook genocide is not perpetrated only by the Jewish Supremacist state of Israel, a European settler colony, \u201cthe most vicious\u201d, in the words of Noam Chomsky. Emphatically, the British state\u2019s direct participation in the genocide is well-documented, from hundreds of rounds of British spy aircraft over Gaza which are believed to be providing Israeli troops with real time on-site intelligence to vital parts of the F-35 fighter bombers which were used to decimate over 90% of physical infrastructure across Gaza to the BBC, in effect, serving as the mouthpiece of genocidal Israel.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Britain has used all legal and discretionary powers to silence any British voices against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Those who run the British parliament had already shut down a previous book launch and documentary film screening organized by Anadolu News Agency, with the straightforward title, \u201cThe Evidence\u201d, just one hour before the scheduled time.<\/p>\n

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The front and back covers of the coffee table book (to go with the Anadolu News documentary on Israel\u2019s war crimes).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The British Parliament blocked its screening in 2024. (photo by Zarni)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The front and back covers of the coffee table book (to go with the Anadolu News documentary on Israel\u2019s war crimes) which the British Parliament blocked from screening in 2024. (photo by Zarni)<\/em><\/p>\n

Those of us 60 or so attendees made up of anti-genocide activists, representatives of different diplomatic missions, and Anadolu staff gathered in an ornate room to hear the Director-General of Anadolu, who commissioned the documentary and the coffee table book, only to be told by the DG that there would be neither film-screening nor book launch.<\/p>\n

My Turkish journalist friend from Anadolu whispered to me, \u201cWe were instructed (by the British authorities in charge of the events) not to even put the coffee table books on the table, for display.\u201d He handed me a complimentary copy of \u201cThe Evidence\u201d, only after we exited the parliament\u2019s premise, while subsequently taking out and lighting a cigarette on the street facing the Parliament Square, as if he needed puff away the justified disgust at this blatant act of British authorities blocking any efforts to disseminate evidence of Israel\u2019s war crimes.<\/p>\n

That was in the early months of Israel\u2019s genocide. The British Prime Sir Keir Starmer never tired of reciting his un-concealed Zionist mantra Israel has a \u201cright to self-defence\u201d (including cutting off life\u2019s essentials such as water, food, medicine and electricity to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza).<\/p>\n

As a Burmese or Myanmar native, I have always felt natural affinity with peoples from other formerly European-colonized countries around the world. That in the year 2025, Palestinian people continue to struggle to shake off the yoke of European settler colonial rule is something I personally find loathsome in the extreme. That, with Britain\u2019s full collaboration and direct participation.<\/p>\n

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My old country, Myanmar, was under Britain\u2019s colonial rule for 120 years, first under the control of the Calcutta-based East India Company and subsequently directly and indirectly from London. Before the British established its \u201crule of law\u201d, the multi-ethnic indigenous populations who rose up organically, without the central overarching leadership or organization were subjected to the Kiplingesque White Man\u2019s savagery \u2013 euphemistically called \u201cThe Pacification of Burma\u201d<\/em><\/strong> formulated in these corridors of executive, judicial and legislative powers in London.<\/p>\n

Watch the book launch by Ahmet Davuto\u011flu at the Houses of Parliament in London below:<\/p>\n