Dr. François Burgat's Themes: When West Values Collapse - Racism, Discrimination, and the Blind Eye to Gaza Palestinian Genocide

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

“The most dangerous of all the forms of human stupidity is racism.” - François Cavanna

“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” - Albert Einstein

“Racism is man’s gravest threat to man – the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.” - Abraham Joshua Heschel

I recently read and watched Dr. François Burgat, a political scientist from a French university who, after being cleared of terrorism charges, speaks with the cool urgency of someone who has seen the workings of power up close and is aware of its secret levers that function. The air is heavy with the weight of his words. His description goes beyond the war in Gaza to include the gradual deterioration of the West's moral framework and its deliberate betrayal of the universal values it claims to protect.

Palestine is now the ultimate litmus test, according to Burgat. Every admirable term the West has ever used, liberty, equality, and fraternity, breaks down into hypocrisy in this conflict. When it benefits the West and Israel alliances, the same leaders who advocate for justice and human rights either remain silent or, worse, applaud the diabolical racism. He cautions that the imbalance results from deep-seated, racialized reflexes that have their roots in the colonial past and is not an accident.

With surgical accuracy, he reveals the double standard. The West is unconcerned as Sudan burns. Why? Since Israel is the centre of the West's heart, strategic investments, and moral theatre, when you are "fully invested," you won't risk your money, political, economic, or emotional, on Palestinians you consider expendable.

Burgat traces the origins of this human value hierarchy. The Jew used to be the eternal outsider in the minds of Europeans. The target changed following decolonization and the Holocaust. Arabs, Muslims, Africans, and anyone else from the global south who challenges to speak on an equal footing are now the enemy. Whether on their own territory or in the streets of Paris, if they raise their heads and demand rights, they set off the reactions of a ruling class that is still adamant that colonialism never really ended.

The phrase "ethnical regression," which the French interior minister uses, oozes with the old racism, the idea that young people who are not white are going back to barbarism. This is not a religious conflict, as Burgat makes clear. It is a rejection of post-colonial autonomy and a deeper fracture. It is evident not only in the way Muslim communities are treated, but also in France's contempt for Black people and its condescending policies toward African regimes unrelated to Islam. The reasoning behind the Western gaze is straightforward, harsh, and unwavering: if you are not white, you are suspicious.

Burgat warns you that this conflict and the ongoing genocidal catastrophe of Gaza are not isolated geopolitical events. It is the mirror where the self-image of the West breaks down. As you watch, a society that takes pride in universal values reveals that these values have boundaries, and those boundaries are represented by skin colour and conquest history.

https://youtu.be/QIPNzPS8bwU?list=TLGGYJk10jOKS9sxNDA4MjAyNQ