Watching and listening to the barrage of news from around the world, particularly about developments in the Middle East and the US, we cannot help but feel mounting despair.
Beneath the headlines of armed conflict, forced displacement and polarising politics lies a common thread: the resurgence of ethnic supremacy as a justification for exclusion, oppression and violence.
This is not an exaggerated claim. I recently saw a public figure on international TV argue that Jews are physically distinct from other humans, even belonging to a “different species”.
That such a sentiment could be aired in a global media forum is deeply troubling. It echoes the horrifying logic of Nazism and apartheid, where pseudoscientific racism became state policy and entire communities were marked for extinction.
Yet, that is exactly the justification for genocide and the displacement of people. Countries and their leaders have lost sight of the people living on the land for the real estate. Some of them think Gaza is part of Israel. Or, if not that, a rich site for another Riviera. For them, the people are an inconvenience that must be moved elsewhere – because they are ethnically inferior and not fit to share the same space with the invading, ethnically superior race.
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In 1937, while speaking to the Palestine Royal Commission in favour of allowing Jews to settle in Palestine, Churchill said:
I do not admit … for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
Embarrassing as it sounds, these are not outdated sentiments from a long-past era. Ethnic supremacy still justifies the displacement of people, now accompanied by new slogans like ‘terrorism’, ‘regime change’ and ‘installing democracy’.
In the US, the spectre of white supremacy has never really disappeared: it has simply changed its language. Myths of genetic inferiority rationalised the despoliation of the native population and enslavement of Africans.
Today, in the name of national security or demographic control, those same beliefs are reappearing in proposals to deport non-white immigrants or to redraw voting rights in ways that systematically disadvantage people of colour.
As the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) reminds us, racial discrimination was built into the foundations of the US legal and economic system and remains embedded in many of its institutions today. Founded in 1989, EJI is a private, nonprofit organisation that provides legal representation to people who have been illegally convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state prisons.
We see disturbing signs everywhere in the world.
In Gaza, the International Court of Justice took the extraordinary step of acknowledging the plausibility of genocide. In its Order of 26 January 2024, the court ruled that Palestinians have a right to be protected from acts of genocide and called on Israel to “take all measures within its power” to prevent such acts under the Genocide Conventions.
The court expressed that it was “acutely aware of the extent of the human tragedy unfolding in the region” and was “deeply concerned about the continuing loss of life and human suffering”.
In a subsequent order on 24 May 2024, the court went further, directing Israel to “immediately cease its military operations in the Gaza Strip, including in the Rafah Governorate” and to withdraw from the territory unconditionally.
These rulings, though provisional, reflect the seriousness of the situation: a large-scale humanitarian disaster, with over 40,000 Palestinians killed and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble.
Gaza is witnessing the deliberate destruction of a people under the guise of ‘war’.
Meanwhile, the supposedly civilised world does nothing to halt the devastation but instead supplies Israel with arms, blocks food supplies to the dying, and vetoes proposals to curb the barbarism.
There are other displacements and violence targeted at ethnic groups. In Nagorno-Karabakh, over 100,000 ethnic Armenians were expelled following a military blockade and forced closure of borders. Religious sites were desecrated, cemeteries flattened, and the physical presence of a people methodically erased.
But these are not distant problems.
In Myanmar, the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority, have endured what the UN has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. Since 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, escaping a brutal military crackdown that included mass killings, gang rapes and the torching of entire villages. The violence was so systematic and widespread that the International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar to take immediate steps to prevent genocidal acts.
In Malaysia, we are grateful that ethnic politics has not led us down the extreme paths that other countries like Israel have taken. But we still need to be vigilant against the politics of identity that is creeping into our language, laws and institutions.
There is an increasing tendency to frame political rights, economic access and cultural legitimacy through the lens of ethnicity. Certain public figures, some of whom are in positions of power, openly suggest that people in Malaysia of certain backgrounds are more “authentic” or more “entitled” than others.
Some among us are unable to talk about people without first naming their race, as if identity were a box that must be ticked before rights can be granted. Some cannot define rights except by denying them to others on the grounds of ethnicity.
Ethnic supremacism is not just about ideology. It is about how power is distributed and who gets to belong. It is about who feels safe in public spaces, whose stories are taught in classrooms, and whose pain is acknowledged by the state. It is about easier access to resources, about not having to queue for handouts, which, as in Gaza, may not arrive or may arrive too late.
To resist it, we must do more than call out individual acts of hate. We must question systems. We must build a political and moral culture that sees pluralism not as a threat but as a strength.
We must teach our children that citizenship is not contingent on race, and that rights are not earned through ancestral claims but guaranteed by our common humanity.
The real victims of supremacism are not just those in the targeted group. The real victims are us – all of us who lose the possibility of a just and dignified society.
This is not the time to retreat. It is the time to speak. To act. To remember that the measure of a nation is not how it treats its majority, but how it protects those at its margins.
Because in the end, what is at stake is nothing less than our humanity.
AGENDA RAKYAT - Lima perkara utama
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
