By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine

I haven't been surprised a bit by the ignominious deafening silence of most Western capitals at the latest bloodbath in the streets of Egypt.

There, mostly ignorant and impoverished police conscripts were ordered to open fire rather indiscriminately on peaceful protesters marking the fourth anniversary of the 25 January-2011 uprising. For its part, the Western backed regime struggled to concoct all sorts of mendacious claims to justify the wanton killings. As of today, we haven't seen any credible reaction even remotely resembling the vacuous but huge "party" following the terrorist attacks in Paris a few weeks ago.

Now, all western leaders, from France's Hollande to Germany's Merkel to America's Obama and Britain's Cameron, as well as the rest of the gang of hypocrites and hangers-on are effectively playing deaf and dumb and looking the other way as if the free slaughter of non-westerners, especially Muslims, were an ineluctable banality.

As I said, western leaders are never expected to adopt a genuine moral stance against terror when its victims are of the "untermenschen class," using the Nazi-worded phraseology. This is because these leaders utterly lack any moral credentials that would make them act with a modicum of conscience. And as the Arab adage goes "one can't give what one doesn't have."

It is probably futile to invoke moral conscience when referring to contemporary influential powers in this world. After all, these powers are more or less responsible for the prevalence of evil and oppression in our world.

These powers will continue to callously disregard all voices of justice and morality since justice and morality represent the ultimate antithesis of their value systems, based on hegemony, greed and rapacity.

After all, we have seen North American and European capitals adopt a decidedly criminal stance vis-à-vis far greater crimes against humanity such as the genocidal atrocities perpetrated recently by Israel against the unprotected and thoroughly decimated Palestinians. Hence, it is hard to see these governments suddenly transform themselves into paragons of justice and human equality.

None the less, things don't and won't stop here. The dark Western embrace of Arab dictatorships has inevitable consequences.

And whether we like it or not, the West will not be immune from suffering some of these implications. What happened in Paris a few weeks ago would probably innocuous in comparison to what could occur if the West maintained its current criminal approach toward Muslims.

The criminal western backing of murderous regimes in the Arab Middle East will make more and more Muslims lose faith in democracy. I have already seen many Arab intellectuals refer to democracy as a "big western lie that Muslims must not allow themselves to be deluded by"

That is an unmistakably grave phenomenon that needs to be tackled. We know that democracy is not a bad thing. But it is also true that consistently evil western behavior has given democracy a very bad name, that is to say the very least.

None the less the recurrent blood-letting in Arab streets, amidst shocking western apathy and collusion with the thugs in power in Arab capitals, will push millions, not thousands, of disillusioned Muslim youths from around the world to join the ranks of extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and IS.

They will join the ranks of extremist groups, not because extremism is an ineluctable fate, but rather because these violent groups have come, for those youths, to constitute the only remaining "hope" for a better tomorrow, given the criminal dark embrace between western powers and tyrannical Arab regimes that not only deny their respective peoples the most basic human rights and civil liberties, but slaughter them without any feeling of guilt.

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http://english.palinfo.com/site/pages/details.aspx?itemid=69840

Khalid Amayreh is a veteran Palestinian journalist based in occupied Palestine