A reader once commented under one of my articles that money and government are to society what blood and nerves are to the human body. I stopped at that line. It sounded strange, almost poetic, but it carried a truth. Because if power in the West moves like blood and nerves, its pulse is not moral conviction. It is circulation — of money, faith, and memory.
One night in Karachi, the power went out during the news. The screen froze on an image from Gaza: an ambulance light flashing red across a dark road. The generator hadn’t started yet. Outside, the call to prayer floated through the night air. I remember sitting in that half-darkness thinking how silence often feels more deliberate than noise.
The comment had gone on to say that the West no longer has a center — no Rome, no London, no Washington — just a network of banks, media, and diplomacy holding it together. An empire without borders. That phrase stayed with me because it describes the way moral power now functions: diffused, shared, but unaccountable.
And that, perhaps, is why nations that lecture the world about human rights fall quiet when their closest ally silences aid workers.
The Network Without a Center
The West no longer speaks with a single voice. It speaks through institutions — the IMF, NATO, and the endless committees of Brussels. The old empire used to march. The new one drafts statements. Its weapons are spreadsheets and media frames.
In Karachi, I often listen to foreign news while stuck in traffic. The words — “strategic alignment,” “shared values,” “security architecture” — sound detached from the heat, the horns, and the dust. Power seems to live somewhere else, far from the places that feel its weight.
When Israel blocks aid convoys or cancels NGO licenses, the institutions respond with rehearsed caution. “Both sides must exercise restraint.” It’s a language designed to sound balanced, but it’s balance without conscience.
Faith as Memory
For much of the West, Israel is not just a political ally. It’s a symbol — of survival, of moral continuity, of guilt carried through generations. Through Christianity, Jewish history became the West’s own mirror. Through the Holocaust, it became a test of conscience.
I still remember walking through Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial with my daughter. The air was heavy, even in daylight. Tourists whispered as if words themselves could wound. That quiet is sacred — and dangerous. Because when guilt turns into identity, questioning becomes taboo.
So Western leaders don’t criticize Israel. They protect their own reflection in it.
Selective Morality
In Munich, my daughter’s heating bill has gone up again. “We’ll manage,” she said last week, standing by the window with a cup of tea as snow fell outside. Across Europe, families are managing too — cutting groceries, saving on light, watching governments spend billions on wars.
Meanwhile, a nurse in Rafah fans a child whose oxygen tank is running out because her convoy was turned back. Her face doesn’t make the evening news. The presenter speaks carefully, without emotion. Neutral words for a moral crime.
That image took me back to Karachi’s last summer heatwave. I was fanning my grandson during a power cut. It felt like the same helplessness, two worlds apart but joined by human fatigue — and the noise of silence.
The Mirror That Blinds
Maybe that commenter was right after all. The West’s bloodstream and nervous system have merged into something self-contained, unable to see itself. Money flows where belief allows. Belief justifies where money flows.
Israel stands at the center not because it demanded to be there, but because the West built its myths around it. Now those myths decide what can and cannot be spoken.
Before dawn, as the call to prayer rises from the mosque near my street, I scroll through headlines from Europe and America. Somewhere, an editor chooses which story to mute. Somewhere else, a family cuts the heating again. The world feels connected by wires and indifference.
And still, between Munich’s cold apartments and Gaza’s burning hospitals, ordinary people are left wondering who the real extremists are — the ones who kill, or the ones who keep quiet
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