“The mirror is waiting. Are you brave enough to look?”

By Andrew Klein

Dedication: To my wife – who taught me that the only true backwardness is the refusal to see the humanity in others.

I. The Pardon That Should Not Exist

In November 2024, a young man in the al-Qurashiya district of Yemen’s Al-Bayda governorate killed a member of another tribe. The crime was accidental. But in the Western imagination, “tribal justice” means blood feuds, vendettas, and endless cycles of violence. It means revenge. It means backwardness.

That is not what happened.

A tribal mediation, led by the provincial governor and a number of sheikhs, brought the families together. The victim’s family – the heirs of Hazim Saif Al-Hajj Al-Hattam – were asked to consider pardon. They were offered compensation: livestock and other customary reparations according to Yemeni tribal traditions.1

They pardoned him.

Not because the law was weak. Because the heart was strong. They attributed his crime to ignorance – his youth, his lack of intent. They chose restoration over retaliation. They forgave. And then, in a gesture that should shame every Western nation that claims moral superiority, they donated the compensation to fighters defending their country’s dignity.8

This is not an isolated incident. In December 2025, another tribal reconciliation in Hajja governorate resolved a murder case between families from different regions. The heirs forgave the perpetrator “for the sake of God, in honor of the attendees.” The case was closed permanently.8.

If this story were told honestly, it would be a lesson in restorative justice – the kind that Western criminologists have spent decades trying to reinvent, while tribal societies have practiced it for centuries.

But the story is not told honestly.

Because it does not fit the narrative.

II. Orientalism: The Invention of the “Other”

In 1978, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published a book that would change the way the West understands itself. Orientalism was not a history of the Middle East. It was a history of the West’s imagination of the Middle East.

Said demonstrated that Orientalism – the academic study of the “Orient” – was never neutral scholarship. It was a “mixture of prejudice, racist assumptions, intertwined and underpinned with scholarship and archaeology”.3. The Orientalist did not describe the Arab world. He invented it.

He created a picture of a static, decadent, violent, irrational civilisation – the mirror image of the dynamic, virtuous, peaceful, rational West. This picture was not a mistake. It was a tool. It justified colonialism. It justified military intervention. It justified the endless wars that have defined Western relations with the Middle East for two centuries.

Said’s thesis, published in 1978, remains urgent today. As one student of his work observed nearly forty years later, “things haven’t changed at all since then”10. The same stereotypes – the same “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology” – continue to shape Western media coverage, Western foreign policy, and Western public opinion.

III. The Manufactured Image: Violence, Terrorism, and the Erasure of Complexity

The bulk of the average Westerner’s knowledge of Muslim societies is derived from an image that film, television, and print media portray: “images of violence and terrorism that we associate with the Middle East“2. This is not an accident. It is the product of a media industry that has learned that violence sells and redemption does not.

When a Western news outlet covers the Middle East, it does not show the tribal reconciliations, the community mediations, the women peacebuilders, or the families who choose forgiveness. It shows bombings, beheadings, and protests. It shows the “honour killing” – presented as proof of primitive savagery – without showing the centuries of customary law that condemn such killings and the community mechanisms that resolve disputes without state violence.

In a misguided attempt to understand the horror of killing in the name of honour, Western media has “intentionally or unintentionally tied the cultural acts of honour killings to the religion of Islam as opposed to labelling it as a tribal act, separated from religion“9. This conflation serves a purpose. It transforms a complex social phenomenon – found in various cultures across history, including in the West – into evidence of the fundamental “backwardness” of Muslims.

The result is a caricature. An entire civilisation reduced to a few lurid headlines. A billion people judged by the actions of a tiny minority. And a region’s rich tradition of conflict resolution – its wisdom – rendered invisible.

IV. The Prisoner Double Standard: Orientalism in Action

If Orientalism is a lens, the treatment of prisoners in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers a stark illustration of how that lens operates.

On both sides, there have been abuses. But the scale, the systematisation, and the impunity are not symmetrical.

The Zionist entity continues its systematic violations against Palestinian prisoners in its prisons, “disregarding international laws and the Geneva Conventions that guarantee their basic rights“4. Palestinian prisoners report solitary confinement, medical neglect, starvation, denial of visits, and severing of contact with their families. The policy, according to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Information Office, “aims to break their resolve and undermine their humanity”.4.

Prisoner Muhammad al-Haroub has been held in solitary confinement in Megiddo Prison for years, denied visits and medical treatment. Prisoner Ayman Sidr has spent his thirtieth year behind bars, deprived of contact with his family and denied medical care. Prisoner Muhammad al-Hamami suffers from deteriorating health and deliberate medical neglect.4.

These violations contravene explicit provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the Mandela Rules. The report warns that these practices amount to “crimes against humanity” under the Rome Statute.4.

When an Israeli prisoner is mistreated, the Western media erupts. It is front-page news. It is proof of “terrorist savagery.” It is a justification for more bombing, more occupation, more punishment.

When a Palestinian prisoner is tortured – when thousands of Palestinian prisoners are systematically abused – the same media is silent. Or it buries the story in a brief dispatch, framed as a “dispute” or an “allegation.” The headline does not scream. The moral outrage does not materialise.

This is not a difference in the facts. It is a difference in the narrative.

The Palestinian prisoner is the “unacceptable other.” His suffering is expected. It is normalised. It is, in the twisted logic of Orientalism, deserved.

V. Gaza: The Laboratory of Western Modernity

The Gaza catastrophe is the clearest refutation of the “backwardness” narrative. As one analyst put it, “Gaza’s catastrophe is not an eruption of theology but the outcome of policy, drawn up in air‑conditioned rooms far from mosques and refugee camps, funded in national budgets, defended at lecterns and in editorial meetings”.6.

Occupation. Blockade. Targeted assassinations. Mass displacement. The throttling of food, water, electricity, and medicine. “None of this is the work of ‘tribalism.’ It is the work of states”.6.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs has described Gaza’s ruin as manufactured: “not the spasm of a premodern culture but the predictable result of long military, diplomatic, and economic strategies underwritten by Western power”. The political scientist Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, has spent decades documenting the legal architecture that turns Gaza into a laboratory for methods of control – “surveillance, siege, periodic ‘mowing’” – while Western capitals supply the hardware and the diplomatic umbrella .6.

Each assault on Gaza is followed by a familiar ritual: “investigations delayed, resolutions softened, headlines stripped of agents and verbs. The language of ‘security’ goes to work not to explain but to erase”.6.

If modernity means anything worth having, it must mean the courage to break with the opiate of comforting lies. It means insisting that law is not a costume, that rights are not a currency, that the life of a child in Khan Younis counts the same as a child in Kraków or Kansas. But “universality” is too often a border‑checked passport.6.

The question is not whether the Middle East is fit for modernity. It is whether we are.

VI. The West’s Model: Arms, Aid, and Endless War

Since 1945, the United States’ hegemony in the Middle East has relied on three pillars: oil purchases, weapons sales, and regime change.7. In diplomacy, Washington has favoured bilateral peace treaties that serve its strategic interests, not the interests of the region’s peoples.

Arms sales are the key. For its allies, the US provides 60‑80 per cent of their lethal imports. For the rest, it supplies 50‑60 per cent.7. Between 1946 and 2023, Washington provided $373 billion in foreign assistance to the Middle East. The bulk was steered to just a few countries: Israel ($139 billion), Egypt ($83 billion), Iraq ($70 billion), and Jordan ($24 billion) .7.

The Middle East is the largest regional recipient of US aid. Yet “the net effect has been precisely the opposite” of increasing security and rising per capita income.7. Worse, “the military symbiosis between the US and Israel has triggered devastating spillovers into adjacent Arab states.” This destabilisation has been accompanied by lost years, even decades, with no increase in per capita income in the aid‑receiving states.

Iran and Iraq have faced escalating adversities since their 1980‑88 war, in which the US supplied arms to both sides. In Iraq, per capita income in 2010 was where it had been in 1978. In Iran, Washington’s sanctions prevented any growth in per capita income for a quarter of a century after the Islamic Revolution.7.

In Syria, following the 1949 US‑led regime change, per capita income before October 2023 was the same as in 1981 – 44 years earlier. In Palestine, per capita income is now where it was in the early 1970s. In Yemen, per capita income is the same as it was 55 years ago.7.

The post‑September 11, 2001, wars alone have cost more than $8 trillion and over 1 million lives. Since October 7, 2023, US military aid to Israel has soared from $3.8 billion per year to $23 billion.7.

This is not a record of success. It is a record of extraction.

VII. What Is Lost: The Destruction of Custom and Its Replacement

Western intervention does not merely kill people and destroy infrastructure. It kills knowledge.

The customs that Yemeni tribes have developed over centuries – the mediation processes, the compensation systems, the culture of forgiveness – are not primitive. They are sophisticated. They have been refined over generations to minimise violence, restore relationships, and maintain community cohesion in the absence of a strong central state.

These customs are under threat. Not from within – from without. From the war that Western‑supplied weapons have fuelled. From the chaos that Western‑backed interventions have created. From the imposition of Western models of justice – punitive, carceral, retributive – that have no place in tribal societies and no respect for their wisdom.

A United Nations report on women in conflict resolution in Yemen documents this loss. It notes that women have historically played active roles in tribal peacebuilding, utilising “the privileges of customary law and tradition to perform peacebuilding activities during conflict”.5. But the war has exacerbated existing gender inequalities and added new layers of vulnerability.5.

What is being lost is not just lives. It is alternatives.

The West’s model of justice – prison, punishment, the state monopoly on violence – is not superior. It is different. And in many ways, it is worse. It does not restore relationships. It does not heal communities. It does not offer forgiveness.

But the West does not offer its model as one among many. It imposes it. Through sanctions, through military intervention, through the structural adjustment programmes of international financial institutions, it forces other cultures to abandon their own ways of doing things and adopt the Western way.

And then, when those cultures descend into chaos – as cultures do when their social fabric is torn apart – the West points a finger and says: “See? They are violent. They are backward. They cannot govern themselves.”

It is a self‑fulfilling prophecy. And it is evil.

VIII. Who Benefits from the Narrative of the Savage?

The question answers itself.

The military‑industrial complex benefits. The weapons manufacturers who supply Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. The defence contractors who profit from endless war. The politicians who receive campaign contributions from those industries.

The media benefits. Outrage sells. Fear sells. Violence sells. A story about tribal forgiveness does not sell.

The neoliberal order benefits. A world of stable, peaceful, self‑governing nations does not need the International Monetary Fund. It does not need structural adjustment. It does not need Western “advisors.” The narrative of the savage – the incompetent, the corrupt, the violent – justifies intervention. And intervention justifies control.

And the West’s own self‑image benefits. Every time a news outlet shows a beheading, every time a politician warns of “terrorism,” every time a think‑tank publishes a report on “failed states,” the Western viewer is reassured: We are civilised. We are modern. We are good.

It is a comforting story. It is also false.

IX. The Question the West Will Not Answer

Who, then, is truly backward?

The farmer whose house is pulverised and who, the next day, sifts concrete dust for a photograph to bury? Or the cabinet that orders the strike and the cabinet that supplies the bomb, and the newsroom that edits the headline until the perpetrator disappears?6.

Backwardness is not about religion or geography. It is about the willingness to accept the suffering of others as the price of our own comfort, and to call that acceptance “reason.”

If modernity means anything worth having, it must mean the courage to break with the opiate of comforting lies. It means refusing complicity – not only with what we fund and arm, but with what we excuse. It means insisting that law is not a costume, that rights are not a currency, that the life of a child is not a geopolitical variable.

The West has spent decades manufacturing the “unacceptable other.” It has done so to justify wars, to sell weapons, to maintain control over resources, to preserve a self‑image that cannot bear the weight of its own crimes.

But the other is not unacceptable. The other is a mirror.

And in that mirror, the West does not see a savage. It sees itself.

Andrew Klein

References

1. SABA News Agency. (2024). Tribal mediation ends murder case in al-Qurashiya district, Al-Bayda.

2. Hart, D. M. (2001). Muslim tribesmen and the colonial encounter in fiction and on film. Het Spinhuis Publishers.

3. Elhagin, M. A. (2018). Orientalism and Edward Said. Qatar National Library.

4. SABA News Agency. (2025). Zionist entity places Palestinian prisoners, intel law under guillotine of violations.

5. Awadh, M., & Shuja’adeen, N. (2019). Women in Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding in Yemen. United Nations.

6. Anadolu Ajansı. (2025). OPINION – Who is truly backward? Gaza and the mirror of Western modernity.

7. China Daily. (2025). Time for change in the Middle East.

8. SABA News Agency. (2025). Tribal reconciliation in Hajja ends murder case between Al-Omari & Al-Jashman families.

9. Shaikh, T., Ossege, J., & Sears, R. (2018). Exposure. Taylor & Francis.

10. Hajj, Y. (2014). Thesis Paragraph on Cultural Stereotypes. The New School.