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Trump’s association with Jeffrey Epstein and endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu are contrasted in this commentary, which argues that Western power condemns scandal when it threatens prestige but excuses mass violence when it serves empire.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
There is something magnificently obscene about a civilisation that treats association with a sex trafficker as a moral scandal, but endorsement of a leader accused of genocide as statesmanship.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s October 27 elections exposes a truth Western imperial power has long concealed beneath its civilisational pretensions: barbarism is supposedly what the darker nations do. Mass killing, when perpetrated by favoured allies, becomes foreign policy.
Jeffrey Epstein is a scandal. Benjamin Netanyahu is celebrated. One association invites repudiation; the other earns presidential endorsement. Behold the moral double standard of empire: depravity is condemned when it embarrasses power and defended when it serves it.
Trump’s association with Epstein has become politically radioactive, prompting Republican loyalists to minimise its significance and discourage scrutiny. Yet the same political establishment applauds his endorsement of a leader presiding over Gaza’s devastation, starvation, and mass killing. Netanyahu, subject to International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is praised as a great warrior and partner for peace.
But the deeper obscenity lies in the racialised mythology surrounding Western civilisation itself. Trafficking, sexual exploitation, and predatory depravity have long been depicted as pathologies of the Orient, the Global South, and supposedly backward societies against which the West defines its virtue.
Trump has exploited precisely this vocabulary, portraying Mexico and the darker world beyond America’s borders as exporters of criminality and sexual menace. Epstein punctures that fantasy. His machinery of sexual predation operated not in some supposedly savage colonial backwater but within Western plutocracy, among financiers, celebrities, and political elites.
The horror, in this racialised imagination, is not merely that such crimes occurred. It is that they occurred here, among civilisation’s self-appointed custodians.
Netanyahu presents no comparable embarrassment. Why should he? Genocide, dispossession, and mass slaughter are hardly alien to Western imperial history. They are woven into its formation, from Indigenous extermination to colonial conquest. The Zionist extermination campaign in Gaza simply exposes the enduring logic of that tradition.
And Trump, that vulgar spokesman for imperial entitlement, does not merely excuse Netanyahu. He celebrates him.
His loyalists applaud. Republican sycophants parade their devotion to Israel as moral courage. Meanwhile, sections of the Western liberal establishment recoil at Trump’s shamelessness, even as their own political traditions have repeatedly accommodated Zionist ethnic cleansing and violence. Trump embarrasses them by openly advertising the settler-colonial logic their imperial order prefers to disguise beneath humanitarian rhetoric.
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Their objection is not necessarily to the barbarism. It is to Trump’s refusal to conceal its pedigree.
Outrage is permitted. Consequences are not.
That is what makes his endorsement so revealing. Epstein represents an association to be explained away; Netanyahu, an allegiance to be proudly proclaimed. One threatens Western moral self-regard; the other reinforces the geopolitical order sustaining it.
Trump did not invent this moral architecture. He merely stripped away its disguises. Where liberal imperial elites reconcile mass killing with humanitarian vocabulary, Trump dispenses with the inconvenience of embarrassment.
Epstein exposed the depravity within institutions claiming to define civilisation. Netanyahu exposes the violence those institutions are prepared to finance, defend, and celebrate.
One scandal reveals what powerful men are ashamed to be associated with. The other reveals what they are proud to endorse.
The Epstein affair threatens the moral reputation of Western imperial power. Netanyahu’s genocide exposes its moral foundations. And Trump’s unforgivable vulgarity is that he cannot distinguish between the two — because, historically, neither could the empire he represents.
Professor Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan.
