A Pharaoh is defined by the rules that control his or her subjects under his or her reign and power. If a society is systematically separated into two groups—one that is dehumanized and oppressed while the other is nourished as the privileged group “near the Pharaoh”—this suggests an inherently unhealthy culture and society.
God teaches us how oppressors think so we can reflect, investigate our contemporary culture, and check if these exact realities exist today. To understand how modern state power replicates ancient patterns of tyranny, we must first look past political rhetoric and ground ourselves in the objective, scientific, and legal definitions of justice, self-defense, and free speech. Only then can we see the modern mechanisms used to fracture humanity into favored factions and disposable populations.
The Scientific and Legal Baselines of Universal Rights
Before analyzing contemporary political structures, it is vital to clarify what the foundational tenets of human civilization mean in objective legal and behavioral science, free from ideological distortion.
1. Self-Defense
In both domestic and international law, self-defense is an inherent right, but it is strictly regulated by precise parameters to prevent it from morphing into aggression.
- The Element of Imminence: True self-defense is a reaction to an immediate, specific, and unlawful threat to life or physical integrity.
- The Principle of Proportionality: The force used in defense must be no more than what is absolutely necessary to repel the immediate threat and restore safety.
- The Reciprocal Right: The right to self-defense is universal and reciprocal. If Party A unlawfully attacks Party B, Party B has a legal right to defend themselves. Crucially, Party A cannot claim “self-defense” against Party B’s resistance, because Party A initiated the unlawful threat.
2. Just War Theory
In political science and international humanitarian law (such as the Geneva Conventions), a conflict is evaluated by two frameworks: the justification for going to war (Jus ad Bellum) and the code of conduct within that war (Jus in Bello).
- The Principle of Distinction: This is the absolute baseline of humanitarian law. Armed forces must at all times distinguish between active military combatants and civilians. Armed forces are legally and morally barred from targeting non-combatants, regardless of the perceived righteousness of their cause.
- Reciprocity: A war can only be considered “just” if both sides recognize a mutual, reciprocal right to exist, protect their people, and seek redress when wronged. A framework that claims a unilateral right to fight while denying the adversary any reciprocal legal protections or right to exist is classified in political science as Total War or Eliminationism, not Just War.
3. Free Speech
In political science and sociology, free speech is a foundational mechanism required for a society to function as a democracy.
- Universal Application: To be classified as a system practicing free speech, the rules protecting expression must be content-neutral and identity-neutral. The exact same protections and restrictions must apply to every individual within the jurisdiction, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or political alignment.
- The Harm Principle: Legal science universally restricts speech at the point where it directly incites imminent violence, constitutes credible threats, or advocates for the physical erasure of a protected group (incitement to genocide).
The Blindness of the Wrong Party: Cognitive Dissonance and the Oppressor’s Shield
A foundational truth of ethical and psychological science is that human beings almost universally defend themselves only when they believe they are “in the right.” However, a critical indicator that a party has actually transitioned into being “the wrong party” is a total, systemic inability to sense, accept, or even open themselves up to the investigation of being wrong.
In social psychology, this blind spot is maintained through the mechanism of cognitive dissonance. Coined by Leon Festinger, cognitive dissonance represents the acute psychological stress experienced when an individual’s self-image (e.g., “I am a moral, civilized defender of justice”) deeply clashes with their actual behavior (e.g., engaging in human slaughter or systematic oppression). Because the human brain struggles to hold these two contradictory truths simultaneously, it triggers unconscious, defensive reduction strategies.
Instead of changing the destructive behavior, the oppressor’s mind resolves the discomfort by altering its perceptions. It actively invents complex moral rationalizations, dehumanizes the victims so the harm feels “justified,” and filters out any incoming data that challenges the narrative of their own righteousness.
This psychological evasion inevitably manifests as structural corruption. If a nation or leadership preaches the doctrine of “just war” when they are the ones engaging in military action, but is completely incapable of recognizing an adversary’s right to a just war or retaliation, they are trapped in this moral delusion. When a state actively shuts down independent courts, blocks international tribunals, or criminalizes journalists and whistleblowers, it is trying to legally enforce its psychological comfort zone.
At what point does an entity realize it is no longer engaging in a just war? It is the exact moment they realize they are using the term “just war” not as a moral compass, but as a conceptual shield to avoid looking in the mirror and seeing themselves as the oppressor. True justice demands the humility to ask: “If I were the one enduring this treatment, would I have the right to resist?” When power strips away the capacity for self-investigation, language is corrupted into a tool for absolute moral self-exoneration.
The Scriptural Pattern: Displacing Words From Their Rightful Places
This pattern of psychological evasion is not new; it is a structural mechanism of corruption documented explicitly in divine text. The Qur’an highlights a specific semantic crime committed by those who seek to justify their violations of moral covenants:
“So for their breach of their covenant We cursed them and made their hearts grow hard. They distort words from their [proper] places and have forgotten a portion of that of which they were reminded…”
— Surah Al-Ma’idah (5:13)
When power structures engage in this distortion, they are practicing what scriptural scholarship recognizes as the linguistic displacement of truth. They take highly specific, sacred, or legal concepts—such as “Self-Defense,” “Just War,” and “Free Speech“—and violently wrench them out of their proper moral and structural frameworks.
By “taking words out of their rightful places,” an aggressor changes the baseline definition of terms to craft an elastic morality.
- “Self-Defense“ is removed from its proper place of proportionality and imminence and placed into a framework of permanent preemptive execution.
- “Just War“ is stripped of its baseline requirement of reciprocity and civilian immunity and converted into a blank check for total annihilation.
- “Free Speech“ is detached from neutral universality and twisted into a mechanism that shields genocidal rhetoric while criminalizing peaceful political dissent.
This is the ultimate semantic deception: borrowing the vocabulary of justice to execute the commands of tyranny.
Obstruction of Justice in International Law
When nations weaponize these psychological blind spots to actively shut down international investigations, their actions transition from ethical failures into severe violations of international law. International human rights and humanitarian treaties explicitly define the blocking, defunding, or intimidating of legal bodies as a lawless obstruction of justice:
- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC): Under Article 70 (Offences against the administration of justice), the ICC explicitly criminalizes any intentional act of “obstructing or interfering with the attendance or testimony of a witness” or “impeding, intimidating or corruptly influencing an official of the Court for the purpose of forcing or persuading the official not to perform… his or her duties”. Threatening international jurists with sanctions or isolating tribunals to evade accountability is a direct violation of international law.
- The Fourth Geneva Convention: Under Article 146 (Penal Sanctions), all High Contracting Parties have an absolute, watertight legal obligation to search for, investigate, and bring to justice any individuals suspected of ordering or committing “grave breaches” against civilians, regardless of their nationality. Active obstruction or blocking of these investigations breaks the very mechanism designed to prevent global lawlessness.
The Modern Manifestations: Weaponized Ideology and Two-Track Laws
When we measure contemporary international actions against these universal baselines, a stark divergence emerges. Across the globe, political figures and judicial bodies are actively engaged in redefining these terms to benefit a chosen faction while crushing another.
The Theological Justification of Civilian Harm
In an interview broadcast on October 2, 2026, British politician Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg debated American commentator Tucker Carlson regarding global security and historical conflicts. Within the discussion, Rees-Mogg explicitly utilized a Christian framework to argue that the killing of civilians and children can be justified under a “just war” rationale, pointing to historical precedents like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is not representative of Christianity as a whole, nor does it align with the core teachings of Jesus or the beliefs of millions of Christians. Rather, it represents a highly specific, localized ideological interpretation being weaponized to strip civilian populations of their inherent right to distinction, attempting to rebrand total warfare as a “just” endeavor while shielding the state from external scrutiny.
The Rhetoric of Eliminationism
Where some offer polished intellectual defenses for civilian casualties, others speak with absolute transparency. Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin openly stated that his concept of morality requires “wiping out” Gaza and annexing the West Bank. When asked directly if it was a Jewish point of view to completely wipe out Gaza, Feiglin responded, “100 percent.” He explicitly discarded the Principle of Distinction by asserting: “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… The enemy is not Hamas.”
Similarly, Daniella Weiss, a prominent leader in the Israeli settler movement, was captured on a BBC interview with Orla Guerin discussing the planned displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. When confronted with the reality that her goals match the definition of ethnic cleansing, Weiss dismissed the terminology, stating, “You choose your definition… I choose the way to protect the State of Israel.” She went on to claim that the world would absorb the people of Gaza because “normal people don’t want to live in hell.”
The Institutionalization of Selective Free Speech
These statements are not isolated remarks from rogue actors; they are protected and sustained by an underlying structural framework where civil liberties are systematically stratified based on identity. Historian Zachary Foster highlighted this institutional reality, observing:
“The ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ has 2 sets of speech rules: one for Jews and one for Palestinians. In English, we call this Apartheid. Not so complicated after all.”
This systemic double standard is evident in the actions of Israel’s Supreme Court. The judiciary has repeatedly permitted far-right ministers to openly utilize inflammatory, exclusionary, and genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians without facing a loss of their political careers or democratic standing. Conversely, the court has actively pressured Arab political leaders, such as Sami Abu Shehadeh, into withdrawing their candidacies for the Knesset based on their written rhetoric and dissent. This creates a two-track system of free speech where one ethnic group is legally permitted to lecture the public on the erasure of populations, while the oppressed group faces political bans, censorship, and judicial closure for asserting their own national narrative or demanding human rights investigations.
What These Examples Show: The Reality of Institutionalized Asymmetric Moralism
When we synthesize these examples, we see that these actors are not practicing self-defense, executing a just war, or protecting free speech. In the vocabulary of political science and sociology, they are engaged in:
- Institutionalized Asymmetric Moralism: A framework where a dominant political or legal entity claims absolute moral authority and total operational freedom for its own side, while systematically stripping the opposing population of the exact same universal rights. They operate under the corrupt logic that “we have the right to fight you, but you have no right to fight us, even when we are wrong.”
- Eliminationist Statecraft: The systematic effort to remove a specific ethnic, national, or religious group from a geographic territory or a political system—whether through physical displacement (as advocated by Weiss), military erasure (as advocated by Feiglin), or political suppression and the obstruction of independent legal tribunals.
- The Enforcement of an Ethnocracy: A system that maintains two entirely separate tracks of civil liberties based entirely on identity. Under this structure, fundamental human rights—the right to self-defense, the right to civilian immunity, and the right to neutral free speech—are treated not as universal human guarantees, but as exclusive privileges granted only to the faction close to the seat of power.
Conclusion: Reflecting on the Pharaoh’s Factions
The misuse of terms like “security,” “just war,” and “selective free speech” serves a singular purpose: to wrap the general public in a false moral framing designed by those in power to justify the unjustifiable. It is a psychological shield deployed to prevent societies from realizing that they have become the very oppressors they historically condemned. It is designed to make us look at the slaughter of infants as a geometric necessity of defense, and to look at the legal silencing of an oppressed group as the protection of democracy.
But the playbook of the oppressor is ancient, and its anatomy has been exposed to us so that we may remain vigilant. We are called to reflect on the correct framing of power, tyranny, and societal corruption through the words of the Qur’an:
“Indeed, Pharaoh exalted himself in the land and made its people into factions, oppressing a sector among them, slaughtering their [newborn] sons and keeping their females alive. Indeed, he was of the corrupters.”
(Quran 28:4)
Whenever a system begins to split humanity into factions—nourishing one while marking the babies of the other as “the enemy”—it has ceased to be a nation practicing justice. When it shields itself from international law, shuts down courts, distorts language from its proper place, and denies its own capacity to do wrong, it has become the empire of a Pharaoh. People of conscience must reject the selective frameworks wrapped around us by those in power, pierce through the shields of cognitive dissonance, and demand an unyielding return to universal reciprocity, true distinction, and equal justice for all.
Feedback, critiques, and corrections are always welcome. This analysis is an ongoing effort to understand and help others understand the complex structural dynamics, and open, principled dialogue that protects the full human rights and dignity of all is essential to refining these ideas.
About the Author: Fadwa Wazwaz writes at the intersection of contemporary politics, ethics, and scriptural reflection. Her work aims to unmask modern structural of power and oppression by ground-testing societal narratives against universal legal principles and timeless divine truths.
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