The West has lost the argument that our world order is a rules-based one. We knew it to be so from the time of the League of Nations. But the West's treatment of the invaders of Ukraine and the invaders of Palestine proves beyond doubt that this is no rules-based world.
Little wonder Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim finds it hard to believe in international law. We, too, share his view.
The West, led by the United States, went around the world ordering countries to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine, but no such globetrotting to condemn Israel's assault on Gaza, let alone sending aid to the Palestinians to help defend themselves against an apartheid regime.
What's worse, US President Joe Biden is calling Americans to spend billions in military aid for Israel to help it defend its "democracy". Reuters, a news agency, reporting from Washington, estimates the bill to amount to US$14 billion.
No less than the late president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, who knew apartheid like the back of his hand, told an American news channel that there was no doubt that Israel was an apartheid regime.
He is not with us to say that it still is, but several human rights organisations from Israel and the US say it is. How could Biden, who has been to Israel several times, not see it?
There is a great danger here for the US leaders, starting from the president. Sending weapons to Israel knowing fully well that they are being used to annihilate the Palestinians is tantamount to being complicit in their annihilation.
Genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes, you name it. Israel has committed them all. If a historical account of Israel's crimes is needed, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe lists them all between the covers of his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
We ask Washington, London and Brussels, if the West is really about rules-based order, why treat the Russian occupation of Ukraine as illegal while the Israeli occupation of Palestine as okay, nay as one to be encouraged?
If the cutting of water, electricity and food in Ukraine is a war crime, why isn't it so in Palestine? Biden ventures an answer: because Israel "has a value set like the US does". What value set?
Illegally occupying people's land and claiming it to be its own, not to mention killing them in the process? Imprisoning 2.3 million Palestinian refugees driven from the illegally created Israel in 1948 in what American journalist Eric S. Margolis describes as "a squalid human garbage dump"?
He should know. He has been reporting on the plight of the Palestinians for about 70 years. Where is the International Criminal Court that opened war crime investigations against Russia within 10 days of the invasion?
Why hasn't the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as quickly as it did against Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Here is our answer. The West's so-called rules-based order masquerades as international law. It is not only the prime minister of Malaysia who has called out the West's charade.
A growing number of other world leaders is losing faith in the so-called international law. And it is all of the West's own doing.