On February 14, US Vice President JD Vance Causing At the Munich Security Conference, when he decided to accuse European allies in America for censorship. The angry Europeans retreated, pointing to a busy record of President Vans, President Donald Trump, in attacking and eroding democracy in the United States.

For many of us, supporters of freedom of expression outside the West, this exchange was somewhat entertaining. For a long time, the West was present on freedoms and criticized us for not being able to achieve them.

Last month, we were distinguished by a 10 -year offer since the brutal attack on the French satirical magazine office, Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent march by Western political and economic leaders in Paris to support cartoonists and the press and “the right to offend”, and we urged the world to be able to “take a joke and laughter On himself. Freedom of expression is the highest value for Western civilization, we were told.

It is very irony to see, after a decade, that the political and economic elites of these western countries themselves are circulating of censorship, while actively working in the background to suppress or distort freedom of expression.

At the same time, the majority in Western societies remains stubbornly denying that this happens on a systematic level and they are convinced that this party or this party is an exception to democratic rule. They still believe that censorship and repression, and they were always global southern problems.

I have been living in the West for nearly a decade, I was accustomed to wide reactions when I remember my profession. “Sudanese political cartoonist? They say,” This must be dangerous, “as if freedom of expression is an exclusive Western ideal. Western media want to indicate this and show anxiety.

For example, in 2015, when the cartoonist Atina Vargadani was sentenced to years in prison in Iran for photographing parliamentarians as animals, her story topped the headlines immediately. Tehran was widely convicted of its inability to “take a joke”.

There was also a lot of Western solidarity with Ali Farzat, a prominent Syrian cartoonist, who was kidnapped and broke his hands in 2011 to pull him a cartoon from Syrian President Bashar al -Assad. A few years later, the news of the death of the cartoonist Akram Raslan also sparked the lion’s prisons.

But the western voices of support and condemnation are quieter when it comes to “friendly systems”. The Egyptian cartoonist Ashraf Omar has been in detention for six months so far, with anyone’s interest in the West. Of course, when it comes to Palestinian artists, he tends to completely silence. In October, an Israeli bomb was killed Mahassen al-khateeb In Gabalia camp in Gaza; The last clarification of the Dalo young man was alive in the courtyard of Al -Aqsa Hospital. There was no Western condemnation of its death, or Israel’s killing of more than 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza.

As the prominent Palestinian thought in America, Edward reminds us, the West loves to imagine the East (and other places in the world) in ways that satisfy its civilizational ego.

“How can one today talk about” Western civilization “except for what is largely ideological imagination, which means a kind of separate excellence of a few values ​​and ideas, none of them meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, travel, travel, and people’s mixture That gave Western nations their current mixed identities?

In fact, censorship in the West is no less realistic than it was in the global south; It is simply more acceptable. It is true that cartoonists in the global south must move in clear red lines – the lines we know and learn to revolve around or leave it.

But what I am fighting to make Western peers understand that the West also has red lines. They found them difficult to see. The Sudanese proverb also goes: “The camel cannot see its neck curve.”

However, there are some red lines in the West completely clear; They are not called. For example, in 2019, a joint cartoon published by the New York Times was depicted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading Trump’s blind Trump after he was declined as anti -Semitism. In the following months, the newspaper decided to stop publishing the political cartoons completely.

In 2023, veteran cartoonist Steve Bell was to reject Also from the Guardian to draw a cartoon from Netanyahu claiming to be anti -Semitic; The newspaper did not reflect its decision even after the Israeli Animation Association Condemn fire.

There are other red lines that are accurately denied as “the interests of companies”, “liberation standards” or “general feelings”.

In 2018, the Israeli Caricature report was informed by the Jerusalem report, which has been working independently since 1990, was that it was no longer published due to a cartoon deployed on social media for the extremist right members in the technical. Pigs. The official statement made by the magazine attributed the decision to “Tahrir’s considerations”.

Recently, on January 4, Ann Telaiz, the long -term cartoonist in the Washington Post, announced her decision to stop her job after one of the cartoons, which criticized the owner of the post, Jeff Bezos, and his colleague in technology, for them from them Their sake surrendered to Trump, he was rejected. She wrote in a short article posted on Stemback that this is the first time that her salary cartoon has not been accepted “because of the permitted point of view in the suspension of animation.”

These are just a few examples that show the red lines of Western societies. It is true that the bold consequences of crossing a red line with your pen are not imprisonment or death, as it can be in other places, but in the end, the result is the same: the cartoonists are silenced.

It is possible that what we see today is worse, as billionaires purchase more media and publishing platforms, as they can determine who is published based on their economic interests and political benefit. Freedom of expression, opposition, and accountability of power are no longer responsible by Western elites; It is managed.

Currently, the Palestinians bear the burden of censorship and violent repression in the West. The protesters supporting the Palestinians were brutally beaten and arrested and directed it with criminal or even terrorist crimes throughout Western countries. One may be naive to believe that such evil persecution and violation of the “Western values” of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression will stop at the pro -Palestinian movement.

For cartoonists gay from the global south, freedom of expression is not just an ideal with noble – it is a daily struggle that we have sacrificed a lot. I hope that my colleagues in the West and their fans will stop taking this freedom as a Muslim by it and realize the violent repression that began to raise his head in their societies as well.

It is time to end illusion and denial, and take action.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.