For most of my adult life, I accepted without serious examination which of these men I was supposed to fear and which I was supposed to respect.
The conditioning was so thorough, so consistent across every newspaper, every television broadcast, and every Western government statement, that it never occurred to me to interrogate the premise.
I simply absorbed it, as most people do, and moved on.
Then I started keeping a list.
The leader I was taught to regard as the world’s most dangerous man has not bombed a single school in Gaza. He has not displaced six million people across a thousand days of sustained military operations.
He has not been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. He does not appear in the Epstein files. He has not bombed a country’s civilian water infrastructure, starved a besieged population, or reduced an ancient city to rubble while the cameras of the world recorded every strike.
He has built nuclear weapons, yes, to defend a country that watched what happened to Iraq when it had no deterrence, to Libya when it surrendered its programme, and to every sovereign nation that placed its security in the hands of a great power whose priorities shifted.
Whether one agrees with that calculation or not, it is a rational one, and it is directed at his own borders rather than outward at other people’s children.
The leader I was taught to honour has an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
He presided over military operations that killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble in Lebanon, struck a school in Minab killing 168 Iranian children, and continues to govern an occupation that the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, and the vast majority of the world’s governments regard as illegal.
He leads a state that has conducted military operations against seven neighbouring countries. He stood before the United Nations in 2023 and displayed a map of the Middle East with Gaza and the West Bank simply erased.
Now ask yourself the honest question.
Who taught you which of these men to fear, and why? What institutions shaped that conclusion? What editorial decisions, repeated across decades of news coverage, produced the reflex that places one face in the category of civilised statesman and the other in the category of existential threat?
The conditioning is not accidental. A population that has been taught to see clearly would ask inconvenient questions about who is actually generating the most documented harm in the world today.
It is considerably easier to manage a population that has pre-assigned its moral categories before the evidence arrives.
I am not asking you to admire either of these men. I am asking you to apply the same standard to both.
Start with the documented record. Start with the verified body counts, the confirmed war crimes, the active international arrest warrants, and the names of the countries that have been invaded, bombed, blockaded, and dismantled within your own lifetime.
Then decide, based on the evidence rather than the conditioning, which face belongs in which category.
The answer may surprise you. The fact that it surprises you is itself the most important thing to examine.
– Source: Prince Taofeek Ajibade’s wall.
