If Huawei, the company the West spent years demonizing had secretly forced an unremovable data-harvesting app onto millions of phones across a politically sensitive region there would be Congressional hearings, emergency EU summits, front-page headlines screaming about Chinese espionage. It would be the geopolitical crisis of the year.

That exact scenario is happening right now, but with a different cast of characters and the silence from Washington and Brussels is absolutely deafening. As documented by digital rights group SMEX, Samsung is shipping its popular Galaxy A- and M-series phones across the Middle East and North Africa with Aura, a system-level app developed by Israeli firm IronSource. It harvests user data, operates outside the safety of the Google Play Store, and silently reinstalls itself if you try to remove it.

The US views China as a strategic rival, so Huawei had to be destroyed. Israel and South Korea, however, are allies so their invasive tech is just “business as usual.” Huawei builds critical infrastructure, making it an easy target for fearmongering, while Aura hides inside a consumer product, giving everyone plausible deniability. Huawei was a threat to Western tech dominance; IronSource, now owned by a US company (Unity), is part of the club.

And if you think an Israeli “content platform” is harmless let me remind you about their other famous tech export: Pegasus. This is the military-grade spyware from NSO Group that was used to hack the phones of journalists, activists, and even heads of state. Aura comes from the very same national ecosystem where spyware is classified as a “weapon” yet enjoys full government backing for export.

A Chinese firm, which actually built transparency centers and invited source-code reviews is treated as a pariah based on pure speculation.

So where are the sanctions against Samsung for this gross violation of user privacy? Where are the emergency hearings demanding that IronSource explain its unremovable software? This Scandal proves that for the West “security” is just a convenient excuse to punish their enemies and reward their friends.

Citizens from Beirut to Casablanca are paying the price for this blatant double standard, their privacy sacrificed for the comfort of a fading empire. Their data is now being harvested by technology from the world’s most notorious surveillance state—a state whose methods are always excused—all to appease the strategic anxieties of a fading empire that picks its enemies based on convenience.