With the Doha strike, Netanyahu has declared war on the world

Al Jazeera English

And so Israel has struck again.

On Tuesday, the Middle East’s favourite perennial aggressor launched missiles against the Qatari capital of Doha, targeting Hamas leaders involved in negotiations surrounding a proposal from the United States for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has officially killed more than 64,000 people in less than two years.

To be sure, Israel has never been a fan of ceasefires – even ones proposed by the reigning global hegemon and most devout backer of Israeli atrocities. After all, the state’s very existence is predicated on wiping out Palestinians and engaging in unceasing belligerence.

And while anyone harbouring an iota of common sense will have long regarded Israel as a rogue state, the unprecedented attack on Qatar appears to have opened some international eyes with regard to just how out of control the Israeli government actually is. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Distraction 101: Blow them up

 Al Jazeera English

On September 2, the United States conducted a sensational military strike on a speedboat in the southern Caribbean Sea in violation of both international and US law. The extravagant attack killed 11 civilians on board, whom US President Donald Trump had magically intuited to be drug traffickers affiliated with Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.

The spectacle was staged amid the ongoing deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast under the pretence of fighting “narcoterrorists” whose ringleader, according to the current Trumpian narrative, is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – no surprise given the country’s lengthy role as a thorn in the side of US imperialism. . . .

But why the sudden need on Trump’s part to project a warrior image by blowing up a speedboat in the Caribbean? To put it briefly, it serves as a convenient distraction from the president’s dismal failure on other fronts to live up to his super-tough-guy vision of himself.

His ultimatums to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine, for example, have proved fruitless. Ditto for intermittent pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap up the genocide in the Gaza Strip, where in less than two years Israel has officially killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Path Is Made by Walking

 THE BAFFLER

Hanging from the ceiling at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:

Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá
“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”
Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream

A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.) READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

A Reporter’s Journey through the Darién Gap: A Q&A with Author Belén Fernández

 The Border Chronicle

What has been happening on the Darién Gap, one of the deadliest border crossings in the Western Hemisphere? Luckily, we have author Belén Fernández here to give us an in-depth rundown. Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that. She accomplishes this in her new book, The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, and she does it here with her answers in this interview.

Here, she discusses the Gap as an extension of the U.S. border, her own travel in it in 2024, the people she met—including the smugglers—and the testimonies she heard from people about the Darién Gap when she was locked up in an immigration prison in Mexico. Fernández is a prolific author, and her other work includes Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up inside Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center and Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera. READ MORE AT THE BORDER CHRONICLE.

Media Dance Around Illegality of Trump’s Third-Country Deportation Scheme

 FAIR

Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.

The US government itself acknowledged that Ábrego García’s removal had transpired as a result of an “administrative error.” However, both the Trump administration and that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”—were huffily opposed to rectifying said error. Ábrego García was at last returned to the US in June, only to now face deportation to…Uganda, the east African country that has been roped into serving as one of numerous international dumping grounds for asylum seekers and undocumented persons who are unwanted in the US. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony says a lot about our dystopia

 Al Jazeera English

And so the verdict is out. United States President Donald Trump’s name has been cleared of ignominious association with the late disgraced financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This is according to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years behind bars on sex trafficking charges.

Earlier this year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly informed the president that his name appeared in the so-called “Epstein files”, the content of which Trump had said on the campaign trail he would be quite keen on releasing.

Once in office, however, he spontaneously decided that the Epstein case was old news, going so far as to reprimand those in his own MAGA base who were “stupid” and “foolish” enough to continue insisting that the files be declassified.

Now, the US Justice Department has released transcripts of a July interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, and Maxwell, who had nothing but praise for the president’s moral solidity. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Darien Gap ‘closure’: Border theatre in the jungle

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Fortress Beirut

THE BAFFLER

At the 2017 groundbreaking ceremony for the United States’ $1 billion-fortified new embassy in Beirut, then-U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard offered some words on the momentousness of the occasion:

"Breaking ground today on our new embassy compound is a strong message to the Lebanese people that we are with you for the long term. We intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for two hundred years."

Given America’s history of backing Israel’s bouts of mass slaughter in the country, many Lebanese were presumably not overly reassured by the prospect of further “cooperation.” The ambassador’s chronological calculations regarding the joint “journey” were curious, as two hundred years ago Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Lebanese still can’t get a break. In October 2023, Israel launched a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and decided to take advantage of the bellicose momentum to go after Hezbollah as well. The Israeli military was no doubt encouraged by the obscene increase in military aid and weaponry from the United States; after President Joe Biden authorized an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel in April 2024, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Israel Katz took to X to applaud the aid package as sending “a strong message to all our enemies.” READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

The Alaska summit was a spectacular distraction

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?

Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country’s war in Ukraine.  

And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

 . . . the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019. . . And while the Alaskan red-carpet stunt provided little to write home about, distraction may yet prevail as folks ponder what the hell that was all about. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Respecting the human right to sleep? Dream on

 Al Jazeera English

When I was a freshman at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my Literature Humanities course shared some personal information with my class, which was that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what prompted the disclosure, though I do recall it was made not to elicit pity but rather as a matter-of-fact explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow her sufficient time to simultaneously maintain her professorship and tend to her baby.

This, of course, was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of rampant sleep deprivation to another level. But modern life has long been characterised by a lack of proper sleep – an activity that happens to be fundamental to life itself. . . .

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States, approximately one-third of US adults and children under the age of 14 get insufficient sleep, putting them at increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and a host of other potentially life-threatening maladies. As per CDC calculations, a full 75 percent of US high schoolers do not sleep enough. . . .

Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip, residents of the occupied territory are well acquainted with acute sleep deprivation, which is currently a component of the Israeli military’s genocidal arsenal for wearing Palestinians down both physically and psychologically. Not that a good night’s sleep in Gaza was ever really within the realm of possibility – even prior to the launch of the all-out genocide in 2023 – given Israel’s decades-long terrorisation of the Strip via periodic bombardments, massacres, sonic booms, the ubiquitous deployment of buzzing drones, and other manoeuvres designed to inflict individual and collective trauma. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.