Hillary Clinton's faux feminism

Al Jazeera English

Last year, while researching an essay for an upcoming collection titled False Choices: The Faux Feminism of Hillary Rodham Clinton, edited by Liza Featherstone, I discovered that Clinton had deleted a rather incriminating section from the paperback edition of her autobiography.

In the original version, she detailed the lengths to which she went as secretary of state under Barack Obama to ensure the success of the 2009 coup d'etat in Honduras against slightly left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya.

After the coup, Clinton explained, she and select regional counterparts "strategised on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future".

Never mind that the Honduran people had already chosen Zelaya for the immediate future. In the United States' view, apparently, opting for anything less than totally right-wing in Latin America is also a "false choice". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Dirty Golf: Barack Obama Does Argentina

TeleSUR English

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you: 

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States? 

or 

B) visit some other time? 

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement. 

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship. 

But while Team Obama will undoubtedly milk this promise for all the brownie points it can, those of us with more than a feigned interest in human rights may be forgiven for not jumping for joy. For one thing, “declassification” does not literally translate as such in the American lexicon, as there are inevitably items deemed in need of redaction and other truth-obscuring measures. 

For another, as historian Greg Grandin notes in his recent book on Henry Kissinger, the notorious former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor “himself has noted that the sheer volume of foreign policy paperwork makes it impossible to determine ‘which documents were produced to provide an alibi and which genuinely guided decisions.’” READ MORE AT TeleSUR ENGLISH.

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you:

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States?

or

B) visit some other time?

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement.

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dirty-Golf-Barack-Obama-Does-Argentina-20160321-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Let’s say you’re the president of the United States and you decide to stage an official excursion to Argentina, the first bilateral visit by an American head of state in nearly two decades. Do you:

A) time your trip to exactly coincide with the 40th anniversary of a right-wing coup staged by a military junta that went on to forcibly disappear tens of thousands of people in said country, with the encouragement of none other than the United States?

or

B) visit some other time?

If you’re Barack Obama, you apparently go with the first option. When it is then suggested to you by concerned observers that your itinerary may be lacking in the sensitivity department, you decide to spend merely the eve of the coup anniversary in Buenos Aires and then the actual anniversary, March 24, playing golf in southern Argentina. This, of course, also comes off as one hell of a sensitive arrangement.

Last Thursday, less than a week before Obama’s scheduled descent upon the Argentine nation, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice announced that the president would use his visit to pledge a “comprehensive effort” toward declassifying additional Defense Department and intelligence records pertaining to the period of the military dictatorship.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Dirty-Golf-Barack-Obama-Does-Argentina-20160321-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Facebook without borders: reflections from South Lebanon

WARSCAPES

During a recent drive along the Lebanese border with Israel, I posted a photograph to Facebook taken from the south Lebanese town of Adaisseh. Facebook immediately asked if I wanted to specify the location as “Misgav Am, Hazafon, Israel.”

In addition to spawning a temporary panic attack, as generally happens when I am confronted with the inescapability of Big Brother, Facebook also piqued my curiosity. Once I had retrieved my laptop from where I had flung it in fright, I Googled the name and found that the top two suggested searches were “Misgav Am kibbutz” and “Misgav Am terrorist attack.” I went with the latter.

According to a dispatch from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) dated 9 April 1980, three Israelis had been killed the previous day during an assault on the kibbutz nursery by five Palestinian commandos from Lebanon, who were themselves all subsequently killed. The Israeli victims included a soldier and a two-and-a-half-year-old child.

Then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s views on the matter were quoted as follows: “Evil men who are bent on the destruction of Israel carried out this barbaric crime.” Incidentally, the article notes, Begin’s assessment was issued “as he received the Stephen Wise Award from an American Jewish Congress leadership mission visiting Jerusalem.”

Begin and other top Israeli officials attended the funeral in Misgav Am for the child and one of the other victims. According to the JTA, the words of poet Chaim Nachman Bialik were invoked at the service—and translated less-than-poetically by the news agency as: “Even Satan has not yet invented revenge for a little child’s blood.”

But if Satan hadn’t gotten around to it yet, others surely had. Since the foundation of the state of Israel more than three decades earlier, the Israelis had carved out a name for themselves in the massacre business—dispensing with children and older humans alike—under the pretense of responding to Arab aggression. READ MORE AT WARSCAPES.

LETTER FROM BEIRUT

The Washington Spectator

In recent years, many a Western journalist has descended upon the Lebanese capital of Beirut to captivate audiences with tales of the magically multisectarian life in the city, with its seemingly irreconcilable elements: Hezbollah and nightclubs, hijabs and billboard lingerie ads.

In 2010, The New York Times travel section discovered that, “[i]n a city of many faiths—Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Druze—at least one religion is universally practiced: sun worship,” and that “hordes of heliophiles . . . cultivate their bronzed exteriors” at high-end beach resorts. Never mind that the majority of Lebanese face serious impediments, both financial and religious, to baring their exteriors at such locales.

A Lebanese public committed to superficial materialism is perhaps an easier sell than reality, and the Times offers a “final Beirut investment tip: suntan oil.”

Another self-appointed promoter and political-cultural observer of the territory is roving celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who declares Lebanon “fully functioning, more or less” despite its history of hostilities and its 18 different recognized sects. Beirut, he insists, is a wonderland “EVERYONE should visit.”

As official history tells it, the Lebanese civil war was a 15-year-long affair that was brought to a close in 1990. Characterized by ever-evolving battle lines, inter- and intra-sectarian showdowns, foreign meddling, massacres, assassinations, and a bloody invasion by Israel in 1982, the conflict resulted in an estimated 150,000 deaths. At least 17,000 more “disappeared”—and those unknown fates are but one reason the war is far from over and done with.The country does indeed appear to be functioning rather well these days, especially when compared to neighboring war-stricken Syria. But as impressed as the international Orientalist community may be by the juxtaposition of Islam and mini-skirts, the fact of the matter is that Lebanon itself remains in the throes of its own civil war.

I met recently in Beirut with a Lebanese humanitarian worker who has conducted extensive interviews with families of the missing. He described the families as inhabiting a world akin to a “time capsule that is mummified,” unable to grieve properly and condemned to a psychological limbo in the absence of any definitive information regarding their loved ones. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

Colombia's challenging peace process with FARC

Al Jazeera English

Recently on Twitter, Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian President until 2010, took it upon himself to tweet the following line in English: "In Colombia human rights is an exclusive privilege of leftist people."

Never mind that the thousands of "leftist" and other kinds of people summarily executed on Uribe's watch were not in possession of a detectable abundance of human rights.

A pillar of Uribe's deplorable legacy, the so-called "false positives" scandal, saw the Colombian military murder an untold number of civilians and dress the corpses up as guerrillas belonging to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Latin America's longest-running civil war has left some quarter of a million people dead and displaced millions more.

It's not clear what precise incident prompted Uribe's Twitter rumination, but a common tactic of the right-wing Colombian elite - and their international allies - has been to accuse opponents of invoking the human rights discourse to get away with terrorism.

Such allegations naturally obscure the role the Colombian state itself has played in terrorising the population.

A 2014 Al Jazeera documentary features testimony by a former female paramilitary commander who describes collaborative village massacres by the army and paramilitary units - the purpose of the latter being to partially conceal government involvement in mass slaughter: "We killed 15-year-olds … and 16, 20 and 50-year-olds." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.