Let's face it: We have an epidemic of sexual harassment

Al Jazeera English

Every so often in the United States, a scandal erupts to temporarily demolish the country's marketed image as a pioneer in gender equality and related rights.

The name of the current scandal is, of course, Harvey Weinstein - the millionaire Hollywood film mogul accused of sexual assault by an ever-expanding number of women, as his decades-long impunity appears to be coming to an end.

Weinstein, however, is merely the tip of the iceberg. In a recent New Yorker piece titled All the Other Harvey Weinsteins, actress Molly Ringwald writes about her own history as a victim of sexual harassment in the film industry, noting, "I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather."

But at least meteorological discussions aren't generally met with the shame, recrimination, and victim-blaming that so often attend accusations of sexual assault in a society plagued by the phenomenon.

As for the fate awaiting the perpetrators of such misconduct, Ringwald remarks, "And the men? Well, if they're lucky, they might get elected President." But at least meteorological discussions aren't generally met with the shame, recrimination, and victim-blaming that so often attend accusations of sexual assault in a society plagued by the phenomenon.

Cue the soundtrack of the current US president, who is known for - among other antics - his endearing observations about "grab[bing]" women "by the p****". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Who wins from casting Hezbollah as a new terror bogeyman?

Middle East Eye

On 10 October, the United States announced multimillion-dollar rewards for "information leading to the location, arrest, or conviction in any country" of Talal Hamiyah and Fu'ad Shukr, said to be "key leaders" of Lebanon's Hezbollah. The bounty for Hamiyah has been set at "up to $7 million"; for Shukr, it’s merely "up to $5 million".

In the accompanying US State Department press briefing on "US efforts to counter Hezbollah", Ambassador-at-large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, and National Counterterrorism Center Director, Nicholas Rasmussen, competed to see who could emit the most words without saying anything of substance.

A couple of takeaways: despite pretending to be a political party in Lebanon, Hezbollah is a "terrorist organisation" that is "rotten to its core", with a decades-long "penchant for violence". Created by Iran to "foment instability… across the world", it is currently "determined to give itself a potential homeland option as a critical component of its terrorism playbook" (translation: Hezbollah is plotting attacks on the US). "[O]ur work related to Hezbollah is every bit as much of a priority as our work against al-Qaeda and ISIS."

And of course, no discussion of the Lebanese group would be possible without trotting out this pet factoid: "Prior to September 11th… Hezbollah was responsible for the terrorism-related deaths of more US citizens than any other foreign terrorist organization"- namely via the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the "even more deadly attack on our [Beirut] Marine barracks in October of 1983 which killed 241 Americans."

Leaving aside the fact that Hezbollah didn't officially exist in 1983, the enduring hype over the barracks bombing fails to account for the detail that the Marines are by definition a military force - and as such were perceived as occupiers by certain sectors of the Lebanese population. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Time to Declare War on the US ‘War on Drugs’ in Latin America

Upside Down World

At a meeting with U.S. law enforcement officials earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions expressed his dismay at perceived inertia on the domestic drug war front: “Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad … It will destroy your life.”

Plenty of folks would no doubt agree with the latter point—including the victims in the following trivia from American historian Howard Zinn: “[B]ack in the 1950s, [the US Central Intelligence Agency] had administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects: one American scientist, given such a dose by a CIA agent, leaped from a New York hotel window to his death.”

When President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, he denounced drug abuse as “America’s public enemy number one,” but various sectors of the American public have long faced a more formidable enemy in the government itself. Consider, for example, the diary entry from Nixon’s former chief of staff noting that the president had “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

The drug war, it seems, was one way to do it — at least judging from the institutionalized discrepancies in drug-related sentencing and the general enthusiasm for throwing Black people in jail.

Of course, the U.S. War on Drugs has also been great fun for the rest of the world, particularly the countries lucky enough to be located in the United States’ “backyard,” where the drug menace has justified all manner of militarization, arms sales, and support for right-wing governments and movements.

It’s no coincidence that Venezuela, Bolivia, and other contemporary obstacles to the desired hemispheric order are consistently lambasted with narco-charges, while ultra-right-wing characters like former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe are hailed as exemplary political specimens — despite, you know, appearing on a 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency list of “the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels.”

The United States’ own complicity in the international drug trade is a rather well-kept secret, thanks in large part to a useless mainstream media, in which deviation from the establishment line can result in ridicule, ostracization, and — as in the case of former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb — ruin. In a series of reports in 1996, Webb suggested that there had been a connection between the crack cocaine epidemic that had devastated black communities in South Central Los Angeles in the early 1980s and the fact that CIA-backed Contras had at that time been engaged in drug running to the US. Thoroughly maligned and discredited, Webb went on to kill himself in 2004. READ MORE AT UPSIDE DOWN WORLD.

From Paris of the Middle East to a depressing Hollywood film set: How gentrification changed Beirut

Middle East Eye

This month, Turkey’s Pegasus Airlines became the latest international entity to trip over itself in euphoric praise of Beirut - a metropolis that has already elicited much fanfare from everyone from the New York Times to Vogue to celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain.

Often, the fanfare revolves around Beirut's opportunities for shameless, high-end consumption and/or the pseudo-exotic panorama awaiting the Orientalist traveler in a multi-sectarian city in which hijabs and miniskirts magically coexist. (We also mustn’t forget VICE’s super-cool report on Beiruti "bars offer[ing] coke-fuelled benders down the street from Hezbollah headquarters".)

In featuring the Lebanese capital as its destination of the month, the airlines magazine has opted for another overused trope: that of Beirut as a "city that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes" of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) to reclaim its former glory as the "Paris of the Middle East".

Regarding postwar reconstruction efforts in the city centre, the magazine gushes: "With the strong attention from tourists and the many international brand-names it has attracted, the city's main shopping district has played an important role in keeping downtown Beirut alive both financially and culturally".

Never mind that "alive" should not be the first word that comes to mind to describe a place that is economically and socially off-limits to the vast majority of a country's inhabitants. It is an aseptic space generally purged of any sign of community or culture beyond its monuments to obscene wealth: fantastically expensive apartment complexes, five-star hotels, luxury boutiques, and so forth.

Additional cultural flavour comes in the form of heavily armed security forces and a fluctuating arrangement of barricades and barbed wire.

In other words, Beirut’s renovated downtown hardly lives up to its marketed role as a forum for postwar reconciliation and reunification of the Lebanese nation - unless by "Lebanese nation" we happen to mean investors from the Gulf and other representatives of the global elite. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Che: 50 years dead and going strong

Al Jazeera English

Fifty years ago, on October 9, 1967, Ernesto "Che" Guevara - Argentine-born doctor and Cuban revolutionary hero - was executed in Bolivia as part of a US-orchestrated plot to rid the world of his pernicious anti-imperialist influence.

Given that Guevara is as popular and symbolic as ever half a century later, it seems that the US government can safely file that project under the category "Oops". 

Of course, the Americans have long denied responsibility for the killing - a claim neatly dismantled by American lawyers Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith in their book "Who Killed Che? How the CIA Got Away with Murder". 

Cuban-American CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, present at Guevara's demise in the Bolivian hamlet of La Higuera, has helped promote the US line that the fatal decision was all the Bolivians' doing.

Rodriguez has, furthermore, vociferously objected to the romanticisation of a man he says was nothing more than "an assassin" who "enjoyed killing people" - a pretty rich allegation coming from someone who also volunteered to assassinate Fidel Castro and who, Ratner and Smith note, has referred to the Dominican Republic's former blood-drenched dictator Rafael Trujillo as a "so-called tyrant". READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.