27 December 2017

Remembering Cast Lead: How corporate media continue to justify Israel's criminal excesses

Middle East Eye

Palestine, now approaching its 70th anniversary of usurpation by Israel, has long been recognised as a laboratory for fine-tuning punitive Israeli policies and techniques.
As the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has extensively documented, the "ongoing colonisation of Palestine and the accompanying atrocities" have enabled Israel to develop "great expertise in repression", while "exporting these tools and methods on an industrial scale has become crucial to Israeli economic political power".
But Palestine has served as another kind of laboratory, one in which certain Western media figures and other upstanding characters work to perfect their talent for exonerating - and even encouraging - Israeli atrocities.
Since 27 December marks the ninth anniversary of the launch of Israel's Operation Cast Lead - a 22-day affair that dispensed with some 1,400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip - we might as well start with the analysis by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times of that particular operation.
As Friedman saw it at the time, Cast Lead was simply "the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: 'Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn't we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?'"
Of course, seeing as Israel was, as usual, doing most of the "blowing up" - and that Palestinian civilians perished at a rate of approximately 400: 1 vis-a-vis their Israeli counterparts during Cast Lead - some observers might have suggested alternate titles for the bloody spectacle, such as: "Why does Thomas Friedman have a job? And shouldn't we convert the New York Times office into a landfill?"

This became especially true when Friedman went on to advocate for war crimes by recalling Israel's alleged "education of Hezbollah” in its 2006 war on Lebanon and prescribing a similar educational approach to Hamas in Gaza. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

24 December 2017

Coca-Cola: Red-and-whitewashing the empire

Al Jazeera English

This month, the New York Times reported that US President Donald Trump consumes a "dozen Diet Cokes" daily - often delivered by "household staff he summons via a button."
Who knows? Maybe overdosing on all-powerful US corporate brands will help the president "Make America Great Again".
In the meantime, a Washington Post article has taken Trump's Diet Coke habit and run with it, citing a recent study according to which "people who drank diet soda daily were three times more likely to develop stroke and dementia than those who consumed it weekly or less."
Also mentioned in the article is the possibility of weight gain owing to "artificial sweeteners [that] can confuse the brain and the body". 
Suggestions of a correlation between soda consumption and deleterious health effects, including diabetes and heart disease, are, of course, nothing new - although Coca-Cola has in the past sought to distract public attention from the bad news by funding more industry-favourable narratives.
To be sure, Coca-Cola is hardly the only culprit in a world so saturated with soft drinks, fast food and other counter-nutritional items that one often wonders how humans are even still alive.
But as the Coca-Cola Company website boasts, Coke is the "most popular and biggest-selling soft drink in history", with an estimated 1.9 billion beverages served globally every day. 
In other words, it's a gigantic part of the problem. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

15 December 2017

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Islamophobia: A brand that sells

Middle East Eye

When Saudi Arabia announced in September that females would be permitted to drive as of mid-2018, prominent anti-Islam campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali tweeted a "Yippeee!" and a "Congratulations to all the women of the KSM."
Lest followers assume she was referring to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the alleged 9/11 mastermind known as KSM - the ever-meticulous Hirsi Ali then tweeted an apology for the typo and a correction: "Should be KSA: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
But her fervent dislike has been somewhat ameliorated by the rise this year of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - latest despotic darling of the New York Times - whom Hirsi Ali lauded in her own recent Times dispatch for his "modernisation efforts", thanks to which Saudi Arabia might in 10 years "look more like the United Arab Emirates, its prosperous and relatively forward-looking neighbour".
To be sure, as the two neighbours currently spearhead the forcible starvation of Yemen, one can only hope the Saudis will absorb some other lessons in modernity from their Emirati counterparts, so well-versed in the crushing of human rights and souls.
In the meantime, Hirsi Ali has ensured her own enduring prosperity by continuously broadcasting to the world the existential perils posed by radical Islam - a topic she accuses leftists and other pesky members of humanity of treating as taboo.
Equally taboo, it seems, is the matter of the impressive series of fabrications upon which Hirsi Ali’s entire career is built - the exposure of which has not interfered in the least with her institutionalisation at Harvard, Stanford, and other prestigious outfits. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

04 December 2017

Celebrity 'charity': A gift for a vicious system

Al Jazeera English

When movie star George Clooney married human rights lawyer and fashion icon Amal Alamuddin in Venice back in 2014, the Entertainment Tonight website declared that "it was charity that came out as the real winner" of the multimillion-dollar nuptial festivities. 
The reason for the alleged win was that proceeds from certain wedding photos were said to be destined for - you guessed it - "charity", that favourite celebrity pastime that so often translates into massive PR points and saviour-hero credit, not to mention tax breaks.
We non-celebrities have been so conditioned to perceive charity as something unconditionally positive - rather than a commodification and exploitation of faux altruism - that we don't seem to notice reality's conspicuous absence from the feel-good world of celeb-philanthropy.
Case in point: reports that rock star Bono's anti-poverty foundation ONE managed in 2008 to channel a mere 1.2 percent of the funds it raised to the people it purported to be assisting have done nothing to interfere with the man's portrayal as some sort of messiah for Africa.
In the case of the Clooneys, who now preside over their very own Clooney Foundation for Justice, celebrity worship and Amal-mania have also precluded sound judgement. Objectively speaking, it would seem that "justice" is not really an option in a world in which human rights lawyer-philanthropists by the name of Amal Clooney wear outfits costing $7,803. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.