Trump's message to the Middle East

Middle East Eye

During a press briefing on Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump was asked whether he was “concerned that by not punishing Saudi Arabia more” for the October murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, “it could send a message to other world leaders that they can do as they please, and America could be weak in their eyes”.

Trump’s response - “not at all” - was followed by a rambling list of all the wondrous functions of the Saudi kingdom, from keeping oil prices low to buying US “equipment”, to being good for Israel. To be sure, US allies, not to mention the US itself, have long gotten away with murder - and on a much larger scale; see for example America’s bloody destruction of Iraq under the pretence of saving the country.

The August massacre of 40 Yemeni children on a school bus by the US-backed Saudi-led coalition also comes to mind, as does the fact that the Israeli tradition of “do[ing] as they please” by obliterating Palestinians left and right is met with ever-increasing US solidarity and funds.

Now, as we enter 2019, the Trumpian “message” to the Middle East might be summed up as follows: For US buddies and clients of the US arms industry, brutality is no longer a cause for shame - or even pretend shame. Impunity is in infinite supply, journalists are legitimate targets, and human rights and freedoms are things to be brought up only when America’s favourite Iranian nemesis can be cast as violating them. In other words, welcome to the era of unabashed enthusiasm for authoritarian repression. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

A Milestone on the Timeline of Israeli Brutality

Jacobin

Ten years ago today, on December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the Gaza Strip — a twenty-two-day affair that ultimately dispensed with some 1,400 Palestinian lives, among them more than three hundred children.

The name of the operation was inspired by a Hanukkah poem by H. N. Bialik, national poet of Israel. The Daily Beast mused at the time: “It might seem strange that Israel would name a military operation after a holiday associated with gifts and dreidels, but in Israel, the Hanukkah story celebrates national liberation.”

In other words, perhaps, the slaughter of innocents was not just fun and games — it was also crucial to Israel’s “liberation” from the people it had occupied and abused for no fewer than six decades, since the violent establishment of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948.

The Israeli fatality count from Cast Lead totaled three civilians and ten soldiers (four of them from friendly fire), which put the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths at 400:1. Predictably, however, Israel unfurled its signature brand of criminal illogic to claim the role of victim, portraying itself as under attack from Hamas rockets despite the negligible damage inflicted.

The victimhood effort got a helpful boost when the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs opted to include 584 victims of “shock and anxiety syndrome” in its official Cast Lead casualty tally — although we can safely assume that shock and anxiety in Israel are often a result of the government’s obsession with air raid sirens and other forms of politically expedient fearmongering rather than any actual physical threat.

Were the Palestinians of Gaza permitted the luxury of psychological suffering, casualty figures would presumably be fairly indistinguishable from the population count itself, considering the regular Israeli bombardments, ubiquitous drones, and other perks of existence in what is frequently called the “world’s largest open-air prison.” As former Oxfam spokesman in Gaza Karl Schembri once put it: “How can you talk about post-traumatic stress interventions in Gaza when people are still in a constant state of trauma?”

Western mainstream media outlets, ever-reliable conduits for Israeli propaganda, explained Cast Lead in the same way they explain all Israeli onslaughts: as “retaliation” for some Palestinian offense. In this case, Hamas was accused of breaking a ceasefire by firing rockets into Israel — even though the rockets (which injured no one) were themselves a response to Israel’s lethal, ceasefire-violating raid into the Gaza Strip.

The media’s insistence on endowing Israel with a perennial monopoly on retaliation obscures the reality that any Palestinian action against Israel is fundamentally a reaction to Israel’s brutal usurpation of Palestinian territory, institutionalized policy of ethnic cleansing, and habitual massacres. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

'Barbed wire-plus': Borders know no love

Al Jazeera English

During a Thanksgiving Day teleconference with members of the US armed forces, US President Donald Trump took the opportunity to exult over the intensified militarisation of the nation's southern border in response to the US-bound Central American migrant and refugee caravan:

"We have the concertina fencing and we have things that people don't even believe. We took [the] old, broken wall and we wrapped it with barbed wire-plus … We're fighting for our country. If we don't have borders, we don't have a country". 

Nevermind that the United States' disregard for other people's borders is a major cause of Central American migration in the first place, as US political and economic meddling in the region continues to increase poverty and violence.

Now, the "barbed wire-plus" scheme has resulted in a situation in which thousands of asylum seekers are stuck on the Mexican side of the border waiting to have their cases processed, with black numbers written on their arms as part of an informal tracking system.

Even the ultra-Zionist Times of Israel - another country well known for its manic and deadly border fortification projects - felt compelled to note that the "marking of asylum seekers" recalled the "Nazi practice of tattooing prisoner numbers".

Nor has "barbed wire-plus" worked out well for some of Trump's fellow citizens as 32 people were recently arrested at a pro-migrant demonstration on the border, organised by a Quaker group. Time Magazine explains that the protest "was meant to launch a national week of action called Love Knows No Borders: A moral call for migrant justice, which falls between Human Rights Day on [December 10], and International Migrants' Day on December 18".

And as we mark this year's International Migrants' Day, right-wing efforts rage on to selectively criminalise not only migration but also human solidarity and empathy. After all, the prevailing capitalist system - in which the financial tyranny of the minority is predicated on the severance of interpersonal bonds - can't really handle love. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Saudi-Israeli love affair: Traffic jam of the century?

Middle East Eye

On Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump participated in a teleconference with members of the US military from his Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago.

The chat elicited many an enthusiastic presidential soundbite, such as: "Good old army. We love the army." The good cheer came to an abrupt end, however, during the post-teleconference press briefing, when Trump was forced to field a couple of questions about the October murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Asked whether the CIA was in possession of a recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman demanding that Khashoggi be silenced, the president responded: "I don't want to talk about it. You have [to] ask them."

And yet, he did manage to talk at length about how, regardless of who ordered the murder, "we have a very strong ally in Saudi Arabia" - which, in addition to helping make America great in many other ways, had apparently also facilitated Trump's self-marketing as the god of cheap gasoline: "I see that yesterday, [in] one of the papers, I was blamed for causing traffic jams because I have the oil prices so low ... let's have some traffic jams."

Also working in the Saudis' favour, according to Trump's analysis, was that "Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia" - a statement that generated some backlash from Israelis peeved at the suggestion that anyone but Israel was to thank for staving off big trouble in the world.

Incidentally, Trump's Thanksgiving Day allusion to the Saudi-Israeli alliance - a subject that has generally fallen under the category of Things We Absolutely Do Not Talk About - was merely one of a recent string of similar comments.

In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump praised Saudi Arabia as "a very good ally with respect to Iran and with respect to Israel". A presidential statementissued on 20 November - headlined with the exclamation "America First!" - once again addressed the centrality of the Saudi kingdom to "our very important fight against Iran," with support for Saudi Arabia being crucial to "ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region".

Among these interests, we are told, is "our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!" But while this may indeed sound like a noble aim, it is presumably not best achieved with the help of the state that has spent the past 70 years terrorising Palestinians, or the one currently presiding over the terrorisation of Yemen (and that also happened to produce 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers). READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Why is this Iranian regime change cult building a base … in Albania?

Middle East Eye

In early September, Albanian Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati travelled to Israel to participate in a counterterrorism summit and some nauseating photo ops with an Israeli cast of characters, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Bushati joked around a bit before getting down to terror-fighting and other business.

Israel, of course, has already conspicuously advertised the hypocrisy of its self-appointment to the counterterrorist vanguard by, inter alia, regularly terrorising Palestinians. Albania's counterterrorism credentials, while less well-known, are also pretty dubious: the Balkan nation currently hosts the headquarters of the Iranian terrorist cult known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, dedicated to violent regime change in Iran.

Delisted as a terrorist organisation in 2012 by the United States - another entity well-versed in the art of terror disguised as counterterror - the MEK is almost comprehensively reviled within Iran on account of its history of allying with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, as well as numerous other attacks and assassinations on Iranian soil.

The group’s near-total marginalisation notwithstanding, their regime change message is most welcome in Washington - and indeed was so even before the terror delisting. 

Between 2013 and 2016, at the behest of the US, several thousand MEK members were relocated from their former base in Iraq to Albania. Now, the MEK presides over a sprawling, heavily fortified camp not far from the Albanian capital of Tirana.

But why Albania? Simply put, it’s not that difficult for the global superpower to twist the arm of a small and often overlooked country that was, until the 1990s, isolated on the world stage, and that is now eager to make up for lost time by ingratiating itself with empire. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The inconvenient truth about the US-bound migrant caravan

Al Jazeera English

In mid-October, what has come to be known as the "migrant caravan" departed Honduras for a weeks-long trek through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. 

The size of the caravan has fluctuated, but the United Nations calculated that, as of 22 October, some 7,200 people had joined up - many of them fleeing abysmal contexts of poverty and violence.

While the journey is an arduous one, the decision to travel as a large group mitigates the dangers generally faced by northward-bound migrants, including murder, disappearance, rape, and theft.

Of course, other obstacles still abound - among them US President Donald Trump, who quickly took to Twitter to announce that "criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in" with the caravan and that "I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy [sic]". 

After all, what better way to attack the US than by walking there from Honduras? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The West enabled Khashoggi's demise - not to mention all the other Saudi crimes

Middle East Eye

On 2 October, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, entered Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul, never to be seen again.

After multiple denials, Saudi Arabia confirmed on 19 October that Khashoggi had been killed inside the building. In a statement on Saudi state television, the country's chief prosecutor said a fight broke out between Khashoggi and "people who met him" in the consulate. The brawl resulted in Khashoggi's death, the prosecutor said.

According to Turkish officials, he was in fact executed and dismembered.

Although formerly a close associate of the Saudi ruling family, Khashoggi had exiled himself last year.

Friedman's trite ideas

Writing before the Saudi admission, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman quickly took to the pages of his own publication to announce that he was "praying for" Khashoggi, whose abduction or murder by agents of the Saudi government would "be a disaster for MBS [Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman] and a tragedy for Saudi Arabia and all the Arab Gulf countries".

By "disaster," Friedman means a potential decline in Western support for Saudi Arabia and Western investments in the kingdom, although the word might more accurately describe his own career, which has included a far-too-long November 2017 ode to MBS titled "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last".

Not that Friedman wasn't a Saudi fan even before the allegedly reform-driven MBS ushered in springtime; previous Friedmanian soundbites come to mind, like: "The problem with Saudi Arabia is not that it has too little democracy. It's that it has too much," and "Of course, we must protect the Saudis".

Now, Friedman tells us, the elimination of Khashoggi would be "an unfathomable violation of norms of human decency, worse not in numbers but in principle than even the Yemen war" - a rather abominable statement given the ongoing bombardment and starvation of that country by a Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition backed by the US and UK.

In August, for example, the coalition dropped a 500-pound bomb on a Yemeni school bus, massacring 40 children. Granted, none of them were employed by the Washington Post.

CNN reported that the bomb in question was manufactured by that pillar of the US military-industrial complex known as Lockheed Martin, an unsurprising revelation in light of the $110 bn US-Saudi defence deal conjured up by Donald Trump last year in Riyadh.

And it's arrangements like these that help ensure that most victims of Saudi Arabia won't be given the time of day, much less various weeks of sustained media coverage. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Weaponised wine cellars: How not to solve the US gang problem

Al Jazeera English

A recent New York Post article reports that the ultra-rich of the Hamptons - an elite swathe of territory on New York's Long Island - are converting their properties into luxury fortresses in order "to hide from MS-13", the Mara Salvatrucha gang.

MS-13 have been described by USA Today as the "favourite villain" of President Donald Trump, who has delighted in referring to the gang's members as "animals". 

The Post details the various security options available, for gigantic sums, to guard against the MS-13 "spectre". Fortunately for the Hamptonites, there's still plenty of room for entertainment, with panic rooms"doubling as home theatres, wine cellars or even gun vaults". 

Billionaire John Catsimatidis is quoted endearingly: "I sleep with a gun underneath my pillow: a Walther PPK/S, the same one James Bond carried". 

Never mind that vast socioeconomic inequality is, you know, a driving force behind crime in the first place. But the beauty of capitalism is that there are always loads of profitable non-solutions to exacerbate problems under the guise of fixing them. 

As the president of a company that installs bullet-proof windows and doors tells the Post: "We get business when there is a tremendous amount of fear being generated".

Enter President Trump, whose goal in life is to turn the US itself into one giant fortified gun vault. In May of this year, the White House issued a brief dispatch titled "What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13", in which the word "animals" was utilised no fewer than nine times - lest there be any doubt as to its spontaneous political correctness in official discourse. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Hezbollah ‘missile sites’ and Israel’s precision-guided propaganda

Middle East Eye

In a typically farcical performance at the United Nations General Assembly on 27 September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to update the world on the alleged activities of his favourite cross-border nemesis: Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

According to Netanyahu’s visual aid - a conspicuously marked diagram - Hezbollah is currently presiding over three secret sites near Beirut’s international airport where, under orders from Tehran, regular old missiles are being converted into precision-guided ones. In other words: the airport and whatever humans might find themselves in the overcrowded vicinity are fair game in any impending conflict.

In response to the allegations, Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil accompanied an array of foreign diplomats and journalists on a tour of the supposed missile sites, emphasising his view that Israel is simply seeking to “justify another aggression” against Lebanon - a valid assessment, given Israel’s track record of invading, bombarding and occupying its northern neighbour.

The tour took place on 1 October, and, as expected, produced no evidence of the missile conversion process.

That same day, the Israeli military tweeted its own opinion that “#Hezbollah has a long history of covering up inconvenient truths and then parading foreign officials around” - a rather brazen claim from a country that has spent the past seven decades covering up the fact that it happens to be founded on a policy of ethnic cleansing and slaughter. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Follow the petrodollars: Why Gulf wealth matters to Britain is a question everyone should be asking

Middle East Eye

In November 2012, former British Prime Minister David Cameron descended upon the Gulf for a visit aimed at - among other things - selling a bunch of Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

After all, what else could the UK head of government possibly have to do besides play travelling arms salesman?

In response to concerns about the dismal human rights records of the territories in question, Cameron offered the following reassurance: “[W]e do believe that countries have a right to self-defence, and we do believe that Britain has important defence industries that employ over 300,000 people, so that sort of business is completely legitimate and right.”

This sort of logical leap would become even trickier a couple of years later, when the UK supported the slaughter-fest in Yemen presided over by a Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition. As for the whole business of defence, this, it turns out, is one significant aspect of an extensive and complex UK-Gulf relationship that must be defended at all costs.

In a newly released book entitled AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain, David Wearing - a teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London - sets out to methodically document the nature and function of these ties.

So much for “legitimacy” and “self-defence”.

Case in point: the Arab uprisings of 2010-11, which included a panorama of brutal repression in Bahrain - that lovable kingdom and devoted ally described by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute as a "substitute for an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in the Gulf".

Overall, reports Wearing, “the data show that the British government’s response to the new wave of demands for democracy region-wide was to continue a sharp increase in arms supplies to its key authoritarian allies”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Can exhumation kill Franco once and for all?

Al Jazeera English

In August, the Spanish government issued a decree paving the way to exhume the remains of fascist dictator Francisco Franco from their current place of honour in the Valley of the Fallen, a massively creepy monument north of Madrid.

The dictator's family members have been given until September 15 to select a new resting place for him; otherwise, the state will decide. The transfer will, theoretically, take place later this year. 

The English-language edition of Spain's El Pais newspaper quotes Franco's grandchildren as complaining that the decree constitutes an "act of retrospective revenge without precedent in the civilised world".

Indeed, it would be most uncivilised to disturb the embalmed body of the man responsible for terrorising Spain for much of the last century. 

After all, only half a million people are estimated to have perished in the civil war of 1936-39 that brought Franco to power, where he remained until his death in 1975. 

On top of that, a mere 114,000 or so were disappeared during the war and ensuing dictatorship, many of them executed by Francoist death squads and deposited in mass graves that have yet to be excavated.

The Valley of the Fallen, incidentally, was itself built by the forced labour of political prisoners held by the fascist regime. It also houses the bones of more than 33,000 unidentified victims of the civil war. 

Other perks of Franco's enlightened rule included the practice of trafficking in newborns, which continued after the dictator's death and - according to some observers - resulted inhundreds of thousands of stolen Spanish babies.

But just how much progress does the forcible migration of Franco's remains signify? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Is Georgia in love with Israel?

Middle East Eye

In August, Georgia Today - an English-language newspaper of the eponymous former Soviet republic - featured a verbose analysis headlined “Georgia as ‘the Israel of the Caucasus’ - a Concept Worth Considering?”

Following numerous twists and turns - including a quote from late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, noting that “if we have to [choose] between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we would rather be alive and have the bad image” - the article appears to conclude that there are many prospects for “further developing the Georgia-US bilateral relationships”.

Successful development, we are left to assume, would ideally propel the wannabe NATO member into a special relationship akin to that enjoyed between the US and its favourite Israeli partner in crime. In other words, the whole “Israel of the Caucasus” concept is definitely worth considering.

Not that the concept is really anything new. Rewind for a moment to 2008 and the five-day war between Georgia and Russia that began when Georgia attacked breakaway South Ossetia. The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, noting Israel’s intimate involvement in the war-making venture on account of “hundreds of millions of dollars in arms and combat training” to Georgia over previous years, speculated that the Georgian government may have been endeavouring to “play the role of the ‘Israel of the Caucasus’ - a loyal servant of US ambitions in that region”.

Among these ambitions was the “broader US scheme to encircle Russia”, while the training services provided by the real Israel to the Caucasian one were said to involve “officers from Israel’s Shin Bet secret service - which has for decades carried out extrajudicial executions and torture of Palestinians in the occupied territories”, as well as the Israeli police and major Israeli arms companies. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The US Helped Massacre Yemeni Schoolchildren

Jacobin

Back in 2010, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman descended briefly upon Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, where he “took part in a ‘qat chew’” with Yemeni officials, businessmen, and other elites.

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”

Fast forward to August 2018, and the concept of targeted kindergartens has acquired rather more sinister connotations following the recent slaughter of at least forty Yemeni children on a school bus. The perpetrators: the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition that, since 2015, has been terrorizing Yemen in the name of fighting terror. Among the coalition partners is the United Arab Emirates, glitzy land of ski slope–equipped malls, modern-day slavery, and love affairs with Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Additional coalition backing is provided by the UK and other friendly Europeans.

On August 17, CNN reported that the munition responsible for the school bus massacre was a five-hundred-pound “laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin,” pillar of the US military-industrial complex. The bomb’s provenance is not enormously surprising given the $110 billion US-Saudi defense deal to which Donald Trump gave birth last year in Riyadh.

Shortly after the airstrike on the bus, a journalist asked US defense secretary James Mattis for his thoughts on the US role in the conflict in Yemen given that such operations are conducted “with US training, US targeting information, US weapons.”

The transcript of Mattis’s response, which appears on the Defense Department website, includes such insights as: “There, I would tell you that we do help them plan what we call — what kind of targeting? I’m trying to trying of the right word.”

Whatever the word was, Mattis remained of the opinion that “we are not engaged in the civil war” and that “we will help to prevent, you know, the killing of innocent people.”

Of course, anyone familiar with the United States’ track record will be aware that protecting innocents is never really the name of the game. In addition to out-and-out killing sprees, more subtle modes of human elimination also come to mind — as when reports in 1996 that half a million Iraqi children had died because of US sanctions elicited the assessment from then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright: “We think the price is worth it.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

On 'victims of terrorism' day, call out the real terrorists

Middle East Eye

Back in 1986, famed Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano penned an essay on Nicaragua, in which he highlighted some ironies he had detected concerning the matter of “terrorism”.

Specifically, Galeano wrote, a certain prominent nation then claiming that “even the stars must be militarised … to confront the terrorist threat” happened to be the very same one that was simultaneously engaged in “terrorist acts against Nicaragua, practising terrorism as an imperial right and … exporting state terrorism, on an industrial scale, under the registered trademark of the National Security Doctrine”.

The nation in question was, of course, the United States, which had committed itself to punishing Nicaragua for that country’s decision to veer from the straight and narrow path of obsequiousness to the needs of US capital. Punitive methods included unleashing havoc-wreaking right-wing proxy forces and mining Nicaraguan harbours.

Without doubt, it’s worth keeping such ironies in mind as we mark this year’s International Day of Remembrance of and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism on 21 August - not that plenty more irony hasn’t accumulated over the past three-plus decades.

A United Nations General Assembly resolution explains that the commemorative day is meant to “honour and support the victims and survivors of terrorism and to promote and protect the full enjoyment of their human rights and fundamental freedoms”. The resolution also reasserts the assembly’s conviction that “any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed”.

Typically vacuous UN language aside, it’s curious that the international body has chosen a terror-oriented day of remembrance, given that the UN has not managed to define terrorism in the first place. As the UN website specifies, “an unequivocal definition of terrorism would remove the political distinction that some make between the actions of so-called freedom fighters and terrorists”. 

Fair enough, but what about when there’s little distinction between the actions of governments and the actions of terrorists? READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Legal cannabis offers doubtful buzz for Lebanon's financial woes

Middle East Eye

The question as to whether a legal cannabis industry can salvage Lebanon's deteriorating economy has spawned a drove of recent headlines. The Guardian’s "Budding business: how cannabis could transform Lebanon" specifies that the Lebanese government will consider legalising medical cannabis production for export as "part of a package of reforms proposed by McKinsey & Company," a US consulting firm that operates globally.

The firm was contracted by the Lebanese government in January to devise a plan for lessening the economic plight of the world's third-most indebted country, where the poverty rate in certain areas approaches 65 percent.

According to Bloomberg, McKinsey's extensive recommendations were presented to Lebanese President Michel Aoun in early July and also include "building a wealth-management and investment-banking hub," "setting up a construction zone for prefabricated housing that can be used in the rebuilding of war-torn Syria and Iraq," and getting in on new avocado markets.

Given Lebanon's already flourishing illegal cannabis industry, concentrated in the Bekaa Valley, it's not difficult to detect the origins of this particular recommendation. And yet, there appears to be some disagreement among the Lebanese political elite over who thought of it first.

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, head of the Progressive Socialist Party and Twitter-user extraordinaire, tweeted in favour of legalisation back in 2014, but a recent Middle East Eye article quoted Lebanese MP Yassine Jabber as attributing the brainchild to Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri, Lebanon's eternal parliament speaker: "Berri got the idea when he visited a pharmacy in Italy recently and saw cannabis-derived products."

Of course, there are plenty of other manoeuvres that could help alleviate Lebanon's fiscal predicament.

For one, the country could presumably do without that preposterously expensive presence known as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) - "interim" being used in the loosest sense of the word - which, since 1978, has done nothing to protect Lebanon from Israeli assault but has helped itself to prime coastal real estate and other Lebanese goodies.

According to the UN website, the approved UNIFIL budget for July 2017 to June 2018 alone was $483m. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Under fire: the perpetual US war on Native Americans

Al Jazeera English

August 9 marks International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples.

On its website, the United Nations notes that the focuses this year will include "the challenges and ways forward to revitalise indigenous peoples' identities and encourage the protection of their rights in or outside their traditional territories".

To be sure, the protection of indigenous rights is particularly challenging in this day and age. In various contexts around the world, the presence of indigenous communities is seen as an obstacle to profit-driven corporate exploitation and environmental despoliation.

In the United States - vanguard of the capitalist system and usurper extraordinaire of Native American land - the goal of "revitalis[ing]" indigenous identity will presumably prove formidable indeed seeing as the entire US enterprise is, in fact, predicated on the suppression of Native agency, culture, territorial bonds, and general dignity.

Also suppressed, of course, is the whole business of genocide upon which the US is built, which naturally complicates the country's self-advertisement as the epitome of liberty, justice, freedom, democracy, etc. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s New-Old Discrimination

Jacobin

On Thursday, the Israeli parliament passed a new law establishing Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” The consensus thus far in the ever-astute elite media is that the move was “controversial.”

The Jerusalem Post website provides the English text of the legislation, which stipulates that “[t]he actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” In other words, Palestinians need not exist.

Other gems include the affirmation that “[t]he state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development.” The New York Times carefully speculates that this provision could “possibly aid … those who would seek to advance discriminatory land-allocation policies.” The law furthermore demotes Arabic from an official language to one with “special status in the state.”

While Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has celebrated the law’s passage as “a pivotal moment in the annals of Zionism and the State of Israel,” other Zionists are less jovial. The Times of Israel quotes Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the prominent Union for Reform Judaism in the United States, as lamenting: “The damage that will be done by this new Nation-State law to the legitimacy of the Zionist vision and to the values of the state of Israel as a democratic — and Jewish — nation is enormous.”

Jacobs is no doubt correct, but it would seem that such legitimacy would already have been definitively crushed by Israel’s recurring habit of slaughtering unarmed Palestinians and taking their land. Indeed, the ruckus over the brand-new law obscures the reality that there’s not actually much new about it at all. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Meet Amir Fakhravar, the 'snake oil salesman' pushing regime change in Iran

Middle East Eye

On 26 June, an event billed as the fifth “Iran Democratic Transition Conference” was held in a US congressional building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., hosted by an American outfit called the National Iranian Congress (NIC).

Defined on its website as a “political party in Washington, DC, United States of America”, the NIC pledges to support the “people of Iran” in their “battle to cut short the hands of celestial and terrestrial ideologies from the people’s lives, affording them proprietorship of their destiny”. In simpler terms: regime change all the way.

A May 2018 report on Iran by the US Congressional Research Service provides a brief history of the NIC: “[T]he Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS), led by U.S.-based Amir Abbas Fakhravar, believes in regime replacement and in 2013 formed a ‘National Iran Congress’ to advocate that outcome. The group has drafted a constitution for a future republic of Iran.”

Fakhravar is listed on the NIC’s “Leadership” page as “Chairman of the Senate”, in between “Attorney General of NIC” Arzhang Davoodi and “Secretary General of the Executive Cabinet” Ramin Nikoo. Surely it's only a matter of time before the organisation appoints a minister of agriculture and fisheries.

But who, exactly, is Amir Abbas Fakhravar?

A 2006 WikiLeaks cable from the US Consul General in Dubai describes him as an “Iranian student activist and political prisoner on the run”, having ditched Iran “while on prison leave” and ended up in the United Arab Emirates “with the help of ‘friends’ who bribed [Iranian] airport officials not to enter his name into the computer”. 

In Dubai, the cable specifies, Fakhravar had “met with Richard Perle” - one of the neocon gang that brought us the Iraq War and a staunch advocate for regime change in Iran - and “received a US visa to speak about Iran, at the invitation of the American Enterprise Institute”, an entity essentially dedicated to combating political and economic sovereignty across the globe on behalf of, well, American enterprise. And in the US he remained. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Will Lebanon win the World Cup?

Middle East Eye

During the noisy aftermath of a basketball game in Beirut a couple of years ago, I asked my Lebanese companion when the sport had become popular in Lebanon. "When we discovered we could make it sectarian," he joked.

Now, the occasion has again arisen to contemplate themes of sectarianism and athletics in the context of a short documentary film titled Lebanon Wins the World Cup, originally released in 2015 but currently available for free streaming on Vimeo for the duration of this year's World Cup competition.

The title is indeed fitting; after all, if you've ever experienced a World Cup in Lebanon, you're likely to have assumed the Lebanese won the whole darn thing based on the amount of horn-honking, flag-waving, and general ruckus that transpires. This is particularly the case following a win by Germany or Brazil, both of which play host to sizable Lebanese populations.

The film's synopsis reads: "On the eve of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, two former enemies from the Lebanese civil war prepare to support their favourite team Brazil. Can the tournament unite them despite everything that's gone wrong?"

The duo consists of Edward Chamoun, a former fighter with the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces, and Hassan Berri, a Shia Muslim who fought with the Lebanese Communist Party for several years of the conflict, which lasted from 1975-1990.

The film spotlights their individual reflections on life and war, and then follows them as they meet in Beirut to root for Brazil. The answer to the question of whether or not the tournament can unite them isn’t difficult to predict.

Both men, it turns out, had supported Brazil in the 1982 World Cup, which took place in the middle of the Lebanese civil war and overlapped with Israel’s summer invasion of Lebanon, a devastating affair that killed some 20,000 people, the majority of them civilians.

Recalls Berri: "Your country is being invaded, it's under attack. And imagine, all I could think about was a game." Hooking up a car battery to a small television, he and his comrades tuned into the Italy-Brazil match, at which point the bombing suddenly stopped: "It was as if the Israeli Army wanted to watch the match too."

Lebanon clearly didn’t win that World Cup, and neither did Brazil, with victory instead going to the Italians - who incidentally also won the 2006 World Cup, which concluded a few days prior to the launch of Israel’s bloody 34-day assault on Lebanon. Some might therefore view Italy’s failure to qualify this year as reassuring. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.