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.