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.