A California prison or an Istanbul mosque? Why the media links coronavirus to Muslims

Middle East Eye

On 14 April, US President Donald Trump announced he was halting funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on account of the group’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus”. This, from a man who has severely mismanaged and covered up the spread of coronavirus himself.

For its coverage of this announcement, the BBC website used an image of a group of medical personnel - the majority of them Muslim women in niqabs - looking at a monitor. The logic behind the selection was not evident; it seems a photo of Trump would have worked just fine.

But for the average, moderately xenophobic western news consumer, the takeaway from the display was likely that coronavirus and/or the WHO are somehow inextricably linked to Muslims - who, thanks to dutiful political and media fear-mongering over the years, are already widely regarded as the enemy.

The BBC is not the only outlet guilty of deploying irrelevant Islam-related images in the context of coronavirus.

In March, the New York Times reported Trump’s suspension of travel from Europe to the US with the help of a photo of a mosque in Turkey, complete with a Turkish flag in the foreground. Given that Turkey was not included in the travel suspension - and is not generally permitted in the category “Europe” in the first place - it was anyone’s guess as to the rationale.

Again, though, the implication is that coronavirus is tied up with Islam, that perennial plague from the East.

Even more ludicrously, CNN ran a photograph of a worker disinfecting the interior of an Istanbul mosque to accompany news of the announcement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that prisons in the American state were prohibiting visits due to coronavirus.

CNN subsequently amended the image on Twitter (although the incredulous responses to the original remain) to a photo of an airport scene with flight screens and passengers wearing face masks. It is not clear whether this was an intentional effort on the part of editors to say: “See? It’s not Islamophobia. We just don't care if the photo has anything to do with the article!” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The Plague of Jared Kushner

Jacobin

Back in January, Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri penned an article titled “I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open-heart surgery.” The piece was inspired by Jared Kushner’s recent claim that, because he had read exactly twenty-five (unspecified) books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he was best qualified to resolve the whole seven-plus-decades-long mess (by definitively screwing the Palestinians, of course).

“To be very clear: Medicine is not my profession,” Petri, channeling Kushner, wrote. “I would describe it as more of a ‘recent hobby.’ In fact, I have a lot more important responsibilities, and I’m a little resentful, frankly, that this has also been put on my plate! But someone has to do it.”

As luck would have it, Trump’s son-in-law and prized adviser has now managed to catapult himself into the medical realm in real life, as coronavirus has provided yet another cool opportunity for egregious nepotism — alongside the other activities on Kushner’s plate, from solving immigration to WhatsApping with homicidal Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Kushner is currently presiding over a “shadow task force” to deal with the pandemic, adding yet more confusion and chaos to the United States’ already schizophrenic response. Politico reports that Kushner’s vast private sector–based operation, which entails a “kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants,” has enabled him to take “charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government” — clearly a logical leadership position for the man who initially assured Trump that coronavirus wasn’t a big deal and is thus more than slightly responsible for the lethal delay in addressing the outbreak in the first place.

Politico goes on to note that there is “limited vetting of private companies’ and executives’ financial interests, raising questions about the motivations and potential conflicts inherent” in the Kushnerian coronavirus enterprise, while the various projects it encompasses are “so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner.” As if anyone ever doubted private-sector efficiency.

Kushner has, it seems, also made every effort to render his shadow task force as shadowy as possible. Communications are being conducted using personal rather than government emails, and there’s no public record of what precisely the group is up to. In addition to being apparently illegal, such behavior does not inspire much confidence in the possibility that the primary goal of the operation is to benefit public health rather than the Kushner family bank account. This is particularly the case following the revelation that a health-insurance company linked to Kushner and his brother was busy designing a government coronavirus website. (The undertaking was abandoned at the last minute.)

The New York Times, meanwhile, quotes a senior US administration official’s description of the Kushner team as a “‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government” — thereby providing one of the most articulate depictions of the presidential son-in-law-cum-alien-frat-boy in contemporary circulation. Less impressively, a Times op-ed originally titled “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed” was subsequently downgraded to “Putting Jared Kushner In Charge Is Utter Madness.”

And yet he’s already complicit in an untold number of deaths, beyond those caused by discouraging Trump from getting his ass in gear. According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Kushner shot down New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s claim that his state — a coronavirus epicenter — was short thirty thousand ventilators: “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Naturally, Trump immediately parroted it.)

Sounds like the old “25 books” approach. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Cuba Under Media Attack for Sending Doctors, Not Bombs, to Help Covid-19 Victims

FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING

As coronavirus ravages the world, Cuba has exhibited disproportionate heroism, deploying medical personnel to at least 14 countries thus far to battle the pandemic—including to Italy, which has been particularly devastated. The response is in keeping with Cuba’s decades-long tradition of “doctors, not bombs,” which has seen the tiny island nation dispatch tens of thousands of medics across the globe to combat everything from Ebola to more mundane diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The Cuban approach stands in marked contrast to the modus operandi of the global superpower and Cuba’s primary antagonist, the United States, a country with an established predilection for bombing rather than saving people.

Cuba’s coronavirus performance is a welcome bit of uplifting news in an otherwise mostly dismal international panorama. Lest anyone start feeling too inspired by the idea of humanity, however, sectors of the US corporate media are dutifully standing by to burst the bubble.

A March Bloomberg opinion article (3/23/20) headlined “Coronavirus Could Give Cuba’s Flying Doctors New Wings,” for example, came equipped with the following caveat in the subheadline: “But allowing Havana to exploit the virus for hard currency will just empower repression at home.” The text of the article, by Mac Margolis, contained few easily detectable illustrations of domestic “repression,” aside from allegedly insufficient Cuban government efforts on behalf of a “consumer economy” and “emerging private sector”—which certainly sounds less repressive than, I don’t know, the US police habit of fatally shooting black people.

Margolis also stressed that, in Cuba, Covid-19 is “anything but an equal opportunity affliction,” and that “compañeros with connections or access to dollars have a far better shot at securing medication and loading up on groceries during a lockdown.” Never mind that Cuban compañeros would have better access to basic necessities in general had the island not been at the mercy of a sadistic US embargo for the past 60 years, or that severe socioeconomic inequality is overall a defining hallmark of US capitalism—as illustrated by reports that low-income communities of color in the States are being hardest hit by the coronavirus.

The Bloomberg article is accompanied by a photograph of Cuban doctors wielding Cuban flags, with the caption: “Nice flags, but how about a bigger paycheck?” And while bigger paychecks are obviously less imperative in societies—like Cuba’s—where the essentials of survival are provided free of charge, a more pertinent question in the time of global pandemic might be how the US spends trillions of dollars on wars and still generates news reports like “Uninsured Americans Could Be Facing Nearly $75,000 in Medical Bills if Hospitalized for Coronavirus” (CNBC, 4/1/20). READ MORE AT FAIR.

War games in the time of coronavirus

Middle East Eye

Years ago in Venezuela, a friend and I visited some of the numerous free health clinics established by then-President Hugo Chavez. We weren’t suffering from any particular ailment; we were simply intrigued by the novelty of healthcare as a human right, rather than as a super-expensive commodity, as was the case back home in the United States.

At one clinic, we were attended to by a female Cuban doctor - from none other than the province of Guantanamo - who stressed that Cuban medics would never deny treatment to citizens of the imperial power that had for decades subjected her island nation to a crippling embargo.

She went on to observe that, like the US military, Cuban doctors also operated in many global conflict zones - but to save lives.

Now, as Cuba dispatches medical teams to fight coronavirus and save lives across the world, the US and its buddies appear as committed as ever to ending them - and not just via President Donald Trump’s criminally negligent response to the virus itself.

For one thing, any hopes that the proliferation of coronavirus among the US armed forces might at least result in a full military lockdown were effectively dashed to shreds with the New York Times headline of 26 March: “U.S. Army Halts Training Over Coronavirus but Then Changes Its Mind”. No doubt, inhabitants of countries on the receiving end of US military killing sprees will be heartened by the news. 

The article specified that the army was, however, going through with its decision to shift recruitment methods away from face-to-face interviews, “as the military, like the rest of the country, is rapidly adjusting to the coronavirus’s dramatic upheaval of daily routines”.

But as far as US-inflicted mass murder goes, it seems that business will continue as usual.

Take the case of Iran - the preferred nemesis of the Trump administration - where the health ministry recently announced that one person was dying of coronavirus every 10 minutes. The US, to be sure, is more than slightly complicit in the vast loss of Iranian life, on account of its devastating sanctions regime, which severely complicates the import of medical equipment and other necessary materials into the country.

And yet, instead of suspending sanctions in the interest of, you know, continued human existence, the US has used the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to expand them. Call it biological warfare of sorts. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.