Nas Daily's normalisation tour: Loving the UAE

 Middle East Eye

When I was growing up in Maryland in the 1980s, the highlights of existence included visits to a gaudy family entertainment centre with a compelling whack-a-mole game. 

Nowadays, whenever a certain Palestinian-Israeli video blogger who goes by the brand Nas Daily pops up on my Facebook feed, I feel a similar physical compulsion.

The 28-year-old Harvard graduate, whose real name is Nuseir Yassin and who hails from the town of Arraba in the Galilee, shot to internet stardom in 2016 when he left his $120,000-a-year high-tech job in New York to travel the world posting daily 60-second videos oozing with cliche and orchestrated cheer. 

His Facebook page currently boasts 17 million followers, which does not inspire enormous confidence in the human race. Video topics have ranged from "The Most Lovable Country!" (the Philippines) to “Serbian Food Heaven!” to “AFRICA’S SECRET COUNTRY!”, Swaziland, where Yassin documented "half naked" dancers and, as Steven Salaita writes, it all "looked like a research trip for a 1940s Disney feature".

It gets more problematic, of course, when Yassin takes a break from revelling exuberantly in superficiality and engages in blatantly political commentary - like the time he explained, in one minute, the mass slaughter, destruction, and expulsion of Palestinians that attended the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948: "Some Palestinians left, some got killed, and some stayed in their land. My people stayed."

Stating that he had opted to "accept the borders of Israel" and to "move on", Yassin lectured his audience that "in life there are better and bigger things to focus on than the name of a piece of land!"

This is a fine and dandy sentiment, to be sure, unless the land in question continues to make life hell for millions of Palestinians more than seven decades after it was forcibly renamed.

It’s not quite clear how residents of the Gaza Strip, for example, are to "move on" in the midst of a blockade and regular Israeli military massacres of civilians. The vast majority of Palestinians - not to mention the vast majority of humans on this planet - don’t have the option to move from Harvard to a $120,000 salary to a career of international gallivanting that entails being lodged for free in executive suites in exchange for a mention on Instagram. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Neoliberal obesity and coronavirus in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In August, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca banned the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to children under the age of 18.

Mexico's Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell, who has denounced soda as "bottled poison", expressed support for the new law, which has begun to catch on in other Mexican states as well. 

Lopez-Gatell is also the government's coronavirus tsar, and early on highlighted the role of the country's "epidemic" of diabetes and obesity in exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico has reportedly recorded more than 70,000 COVID-19 related deaths to date - although the actual toll is likely much higher.

In recent years, Mexico has vied with the US for the title of most obese nation on earth - three-fourths of adults there are overweight, and at least one in 10 have diabetes.

Oaxaca, one of the poorest Mexican states, has among the highest obesity levels and the highest child obesity rate in the country.

I have been in Oaxaca since March, and can confirm that - as is the case in much of Mexico - it sometimes seems impossible to take a step without tripping over Coca-Cola advertisements or similar propaganda. 

Indeed, Mexicans drink more soda per capita than any other country in the world, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox was once the CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico. In 2017, diabetes became the nation's number one killer.

How, then, did Mexico end up in such a deadly position?

To answer this question, a good place to start is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which came into effect in 1994 - and was recently repackaged as something-way-better-than-NAFTA under the auspices of resident continental megalomaniac Donald Trump. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel-UAE deal: The two-(police)-state solution

Middle East Eye

In 2016, award-winning Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor - who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates for such unspeakable crimes as insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols,” including its leaders - was the victim of a hacking attempt by NSO Group, an Israel-based cyber warfare firm.

According to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which analysed the attack, the goal of the operation was to convert Mansoor’s iPhone into a "digital spy in his pocket" - taking control of the camera and microphone and recording the activist’s communications and movements.

This, mind you, was four years before the normalisation of UAE-Israeli relations last month - the culmination of a longstanding, secret love affair between the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms and the Zionist state known for habitually massacring Palestinians and otherwise tormenting the Emiratis’ fellow Arabs.

The targeting of Mansoor is hardly the only instance of pre-normalisation surveillance collaboration. There’s also Falcon Eye, a mass civil surveillance system installed in Abu Dhabi by an Israeli-owned company.

A Middle East Eye article from 2015 quoted a source on the system’s utter creepiness: “Every person is monitored from the moment they leave their doorstep to the moment they return to it. Their work, social and behavioural patterns are recorded, analysed and archived.”

Indeed, the UAE is believed to possess one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras on the planet.

Then there’s DarkMatter, the Emirati cyber-intelligence and hacking firm that has been described as “Big Brother on steroids”. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Abu Dhabi-based outfit employed not only former US National Security Agency personnel, but also former Israeli military intelligence operatives. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Tehran: New Israeli spy thriller is Orientalist brainwashing

Middle East Eye

On 24 June, Haaretz ran the exuberant headline: “New Israeli Spy Thriller ‘Tehran’ Is Even Better Than ‘Fauda’” - the wildly popular Netflix show that gets off on Palestinian suffering while pretending not to.

The article’s author swears that the three episodes of Tehran that she viewed “reveal a television series that is outstanding, polished and very effective by American criteria”, and that “when you watch it you will curse the screen and the broadcasting corporation, because there’s no option for binge watching”.

The series is furthermore “beautifully filmed in Athens, which suddenly looks like the capital of Iran as we imagine it” - calling to mind the sensational Orientalism of like-minded productions such as Homeland, the Beirut portions of which were filmed in Tel Aviv. 

Apple TV has purchased the new show and it is, well, pretty much exactly what you would expect from an Israeli TV show called Tehran. The storyline of the first season goes something like this: a young Mossad operative named Tamar Rabinyan, who is Iranian by birth, returns to her homeland as part of a plot to hack into Iran’s air defence system and take control of its radar so that Israel can bomb a nuclear reactor. . . .

According to Moshe Zonder, a co-creator of Tehran who also co-wrote Fauda, the new series “presents a different, pleasant side of Iran, which as far as I know, no western series has ever shown”. It’s anyone’s guess, of course, how a show about Israeli spies running around the Iranian capital constitutes presenting a pleasant side of the country.

But Zonder is sure of it, and also hopes that the series “will do something to help with the total disconnect between Israelis and Iranians”. Indeed, just imagine if the Islamic Republic were to produce a series called Tel Aviv about Iranian spies trying to blow up Israel: there’d be all sorts of de-disconnecting! READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.