Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021

 Al Jazeera English

Time magazine recently chose Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history” and the CEO of rocket firm SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla – as its “2021 Person of the Year”. In the first paragraph of the lengthy profile of Musk accompanying the accolade, we learn that the man “tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun”, sends the stock market soaring and swooning with a “flick of his finger”, and also “likes to live-tweet his poops”. . . .

Presumably, the excremental intro is meant to project a down-to-earth, human dimension onto the tyrannical South African entrepreneur who wants to colonise Mars and has officially appointed himself “Technoking” of Tesla. Call it poop-washing, if you will. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Welcome to Tijuana – or not

 Al Jazeera English

In February 2017, Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, a Mexican man in his mid-40s, killed himself by jumping off of a bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, which lies directly across the border from San Diego, California.

The suicide took place just minutes after Olivas Valencia had been deported from the United States for the third time. Symbolically, he jumped holding the plastic bag that had been issued to him by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for his belongings, as CBP customarily does for deportees.

Now, nearly five years later, US border policy continues to destroy lives – and Tijuana continues to serve as an epicentre of destruction.

The Joe Biden administration has just reinstated the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) – the criminally euphemistic Donald Trump-era policy that saw Tijuana and other Mexican border cities converted into holding pens for asylum seekers in the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Remembering US-backed state terror in El Salvador

Al Jazeera English

Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs.

Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.

A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:

“The soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded their rifles into them.” 

The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Fear and loathing on the US-Mexico border

 Al Jazeera English

On November 8, 2021, the United States reopened its borders to eligible international travellers who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus, thereby ending the restrictions on “non-essential travel” that were implemented at the outset of the pandemic in March 2020.

Of course, US borders are never really “open” to the majority of the Earth’s population – vaccinated or not – such being the nature of imperial hypocrisy in a world where the US is free to transcend other people’s borders, military and economically, while closing its own frontiers to, inter alia, individuals fleeing US-imposed military and economic havoc. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

An ode to train travel

 Al Jazeera English

At the end of September, I took an overnight train called the Doğu Ekspresi – or Eastern Express – from the Turkish capital Ankara to the city of Kars in the northeast, close to the Armenian border.

I cannot say precisely how the journey came about, or what sort of neuronal firing must have transpired in my brain the previous month as I lay sweating in between the oscillating fans on either side of my bed on the Oaxacan coast of Mexico – the position in which I had undertaken to plan my first transatlantic trip since December 2019.

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, I had led a pathologically itinerant existence for nearly 20 years, flitting continuously between countries and continents and harbouring an existential aversion to settling down.

Coronavirus had put an abrupt end to the arrangement, converting what was meant to be a two-week stay in Oaxaca into a heretofore inconceivable year and a half. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Havana Syndrome: an act of war or just an act?

Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time in Havana, Cuba, a strange thing happened.

United States diplomats and CIA emissaries to the country began reporting the sudden onset of debilitating symptoms, ranging from headaches and hearing loss to vertigo and nausea. As The New York Times notes, the symptoms were “brought on, most of [the victims] said, by a piercing, high-pitched sound, as though they had been caught in ‘an invisible beam of energy’”.

The inexplicable phenomenon, which was first recorded in 2016, was dubbed “Havana Syndrome”, and was initially hyped as potentially being caused by some sort of Cuban sonic weapon.

Never mind the US State Department’s assessment that the high-pitched sound in question was most probably emitted by the Indies short-tailed cricket. A global superpower should never miss an opportunity to malign a tiny communist island for being a thorn in the side of the empire. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

On the death of my maternal grandmother: an anti-obituary

 Al Jazeera English

On October 18, Colin Powell – former United States secretary of state and war criminal – died of coronavirus-related complications.

The following day, as I was busy writing an article for Al Jazeera titled “Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer”, my maternal grandmother Anne died of coronavirus in Florida.

And as with Powell, I felt no need for eulogies.

My grandmother, of course, had wielded considerably less power during her time on earth than had the late statesman. She had not helped fuel the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, or presided over the 1989 pulverisation of the impoverished Panamanian neighbourhood of El Chorillo – to the extent that local ambulance drivers had begun referring to the area as “Little Hiroshima”.

She had, however, managed to inflict significant psychological, as well as bodily, injury on the persons inhabiting her own little world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Third World Women’s Alliance: Lessons for today

 Al Jazeera English

In November of last year, The Washington Post reported that, nearly nine months after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, the disease was “ravag[ing] African American and other minority communities with a particular vengeance” – as Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian patients continued to perish at a far higher rate than white patients.

Then in April 2021, a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that Black women in the US suffered three times the coronavirus mortality rate of white men.

According to the study’s authors, the disparities in mortality had much to do with “the gendered and racialised nature of work, housing and living conditions, comorbidities, and access to care”.

Yet COVID-19 was not the canary in the coal mine that exposed US society as, well, downright sick. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Stop being polite – Colin Powell was a killer

 Al Jazeera English

Colin Powell has died, and the hagiographic obituaries are upon us.

The New York Times hails him as a “pathbreaker”: the United States’ first Black national security adviser, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, and secretary of state.

The rest of the US mainstream media have taken a similar line, erupting in characteristic American self-adulation at the idea that a once-discriminated-against Black man was able to make it so far in life.

MSNBC took the hagiography a step further by . . . titling its posthumous Powell segment: “Richard Haass: Colin Powell was grounded in reality”.

If Powell’s reality included non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other threats, what does “reality” even mean in the end? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why won’t Colombia let Martha Sepúlveda die?

 Al Jazeera English

At 7am on October 10, 51-year-old Martha Sepúlveda, a resident of the Colombian city of Medellín, was scheduled to die by euthanasia – and she could not have been happier.

“I’m a lot calmer since they authorised me to have the procedure,” Sepúlveda told the Colombian television network Noticias Caracol. “I laugh more, I sleep better.” Diagnosed in 2019 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that has already rendered her unable to walk by herself, Sepúlveda was to have been the first person to be euthanised in Colombia without a prognosis of less than six months to live.

Although Colombia decriminalised euthanasia in 1997 in cases of terminal illness, the first such procedure was only approved in 2015. To date, a total of 157 patients have been permitted to end their lives in such fashion. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Afghans are the next victims of Italy’s war on refugees

 Al Jazeera English

Time for a quick quiz: Who, in the end, is the biggest victim of the whole Afghan crisis?

If you answered “Italy”, you’d be correct – at least in the view of the Italian right wing.

Consider, for starters, a recent article in the Italian newspaper Il Tempo, which warns that the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan will unleash an “unprecedented wave of migrants” – a veritable “migratory tsunami” – that will soon inundate Italy with millions of Afghans.

According to the article’s author, Afghan men often struggle to integrate into European society, and have already “committed hundreds of sexual aggressions against European women” – something European men obviously never do. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The social media blackout: What has the world come to?

 Al Jazeera English

When the great social media blackout of October 4, 2021, struck, I was in the picturesque village of Himarë in southern Albania with my feet propped up on a balcony railing, half-gazing at the Ionian Sea, while impatiently awaiting Al Jazeera’s publication of my latest article on New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

As the blackout happened to coincide with a local internet outage, I first dedicated myself to cursing the Albanian networks and manically refreshing all open tabs on my laptop.

When the internet returned but the components of Mark Zuckerberg’s digital empire – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – still failed to load, I sped over to Twitter to see what was wrong with the world.

And much, it seemed, was wrong with the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Tom Friedman’s tribal tantrum

 Al Jazeera English

Oftentimes, Thomas Friedman articles are like the aftermath of car accidents: You know it is going to be bad, but you just cannot look away.

In one such recent dispatch – the journalistic equivalent, perhaps, of a head-on collision between two trailer trucks laden with combustible materials – the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist and bestselling author surmises:

“One day, 1,000 years from now, when they dig up this era, archaeologists will surely ask how was it that a great power called America set out to make the Middle East more like itself – embracing pluralism and the rule of law – and ended up instead becoming more like the Middle East – mimicking its worst tribal mores and introducing a whole new level of lawlessness into its national politics?”

While they are at it, archaeologists may also ask how it was that a man who argued that McDonald’s was the key to world peace and that the Beijing Olympics fuelled the Arab Spring ended up institutionalised at the US newspaper of record, where he was heavily remunerated for self-contradictory and cringe-inducing babble. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It is time to abort Texas’s abortion law – and much more

 Al Jazeera English

On September 1, the state of Texas implemented Senate Bill 8 (SB8) banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, including in cases of rape and incest.

Given that most women are not even aware they are pregnant at six weeks, SB8 amounts to a near-total abortion ban. It is the most restrictive such law in the entire United States, where the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling ostensibly offers constitutional protections for abortion rights.

In addition to being criminally invasive, the Texas law is totally unhinged. For starters, its enforcement is delegated not to agents of the state but rather to individual citizens who stand to win $10,000 or more by bringing lawsuits against doctors, abortion clinic staff, Uber drivers, and any other witting or unwitting accomplices to abortions performed after the six-week cutoff. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s Pegasus: Is your phone a ‘24-hour surveillance device’?

 Al Jazeera English

Between June 2020 and February 2021, the iPhones of nine Bahraini activists – including two dissidents exiled in London and three members of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights – were hacked using the Pegasus spyware that was developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-surveillance firm regulated by Israel’s defence ministry.

The hackings were revealed in a new report from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which has studied Pegasus extensively along with related nefarious modern phenomena.

As the Guardian notes, Pegasus is “perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed” and can turn a mobile phone into a “24-hour surveillance device” – harvesting messages, passwords, photos, internet searches, and other data and seizing control of the camera and microphone.

This can all be done via “zero-click” technology, meaning that one does not have to click on a compromised link or do anything else for one’s phone to become infected. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Getting jabbed in New York: Vaccines for a sick system?

Al Jazeera English

It was not my intention to get vaccinated against coronavirus in the United States of America.

Though I was born and raised in the US, I had abandoned it in 2003 in favour of global meandering through countries that, unlike my homeland, did not give me panic attacks – and where people behaved like human beings rather than alienated automatons.

I had not so much as set foot in the US since 2015, in the interest of my mental health and of avoiding eternal debt in the event of some sort of medical emergency – such being the perils of life in capitalist civilisations where basic rights like healthcare are converted into punitive, for-profit enterprises. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Geographies of fear: Letter from America

 Al Jazeera English

Earlier this summer, I arrived from Mexico to Newark Liberty airport for a brief stay in New York City. It was my first visit in years and a violation of my self-imposed travel ban to the United States, which despite being the country of my birth and upbringing I found to be a terribly disconcerting place and irreparably alienated from the human condition.

I had left the US in 2003 following my graduation from university in New York, nearly two years after the September 11, 2001 attacks had occasioned the giddy launch of a “war on terror”. In keeping with the US predilection for shameless irony, this war had ultimately served to terrorise communities abroad and at home.

Flying into Newark Liberty – renamed in honour of 9/11 – it was immediately clear that 9/11 was still going strong, 20 years after the fact.

My homecoming began with an interminable and schizophrenically supervised passport line. During the wait, US citizens and guests could admire signage from the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection agency, promoting itself as the first and last line of defence protecting America and its “way of life”.

But what exactly is the American “way of life” – and just how much “liberty” does it actually entail? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Women’s rights and the US’s ‘civilising’ mission in Afghanistan

 Al Jazeera English

In July, former United States president and war criminal turned portrait artist George W Bush bewailed the impending withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after he ordered the invasion of the country.

Afghan women and girls, Bush warned, would suffer “unspeakable harm” on account of the American departure – an ironic assessment, to say the least, coming from the man who kicked off a “war on terror” that has thus far killed more than 47,000 civilians (including women) in Afghanistan alone and displaced millions.

To be sure, the plight of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban has from the get-go offered a handy pretext for US military devastation.

Long before the 9/11 attacks even transpired, US politicians, celebrities and self-declared feminist activists had been pushing for a “liberation” of women in Afghanistan that conveniently dovetailed with imperial geostrategic interests. As if “B-52 carpet bombing”- to borrow the New York Times’ terminology – has ever been good for female humans, much less any other organism. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The great US ammunition famine of 2021

 Al Jazeera English

Some years ago, my estranged grandmother – a psychologically unstable resident of Florida and a devout believer in the right to bear arms – threatened my aunt, i.e. her own daughter, with a handgun.

The weapon was confiscated from my grandmother’s possession by authorities, only to be returned at a later date – such being life in a country that is, for all intents and purposes, mentally ill.

As the Washington Post reported back in 2018, there were already “more guns than people” in the United States, not even counting the gobs of guns belonging to trigger-happy law enforcement agencies or the military.

According to a study by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, the Post summarised, Americans comprised 4 percent of the world’s population in 2017 but “owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock” of civilian firearms. This meant that, in the US, there were enough civilian-owned firearms “for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Who’s afraid of Hamas summer camps?

 Al Jazeera English

Recently, Lawrence J Haas of the American Foreign Policy Council took to the pages of Newsweek to publicise a dangerous phenomenon: “Western Silence as Gaza Summer Camps Train Future Terrorists”.

According to Haas – whose panties have been propelled into a massive bunch by the (hallucinated) idea that Western media and academia are obsessed with a “narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimisation” – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are teaching teenage boys in the Gaza Strip how to “shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls”.

Fortunately, however, alleged “silence” about the summer camps has been more than compensated for by the likes of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) – a notorious US taxpayer-subsidised factory of Zionist propaganda – and similarly devoted institutions. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

SOS: A plea for freedom from the media narrative on Cuba

 Al Jazeera English

In the wake of this month’s protests in Cuba over food and medicine shortages and other complaints, the New York-based magazine Travel + Leisure ran an item titled “4 Ways to Help the People of Cuba Right Now”.

First on the list is “asking the US for humanitarian intervention” in order to “help alleviate the dire situation citizens are in”. Never mind that Cuba’s dire situation has just about everything to do with United States interference in the first place – particularly the six-decades-long blockade that, under international law, technically qualifies as an act of war – or that magazines called Travel + Leisure should perhaps stick to the subjects at hand rather than serving as conduits for imperial propaganda.

The fourth suggestion on the list is to “drink some Cuba libres in Miami”, the unofficial capital of right-wing Cuban exiles. The name “Cuba libre”, which literally means “free Cuba” and generally involves rum and Coca-Cola, evokes nostalgia for the good old days when the island existed blissfully under a brutal US-backed dictatorship.

But the problem extends far beyond Travel + Leisure. The US corporate media as a whole have been less than serious in their coverage of recent events in Cuba – to the extent that many outlets have deceitfully published images of pro-government demonstrations cast as the opposite. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Siglo XXI: My 24 hours in Mexico’s 21st-century migrant prison

 Al Jazeera English

On July 11, I found myself imprisoned at Mexico’s infamous Siglo XXI “migration station” in Tapachula – a city in the state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala – which specialises in detaining US-bound migrants from Central America and beyond.

Mine was a curious predicament, to say the least, for a citizen of the United States, exempt as we usually are from the fallout of border militarisation policies that make the world safe for US imperialism.

I had come to Tapachula for four days to write about migrants. When I attempted to board my return flight to Mexico City, I was apprehended for visa irregularities of my own and loaded into a van bound for Siglo XXI, which means “21st century” in Spanish.

According to the Associated Press, the detention centre is said to be the largest in Latin America, and is a “secretive place off-limits to public scrutiny where … journalists aren’t allowed”.

Whoops. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Nayib Bukele: El Salvador’s Bitcoin messiah

 Al Jazeera English

In June, El Salvador became the first country ever to recognise the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal tender, just days after millennial President Nayib Bukele – who defines himself on Twitter as “officially the coolest president in the world” – announced his cool crypto-vision at a Bitcoin extravaganza in Miami.

As of September, all Salvadoran businesses will be required to accept payment in Bitcoin as well as the US dollar, which was itself hurriedly adopted as the domestic currency in 2001 under similarly dubious circumstances.

The new Bitcoin bill hurtled through the Salvadoran legislature in five hours – which at least meant Bukele did not have to send the national army and police into the parliament building to threaten lawmakers, as he did in February 2020 when he was not getting his way.

Rather than address impoverished Salvadorans whose tax money and livelihoods will now be gambled on an inconceivably volatile cryptocurrency, Bukele took to a Twitter Spaces livestream with two of his brothers to tell foreign investors about the beachfront property and other perks awaiting them in Bitcoin wonderland. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Memories of a Honduran coup

 Al Jazeera English

Twelve years ago, in the wee hours of June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras, was abducted from his residence by heavily armed Honduran soldiers and carted off to Costa Rica in his pyjamas, never to be restored to his rightful post.

Prior to the coup, the slightly left-leaning Zelaya had raised the urban minimum wage to $300 a month and pursued a smattering of other domestic adjustments. While these measures hardly did much to alleviate institutionalised misery, they were still too abominable a departure from business as usual for the right-wing Honduran elite – faithful acolytes of American empire and replicators of capitalist oppression.

Following Zelaya’s overthrow, the Barack Obama administration in the United States took its sweet time debating whether the coup had actually been a coup and should therefore trigger the required cutoffs in aid to Honduras.

Ultimately, the US heel-dragging allowed the Honduran right wing to re-entrench itself in power, and subsequent illegitimate and fraudulent elections – swiftly signed off on by Obama & Co – sealed the deal.

When the coup transpired, I was in Argentina visiting my parents, who had recently relocated there from the US homeland. I had just spent four months hitchhiking through Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela – a trip that, like my previous international hitchhiking jaunts, had offered me a first-hand glimpse of my country’s malevolent machinations worldwide. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

As the drug war turns 50, the US is still public enemy number one

 Al Jazeera English

Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon convened a press conference with a grave message for his fellow citizens: “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse”. To vanquish the enemy, he declared, it was “necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive”, which would be “worldwide” in nature and would naturally require “more money” from Congress.

To be sure, it was fortunate that Nixon included the geographic specification “in the United States” – lest Americans forget the terrible communist menace that was allegedly also imperilling their lives at every moment and that required, inter alia, a multitude of US soldiers to go kill and be killed in Vietnam.

As it turned out, part of Nixon’s professed motive for launching the so-called “war on drugs” had to do with none other than the Vietnam War, which had spawned an epidemic of heroin abuse and similar phenomena in the US military. It was hardly rocket science: if you are a poor American dispatched to kill and die for no other reason than imperialism, you are probably more likely to seek a narcotic-fuelled escape from said miserable reality. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why does Mexico have the world’s ‘most violent’ cities?

 Al Jazeera English

In 2020, according to a report by the Mexico City-based Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, seven out of the ten “most violent” cities in the world were located in Mexico.

The organisation ranks cities with populations of 300,000 or more – which are not in declared conflict zones – based on official tallies of intentional homicides.

The city of Celaya in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato came in first with 109.38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Ciudad Obregón. Guanajuato’s Irapuato took fifth place, while Baja California’s Ensenada took sixth. Uruapan in the state of Michoacán came in eighth.

For the country as a whole, 2019 and 2020 were the most violent on record, with more than 34,000 intentional homicides each year. Many critics of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have blamed his “hugs, not bullets” policy vis-à-vis the drug cartels for the bloody state of affairs.

But while AMLO is certainly deserving of more than a little criticism – particularly with regard to his appallingly dismissive attitude towards Mexico’s surge in femicides during the pandemic – he did not exactly create the current landscape of violence out of thin air. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The New York Tides: Is discourse on Israel-Palestine truly shifting?

 Middle East Eye

On 23 May, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page article titled “The Misery of Life Under Occupation”, recounting the personal stories of various Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem subjected to lifetimes of misery by the state of Israel.

The article appeared just days after a ceasefire halted the Israeli military’s latest bout of butchery in the Gaza Strip, which killed 248 Palestinians - including 67 children - and was touched off by, inter alia, Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem.

Among those profiled in the Times piece was Muhammad Sandouka, 42, who was forced to tear down his own family’s Jerusalem home after being given a choice between do-it-yourself demolition and Israeli government demolition - the latter option also entailing a $10,000 fee to be paid by Sandouka, for the privilege of being made homeless.

The alleged reason for disappearing the Sandouka home: it was interfering with touristic views of the Old City.

Stressing that “no Palestinian is insulated from the occupation’s reach”, the Times writers note that - for the approximately three million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem - the impending forcible removal of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah was a “story [that] was exceptional only because it attracted an international spotlight”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Two oppressive states join forces

subtext, by AJE+

Colombia’s Foreign Ministry responded to the recent Israeli military campaign in Gaza by expressing “concern over terrorist acts” and “solidarity with the victims of these actions.” But the terrorist acts it condemned did not include Israel’s 11 days of airstrikes against a captive, mostly refugee population crowded into a densely populated strip, while its solidarity was reserved only for the 12 Israelis killed, not for the 248 Palestinians.

That was no surprise though, because Israel and Colombia are two peas in a bellicose pod, engaging in the United States-backed state terrorism known as the War on Terror. Israel and its allies reserve the “terrorist” label for Palestinians, who, as we know, have been subjected to 70-plus years of land theft, ethnic cleansing and massacres. In Colombia, the “terrorists” have traditionally been members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) – the left-wing guerrilla movement formed in the 1960s in response to obscene economic inequality and authoritarian tyranny – although the term is quite flexibly applied to pretty much anyone opposed to a right-wing government.

Like in Israel, land theft and the forced displacement of Indigenous communities is also a theme of the Colombian political landscape. The survival of campesino, or small farmer, communities has tended to complicate corporate plunder and other profitable endeavors in resource-rich areas. Many years ago, I visited the persecuted peace community of San José de Apartadó in northern Colombia. The community co-founder María Brígida González – whose 15-year-old daughter Eliseña was killed in her sleep in 2005 by Colombian soldiers who portrayed her as a FARC militant – surmised that the purpose of such operations was to “sow terror” in order to clear the land and facilitate resource exploitation. READ MORE AT subtext, by AJE+

From the Twitter trenches: The Israeli army’s propaganda war

 Al Jazeera English

On May 14, the official Twitter account of the Israeli military tweeted a “pop quiz” video, inviting viewers to “imagine” that they themselves were the Israeli armed forces deciding what to do in response to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. The answer options were: “A. Nothing[.] Allow terrorists to destroy Israeli cities,” or “B. Target the terrorists who fire the rockets.”

According to the military, there was “only one right answer”: option B. In reality, a more accurate answer would have been something like: “C. Bomb Gaza to smithereens and massacre entire Palestinian families in ‘response’ to rockets that are not even capable of destroying Israeli cities – and that are only being fired at Israel because Israel has spent the past 73 years massacring and otherwise tormenting Palestinians.”

Nearly 250 Palestinians have thus far been killed, including 66 children, in the Israeli assault that began on May 10. As usual, the Israeli military Twitter account has served as a valuable weapon for conducting a parallel propaganda war to bolster the physical one. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

What Kind of Democracy Kills Children?

 Jacobin

During a press briefing on Tuesday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price discussed Israel’s latest all-out assault on the Gaza Strip — dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls — which had begun the previous day and quickly dispensed with thirty Palestinian lives, including ten children.

Asked by a reporter whether the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli air strikes was “something to condemn,” Price responded in typical State Department style by verbosely not answering the question:

"Well — and I said this yesterday, that the loss of innocent life is something that we would — that is deeply regrettable. It is — of course, Israel has the right to defend itself against those attacking Israel, against Hamas and terrorists responsible, including for the loss of life in Israel, but the loss of civilian life in these operations is something that we deeply regret. It is precisely why we have said that, just as the Israelis do, the Palestinians have every right to live in safety and security."

Obviously, it’s a bit difficult for Palestinians to aspire to safety and security when the imperial power that throws billions of dollars a year at Israel can’t even say that slaughtering kids is bad. Nor is the Palestinian population provided much security considering the Israeli state’s seventy-three-year predilection for ethnic cleansing. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Sheikh Jarrah: Clashes, scuffles, conflict - western media's euphemisms for Israel's violence

 Middle East Eye

Let’s imagine some creative wartime reporting: "On April 26, 1937, the inhabitants of the Basque town of Guernica 'clashed' with German warplanes dropping high explosives and incendiary bombs. The town was pulverised in the course of the 'scuffle', and up to 1600 people perished".

Obviously, the above lines would never be written by any non-delusional person, since the nature of the power relationship between human bodies on the one hand and bomb-spewing airborne monstrosities on the other is quite clear.

Yet, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - itself a euphemism for Israel’s forever war on Palestinians - the Western corporate media never miss a chance to report blatantly one-sided brutality as "clashes" and "scuffles".

Take, for example, the Great March of Return, the overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations that began in the Gaza Strip in March 2018. According to the United Nations, the Israeli military killed 214 Palestinians - 46 of them children - in the context of the Great March, and injured more than 36,100. “During the same period,” by contrast, “one Israeli soldier was killed and seven others were injured.”

The media takeaway from the same event: there were "clashes". READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

15 Salvadoran Military Officers Could Soon Go on Trial for the El Mozote Massacre

 Jacobin

In April, El Salvador began the final phase of pretrial hearings in the criminal case against the accused perpetrators of the 1981 El Mozote massacre. The massacre, which took place during the country’s civil war of 1980–1992 and killed some one thousand civilians in and around the village of El Mozote — most of them children — was carried out by the US-trained and -funded Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran military. If the judge concludes that there is sufficient evidence to move ahead with the trial, fifteen retired military officers could face prison sentences.

In his book Weakness and Deceit: America and El Salvador’s Dirty War, former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner cites the recollections of massacre survivor Rufina Amaya, whose blind husband and three daughters were slaughtered:

From her hiding place in the trees, she heard the soldiers’ conversation: “Lieutenant, somebody here says he won’t kill children,” said one soldier. “Who’s the son of a bitch who said that?” the lieutenant answered. “I am going to kill him.”

The day after the bloodbath began, soon-to-be Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams took up a post as Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs and set about denying that the massacre had ever happened. Even after the civil war ended, Abrams insisted that the Reagan administration’s legacy in the Central American nation had been one of “fabulous achievement” — this despite the loss of upward of 75,000 lives, with the vast majority of atrocities attributed to the US-backed state and allied paramilitary formations and death squads. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Biden’s anti-migrant ‘surge’

 Al Jazeera English

In mid-March, Reuters reported that Mexico would “restrict movement on its southern border with Guatemala to help contain the spread of COVID-19”. The same article noted that the Joe Biden administration in the United States would be simultaneously sorting the details of a plan to loan Mexico coronavirus vaccines.

According to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, the simultaneity had nothing to do with a quid pro quo to stanch so-called “illegal immigration” and was instead the result of “multiple layers” of conversations between the US and Mexico.

But there is no time like a pandemic to intensify the crackdown on poor, US-bound migrants. I have been in Mexico since the onset of the health crisis last year, and no effort has been made to “restrict movement” of incoming tourists and other humans of superior value who have arrived by plane – many of them from coronavirus hotspots such as the US itself.

Quid pro quo or not, Mexico’s southern border reinforcement apparently did not provide the gringos with sufficient immunity from the migrant threat. On April 12, the Associated Press remarked that the month of March had seen a “record number of unaccompanied children” endeavouring to cross into the US, as well as the highest number of Border Patrol “encounters” with migrants on the US-Mexico border since March of 2001. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel and Colombia: The ever more special relationship

 Middle East Eye

Last August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Colombian President Ivan Duque held a joint videoconference to launch a new free trade agreement between their countries.

The corresponding media release from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the agreement would “create opportunities for the Israeli economy in various fields including agriculture, technology and medicine”.

Duque also committed to opening an “innovation office” in occupied Jerusalem, which was apparently Colombia’s interim solution for kissing the Israeli rear end without irreparably defying Palestinians and international law by suddenly moving the Colombian embassy to Israel’s self-appointed capital.

The media release quoted Netanyahu as enthusing that the “platform of cooperation” between Israel and Colombia would “bring our partnership, our friendship, our brotherhood … to new political and economic levels”. The prime minister went on to applaud his counterpart: “Ivan, your leadership in the fight against terrorism sets an example for the rest of Latin America.”

Of course, given that Netanyahu’s version of fighting terrorism includes things like slaughtering Palestinians left and right, it’s not difficult to guess at what Duque’s “counterterrorism” credentials might entail. Since the right-wing leader took power in 2018, a surge in massacres has taken place in Colombia - many implicating the government. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

COVID-19: The patriarchal pandemic

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic here in Mexico last year, femicides and calls to domestic violence hotlines soared. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) – who had previously expressed annoyance that the femicide issue should distract from a very important project to raffle the presidential plane – then took it upon himself to claim that 90 percent of emergency hotline calls were false.

The AMLO government went on to release a public service video containing ludicrous advice on how to ostensibly prevent violence in the home, such as by taking a deep breath and counting to 10.

Of course, for many women in Mexico and around the world, the pandemic’s stay-at-home measures have produced a situation in which they effectively cannot breathe – much less deeply.

From Argentina to Malaysia and Sudan to the United Kingdom to the United States, there has been a surge in reports of violence against women. To be sure, there are more opportunities for domestic violence when people are confined to domestic space.

And yet the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in other ways, as well. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Covid-19: On Israel's vaccination 'miracle'

 Middle East Eye

On 8 March, ABC News ran the headline: “Israel celebrates 5 millionth coronavirus vaccination” - a milestone in the country’s race to prove its global superiority by vaccinating its nine million people faster than anybody else.

It helps, of course, that Israel was able to strike a data-sharing deal with Pfizer-BioNTech, according to which all Israeli vaccine needs have swiftly been met in exchange for a gargantuan sum and rampant violations of medical privacy.

But this sort of winner-takes-all logic of corona-capitalism means that there are lots of losers. News consumers who read beyond headlines will discover in the second paragraph of the ABC article that, by numerical coincidence, there are also five million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza - who, as usual, have nothing to be celebrating.

In a case of massive criminal negligence, Israel has refused to vaccinate Palestinians in the occupied territories, despite being obligated to do so under the Geneva Conventions. After donating a mere 2,000 doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, Israel has now charitably agreed to vaccinate Palestinian labourers who work - surprise surprise! - in Israel and illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The negligence is even more criminal in the context of Israel’s ongoing crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has long thwarted the import of critical medical equipment and driven the coastal enclave’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Even before the onset of the pandemic, Gaza was effectively unable to breathe. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.