Covid-19: From a beach in Mexico, nomadic dreams of return

 Middle East Eye

Many years ago at a Chinese restaurant in some city or another, I acquired a fortune cookie containing a fortune inscribed with the verb "to return". At the time, I was in the midst of a 17-year bout of mad itinerancy that had commenced in 2003, when I had abandoned the United States in favour of darting between countries and fleeing like the plague the notion that I might ever subscribe to a sedentary existence.

The fortune would eventually end up among the heap of belongings I deposited at a friend’s house in the southwestern Turkish city of Fethiye, which, appropriately, would become one of my regular stops as I transited the globe. Sorting through my possessions on each return trip, I’d come across the slip of paper, which provided the requisite amount of consistency to offset my continuous motion.

In 2020, the coronavirus plague put a stop to my returns - and to movement in general. I had travelled in March to the coastal village of Zipolite in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where I was meant to spend 12 days before dashing off again. Nearly a year later, I’m still here. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

In Our Corona-Capitalist Dystopia, You Can Have Multiple Star Wars Helmets, But No Health Care

 Jacobin

Chatting recently with a Lebanese-Palestinian friend in Beirut, I confessed to him some of my online pandemic purchases made from the Oaxacan coastal village of Zipolite, where I’ve been since the start of Mexico’s not-so-quarantine last March.

I have, for example, acquired no fewer than three pairs of high heels, despite the fact that there is nowhere to wear high heels in Zipolite — and that I don’t wear high heels in the first place. I now own two fanny packs — one neon blue and the other rainbow — an accessory I have not used since I was six. And I’ve bought five yerba mate gourds, even though one has sufficed for the past fifteen years.

My friend informed me that he himself had just returned from the supermarket — which had been closed for various weeks in accordance with Lebanon’s lockdown — only to review with horror the contents of his shopping bag: bulk quantities of Philadelphia cream cheese, Oscar Mayer salami, and other subpar food that, he explained, he didn’t even eat.

A survey of other acquaintances produced accounts of similarly questionable quarantine investments. There was the friend who had stockpiled sweaters despite being stuck in Hawaii, and the friend who had stockpiled bras despite an aversion to using them. There were tales of Ninja Turtles boxers, sea-foam green sequin turtlenecks, and late-night Amazon binges resulting in the delivery of multiple Star Wars helmets. And there was the friend in Philadelphia who commenced an obsessive procurement of what she described as “vaguely Mormon linen dresses that will transform this dystopian nightmare (in which all the pleasures of urban life are stripped away) into something pastoral and picturesque.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Nobel Peace Prize 2021: The case against Jared Kushner

 Al Jazeera English

Jared Kushner, former White House adviser and prized son-in-law of Twitter ban victim and ex-US President Donald Trump, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz.

The nomination is based on Kushner’s role in negotiating last year the “Abraham Accords”, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Of course, of all the people to be running around making Nobel Peace Prize nominations, Dershowitz’s credentials are rather dubious. His track record includes advocating for the legalisation of torture and psychopathically arguing in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of a “continuum of civilianality” – according to which it is OK for Israel to kill Arab civilians because, well, many of them are just not that civilian-like.

It is not difficult to see why celebrity lawyer Dershowitz, who also defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, would celebrate the “peace” efforts of nepotism’s favourite poster boy. After all, Kushner’s approach to Middle East peace is to definitively dispossess the Palestinians and thereby finalise Israel’s project of territorial domination based on ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

The thrust of Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan – unveiled in 2019 as part of Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” – was to inflict on the Palestinians “private-sector growth”, “foreign direct investment”, “free trade agreements”, and all those other neoliberal catch-phrases that magically endow corporate tyranny and mass economic suffering with a veneer of necessary and exciting progress.

Never mind that it is impossible to prosper when you are being bombed on a regular basis by Israel, whose policies of slaughter and other forms of human rights obliteration are never seen by the likes of Kushner and Dershowitz as an impediment either to peace or peace prizes. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Jumping on the Hezbollah ‘Narcoterrorism’ Bandwagon

 FAIR

Italy announced last July 1 the seizure of 84 million counterfeit pills of the amphetamine Captagon, widely used by combatants in the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. The pills, seized in the southern Italian port of Salerno and said to be worth 1 billion euros, were immediately attributed to ISIS, one of the primary parties to the Syrian conflict.

But the narrative quickly did an about-face, and blame was reassigned to ISIS’s mortal enemies: the Syrian government and—perhaps more importantly—Hezbollah, the Syrian government-allied Lebanese political party and militant organization that has long been a thorn in the side of the US empire and its integral Israeli appendage.

On August 4, coincidentally the same day that the Beirut port explosion devastated Lebanon’s capital city, the Washington Post ran a dispatch by Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, headlined “Hezbollah Operatives Seen Behind Spike in Drug Trafficking, Analysts Say.” While the authors concede that “whether Hezbollah was directly involved in the Italian shipment is not yet known,” the ultimate takeaway is that “investigators say the episode fits a pattern of recent drug cases in the Middle East and Europe linked to the powerful Lebanese militia.” The idea that “Hezbollah operatives began manufacturing [Captagon] more than a decade ago” is presented as fact without need for evidence. 

As is par for the course for such articles, the “analysts” are largely unnamed, consisting of the usual assortment of anonymous “intelligence officials” and the like. Among the few named officials are John Fernández, head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center—whose briefing on Hezbollah at the fervently pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is quoted—and Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury official and FBI analyst now ensconced at WINEP, where he is perennially available to link Hezbollah to any and every narco-terrorist plot on the planet.

In their piece, Warrick and Mekhennet plug Levitt’s latest pride and joy, an interactive map that purports to implicate Hezbollah operatives in “drug smuggling, money laundering and other criminal enterprises in dozens of countries around the world, while also charting terrorist attacks financed by such illicit proceeds.” A quick perusal reveals that key global enterprises have unfortunately been overlooked, such as the “Hezbollah pig farm in Liberia” that was dutifully exposed in 2018 by US State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan A. Sales. Other essential components of the fearmongering arsenal do, however, appear in Levitt’s database, including Hezbollah’s alleged narco-ties to Venezuela—a country that must be demonized at all cost on account of its refusal to subscribe to US-prescribed systems of right-wing oppression—as well to as the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), myriad drug cartels and other preferred imperial bogeymen. READ MORE AT FAIR.