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.