‘Tis the season: The post-World Cup Christmas blues

 Al Jazeera English

When the World Cup kicked off in November, I was rooting for Mexico. Having resided off and on in the coastal town of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state since the start of the pandemic, I had already amassed a good quantity of Mexican football shirts, and I watched the games at a café on the beach, where a television had been set up on a table in the sand.

A traditional Mexican blanket was hung to deflect the glare of the sun, and an altar was erected below the TV comprising burning incense, a green candle bearing the image of Jesus Christ, an enlarged photograph of Mexican goalie Guillermo Ochoa, and assorted good luck charms. A small audience would gather with the beer the Mexican TV commentators in Qatar had encouraged us to imbibe on their behalf, and the 90 minutes would pass in animated camaraderie, with plenty of hollering and colourful Mexican swear words.

Little did we know that, upon the elimination of the Mexican team, Morocco would replace Mexico in our hearts – in my case rather literally. With the help of a laundry pin, a piece of paper, and red nail polish, I amended the MEXICO emblazoned across the chest of one of my jerseys. The letters OROC took the place of EXI, and I was ready to go. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Mexico and the unbearable whiteness of advertising

 Al Jazeera English

Scrolling through Facebook recently on my phone in Mexico, I came upon an advertisement informing me in Spanish: “The moment has arrived to renew yourself.” A company based in the northern Mexican state of Nuevo León offered to loan me up to 250,000 pesos — more than $12,000 — to pursue the plastic surgery of my choice. An image of a bikini-clad white woman with blond hair provided additional encouragement.

A perusal of the company’s Facebook page revealed that she was not the only white person selected to promote these surgically focused financial services. In fact, not a single non-white person had been chosen to embody “renewal”. This in a country where the vast majority of people are not white, and where a soaring national poverty rate — nearly 44 percent at the end of 2020 — means most folks could never afford a $12,000 loan.

And yet the Nuevo León firm is scarcely alone in its extra-white marketing approach. Generally speaking, the chromatic composition of Mexican advertising exists in glaring defiance of the physical diversity of Mexico’s primarily mestizo (mixed heritage) and Indigenous population. As is the case elsewhere in Latin America and in other countries subjected to European colonial depredations, the Spanish colonial legacy in Mexico has meant that lighter skin is associated with societal superiority and economic advantage. And what is the point of advertising if not to make people want to be something “better” than they are? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

El Salvador’s war on itself: The siege of Soyapango

 All Jazeera English

On December 3, Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who is also a Bitcoin influencer and the self-dubbed “coolest dictator in the world”, took to his favourite platform for governance, Twitter, to announce that 10,000 soldiers had surrounded the Salvadoran municipality of Soyapango.

According to the tweet, which came accompanied by a video set to dramatic music, “extraction teams” from the police and army had been tasked with removing gang members from the area “one by one”.

The following day, Bukele tweeted another annoying video to accompany the news that “more than 140 gang members” had already been arrested in Soyapango, El Salvador’s most populous municipality and a satellite city of San Salvador, the country’s capital.

And the day after that, he reported that the Soyapango operation had entailed the largest concentration of troops in Salvadoran history — no small feat in a nation whose 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992, killed upwards of 75,000 people. . . .

Of course, in his euphoria over the unprecedented mobilisation of an entire army division, Bukele failed to explain why a president should derive such delight in effectively waging war against his own country. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Hardcore’: The Mars of Elon Musk

 Al Jazeera English

Not long after commandeering Twitter in October for a sum of $44bn, Elon Musk – who is also the CEO of SpaceX and the self-branded “Technoking” of Tesla – dispatched an ultimatum to Twitter employees giving them two options. The first was to commit to being “extremely hardcore” and working “long hours at high intensity”. The second was to quit.

Musk had already fired approximately half of Twitter’s workforce – since anyone with a mere $44bn to spare on buying a social media platform is clearly in the business of pinching pennies. . . .

On the surface, writing about Musk should be like shooting fish in a barrel. The 51-year-old US-based South African live-tweets his bowel movements, makes penis jokes, gets off on anti-Black racism, and builds not-so-self-driving electric cars that crash into parked emergency vehicles. Unfortunately, this particular fish happens to be the richest person on the planet, who wields disproportionate control over terrestrial matters like the stock market and Donald Trump’s Twitter presence and who is now determined to make humanity a “spacefaring civilisation” as well – whether we like it or not.

As Musk told Time magazine, which shamelessly crowned him “Person of the Year” in 2021, the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”. According to Time’s obsequious writeup, Musk predicted colonising Mars within five years. Eventually, rocket ships would shuttle 100 people at a time to the Red Planet and then travel back to Earth, powered by Made-in-Mars fuel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The massive hypocrisy of the West’s World Cup ‘concerns’

 Al Jazeera English

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently came out against a ban on rainbow armbands at the World Cup tournament in Qatar, which various European team captains had intended to sport in support of LGBTQ rights and against discrimination. Blinken flagged the ban as “concerning” and a restriction on “freedom of expression”.

The secretary’s scolding came on the heels of another rather “concerning” development on the world stage: a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in the US state of Colorado that killed five people and wounded 18 others. This, in a country that fancies itself the global role model in terms of respect for freedom of expression, human rights, and all that good stuff – and yet where it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to exercise their right to not be massacred at nightclubs, elementary schools, places of worship, shopping malls, and so on. . . .

Indeed, as this year’s World Cup host, Qatar has come under intense US and European fire on the issue of gay rights as well as migrant worker exploitation (not to mention the violation of the apparent human right to drink beer in sports stadiums). After all, Orientalism dies hard – and what better backdrop for the release of pent-up Western chauvinism than a football tournament in a bona fide Middle Eastern desert, enduring Orientalist symbol of Arab backwardness and resistance to progress? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

World Cup 2022: Capitalism can’t kill football — try as it might

 Al Jazeera English

A week or so before the kickoff of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, I was walking in the coastal city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state when I passed a group of children playing football with a plastic Coca-Cola bottle. They were as gleefully animated as any group of children playing football anywhere, while the Coke bottle was, I thought, regrettably appropriate in a world governed by corporate toxicity.

It was particularly appropriate, perhaps, given that Coca-Cola and football go way back. The company, which has been an official World Cup sponsor since 1978, entered into a formal association with FIFA in 1974 – although its logo has saturated World Cup events since 1950. The partnership was initially ostensibly meant to promote youth development programmes, since there is clearly nothing better for youth development than ingesting sticky brown liquid that is bad for human health.

Of course, that alliance is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of global capitalism’s efforts to suck the soul out of football and eradicate any remnants of primordial joy by monetising and commodifying everything on and off the field. Given the deluge of corporate propaganda that we call “sponsorship”, the uninitiated football spectator would be forgiven for thinking Adidas was a football team – or that matches are waged between Emirates and Etihad airlines. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It’s time to call US democracy what it is — a failure

 Al Jazeera English

Polls closed on Tuesday evening in the United States’ latest democratic spectacle: the midterm elections — a topic the rest of the world has already had to hear far too much about and will continue to hear about, as some of the results may take days or weeks to confirm.

What we do know is that the “red wave” promised by Republicans did not exactly pan out; while the GOP is likely to take control of the House of Representatives, a deadlock looms in the Senate. The outcome of the crucial Senate race in Georgia will likely be postponed to a December run-off.

The delays and uncertainty mean the timing is ripe for a new cycle of election denialism, with growing mistrust in state institutions suggesting it will be increasingly difficult for the US to keep up democratic appearances.

In this year’s race for the Senate, House and other offices, a majority of Republican candidates have denied or cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. So we will likely see quite a lot of politicians triumph in an electoral system they themselves have denounced as fraudulent. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US midterms: Why abortion never gets old as a hot election topic

Al Jazeera English

Fifteen years ago, I had an abortion in the southwestern Turkish town of Fethiye, where I had been intermittently residing as part of my self-imposed exile from the United States. The procedure was performed in a gynaecological clinic by a Turkish doctor who whistled, sang songs and joked about my distinct lack of fortitude compared with his patients from surrounding villages – who, he said, were in and out of his office with no anaesthesia or whining.

While this will not be music to the ears of the so-called “pro-life” crowd, the experience remains one of the high points of my entire existence – which would have undoubtedly gone swiftly downhill had I been forced to reproduce against my will.

Had I pursued the abortion in the US, the extraction of a blob of cells from my uterus would have entailed far more bureaucracy, stigma, and money (and probably no whistling). Still, I would have had it much easier than a poor woman, especially if she was not white. Such, after all, is the nature of “equality”, “women’s rights”, and similar empty concepts that the US specialises in.

Indeed, in the self-appointed land of the free, reproductive freedom was never fully born; you might even say it was aborted. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Darién Gap: A deadly extension of the US border

Al Jazeera English

This year, a record number of United States-bound migrants and refugees have risked their lives to cross the Darién Gap, the 66-mile mountainous stretch of spectacularly inhospitable jungle between Colombia and Panama. According to Panama’s National Migration Service, more than 151,000 people, including at least 21,000 minors, made the crossing between January and September.

The trek can take more than a week, with perils ranging from precipitous ravines and flash floods to vipers and ultra-poisonous spiders. There are also man-made contributions to the landscape, such as unexploded ordnance courtesy of the US military, which practised dropping bombs over the Darién as part of its Cold War mission to make the world safe for capitalism.

Then, as now, a world safe for capitalism is a pretty dangerous one for humans. And, as the US continues to maniacally fortify its borders to ensure that poor people will never have the same freedom of movement as corporate capital, that sociopathic policy plays out over migrant bodies more than a thousand miles away in the Darién Gap. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

These Supreme Court cases could kill what remains of US democracy

 Al Jazeera English

In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has dutifully laboured to erode the protections guaranteed under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a civil rights era milestone that aimed to safeguard minority voters from racial discrimination. Now, six decades after the law’s passage, the country’s highest judicial body will decide whether to drop some of the few pretences to justice and equality in US electoral democracy that remain.

Keep in mind that this is the same conservative-majority court that recently brought us the evisceration of Roe v Wade and other assorted sociopathic rulings, such as the one enshrining the constitutional right to carry a gun outside the home. That, by the way, was just a month after the Uvalde elementary school mass killing of 19 children and two adults.

One of the high-profile cases that the Supreme Court is currently hearing deals with Alabama’s congressional redistricting map, which was implemented by that state’s Republican legislature following the census in 2020. The redistricting scheme is a rather transparent violation of the Voting Rights Act. While more than 27 percent of Alabama’s voting-age population is Black, deft cartographic manoeuvres have produced an arrangement in which African American voters have a realistic chance of electing a candidate they like in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US capitalism is bad for your mental health

 Al Jazeera English

When I was in high school in Texas in the late 1990s, running myself ragged with academic and extracurricular activities, I began suffering from acute panic attacks.

The first round lasted for six months, during which I experienced continuous shortness of breath, a berserk heart rate and the feeling that I had been wrenched out of reality and placed in a parallel and terrifying universe, where I was entirely alone and where no one would help me.

Having been raised in the ruthless system known as United States capitalism — in which the need for individual success had been hardwired into my brain — my terror was exacerbated by the assumption that I was dying or otherwise failing miserably at existence.

When the panic attacks resurfaced a few years later in college in New York, where hyperventilating in the bathroom quickly proved incompatible with attendance at lectures, I underwent a professional psychological evaluation. The doctor needed just 90 seconds before prescribing heavy-duty anxiety medication.

So it was that I briefly joined the ranks of Americans medicated to deal with mental health issues caused by, well, the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Brazil, it is time to wake up from your Bolsonaro nightmare

 Al Jazeera English

In the aftermath of Brazil’s last general election in 2018, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page celebrated the victory of Jair Bolsonaro – a former low-ranking army officer, far-right fringe politician, and fan of Brazil’s sadistic military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.

According to one bizarre article by the right-wing writer Mary Anastasia O’Grady, there was a simple explanation for the electoral triumph of the man that many analysts had compared with the then-president of the United States, Donald Trump. Despite the fact that Bolsonaro had been “labeled a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a fascist, an advocate of torture and an aspiring dictator”, he had prevailed, the piece argued, because Brazilians were “in the midst of a national awakening in which socialism – the alternative to a Bolsonaro presidency – has been put on trial”.

While a socialist presidency certainly beats fascist torture any day, “socialism” was in truth not even in the running in 2018. The Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) – whose candidate Bolsonaro defeated – is not socialist but rather centre-left, and has furthermore done its fair share to advance neoliberal capitalist interests over the years. Granted, the PT has also committed such flagrantly leftist crimes as helping to extricate millions of Brazilians from poverty and hunger, as transpired during the first decade of this century under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Now, it’s election time again in South America’s largest country – and folks may be in for another “awakening”. As Brazil votes tomorrow, Lula is back in the race, and is leading Bolsonaro in the polls (although, as Bloomberg reports, Goldman Sachs and concerned hedge funds have assured clients the election will be “tighter” than surveys suggest). READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why Marvel’s Mossad superheroine Sabra is all kinds of wrong

 Al Jazeera English

Over a period of two days just outside Beirut in September 1982, Israeli-backed Lebanese militiamen slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in what became known as the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Pregnant women were stabbed in the stomach; foetuses were ripped out. Children had their throats cut; young men were lined up and shot in the back.

Israel’s military provided logistical support throughout the butchery, which occurred three months into the apocalyptic Israeli invasion of Lebanon that had been green-lit by the United States.

So it was not the most appropriate timing in the world when, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre this month, Disney’s Marvel Studios announced that its film, Captain America: New World Order, slated for release in 2024, would feature an Israeli character called Sabra. This little-known character made her Marvel Comics debut in the 1980s as the “super heroine of the state of Israel,” and will be played by Israeli actress Shira Haas.

And while her name is not a reference to the massacre in Lebanon, the whole thing is still super problematic. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Neurotic in paradise: Capitalist hangover on a ‘red’ Greek island

Al Jazeera English

It was some years ago during a brutal winter in Bosnia that I first learned of the existence of the remote Greek island of Ikaria. Prior to the pandemic, Sarajevo was one of my regular stops as I pursued a life of frenzied international itinerance, eschewing a fixed residence and, more importantly, avoiding my execrable country of birth, the United States.

On this particular visit to subzero Sarajevo, I alternated between falling on ice outdoors and sitting in my apartment looking at pictures of summertime scenes on the internet. And it was on account of the latter pastime that Ikaria entered my consciousness, via a spate of articles extolling the island’s rugged beauty and the extraordinary longevity of its inhabitants. . . .

No one has pinpointed the precise secret to Ikarian endurance, but it appears to involve a combination of a slow life, social camaraderie, olive oil, wild sage tea, goat’s milk, outdoor labour, afternoon naps, therapeutic winds and sexual activity into old age — not to mention the sheer exquisiteness of the physical environment. As if that weren’t good enough, it gets even better: Ikaria is known locally as the “red rock” in reference to its communist tendencies, which only intensified in accordance with the island’s service as a place of banishment for Greek leftists in the mid-twentieth century. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

 

The Chilean constitutional vote: A tectonic shift?

Al Jazeera English

In the aftermath of the deadly magnitude 8.8 earthquake that rocked Chile in February 2010, US columnist Bret Stephens – whose brand of conservative zealotry commands a regrettably lucrative market in the imperial commentariat – took to the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page to explain “How Milton Friedman Saved Chile”.

In Stephens’ view, the late free-market fundamentalist was to thank for the fact that the disaster did not cause more damage – and for giving Chileans the “intellectual wherewithal first to survive the quake, and now to build their lives anew”. Never mind that Friedman’s “intellectual” contributions to the South American nation consist of providing the neoliberal ideology that underpinned the bloody US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which thousands of Chileans did not survive. Tens of thousands more were tortured by the state.

Never mind, too, that the strict Chilean building codes referenced by Stephens hailed from 1972, i.e. from the pre-dictatorship presidency of democratically elected Salvador Allende – whose belief in economic equality, social justice, and other diabolical things had necessitated the lethal 1973 coup against him by the guardians of hemispheric order. Following Allende’s election, US President Richard Nixon famously ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream”. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, busied himself setting the stage for the coup.

Fast forward 49 years and the foundations of order are once again being shaken – but not by an earthquake. In a compulsory nationwide plebiscite on Sunday, September 4, Chileans will vote on whether to approve a new draft constitution to replace the current one, which dates from 1980 and the Pinochet heyday. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Keeping up (dis)appearances in El Salvador

 Al Jazeera English

In her brief book Salvador, penned during the bloody Salvadoran civil war of 1979-92, Joan Didion reflects on the Spanish word “desaparecer,” meaning “to disappear”. She notes that its “flexibility” in Spanish as both a transitive and intransitive verb had “been adopted by those speaking English in El Salvador, as in John Sullivan was disappeared from the Sheraton; the government disappeared the students”.

Indeed, there was plenty of disappearing going on in the country — whether transitively or intransitively. The International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, estimates that about 9,000 people disappeared in El Salvador during the war. This is on top of the more than 75,000 people killed, with the majority of atrocities committed by the United States-backed right-wing military and associated death squads.

By coincidence, in 1992 — the year of the conflict’s ostensible end — the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance. In 2010, the UN declared August 30 as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

But declarations and international days do not make missing people reappear. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump and I can agree: The US is a ‘third-world country’

 Al Jazeera English

When on August 8 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in search of classified documents, the ex-president of the United States decried the episode as “an assault [that] could only take place in broken, third-world countries”. He continued to lament that America had “now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before”.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, chimed in on Twitter with the assessment: “This is what you see happen in 3rd World Banana Republics!!!” Never mind that the FBI’s seizure of secret documents does not fit the “corruption” bill quite as well as some other characteristics of American democracy: say, the fact that non-taxpaying billionaires can be president or that the country is run as a crooked, oligarchic corporatocracy.

This is not the first time Trump has likened the US to a “third-world country”, which was also his epithet of choice when he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But Trump & Co are not the only members of the US ruling elite to exercise this vocabulary. The January 2021 attack on the US Capitol prompted a surge in pejorative “third world” and “banana republic” comparisons from everyone from Biden to George W Bush, former US leader and civilised ravager of Afghanistan and Iraq. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel: normalising terror, one dawn at a time

 Al Jazeera English

Israel’s latest military assault on the Gaza Strip – codenamed Operation Breaking Dawn – spanned three days in early August and killed at least 44 Palestinians, including 16 children. According to the Israeli government, the attack was a “preemptive” operation against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group – which is as creative an excuse as any for spontaneously bombing people for no apparent reason.

A total of zero Israelis were killed over the course of Israel’s sanguinary dawn-breaking in Gaza, an acute discrepancy in casualties that is par for the course in the Zionist state’s dealings with the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave. While lethal and nonlethal forms of Israeli military torment have continued to be fixtures of daily existence in Gaza even after Israel’s so-called “withdrawal” from the territory in 2005, Breaking Dawn was the bloodiest episode since the 11-day Israeli attack in May 2021 – nobly dubbed Operation Guardian of the Walls – which killed more than 260 Palestinians, including 67 children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: The cult of Nayib Bukele

 Al Jazeera English

On August 2, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele – whose Twitter profile has evolved from “officially the coolest president in the world” to the “coolest dictator in the world” to just “El Presidente” – took to his favourite social media platform to announce that El Salvador had gone from being the “most dangerous country in the world to the safest country in Latin America”.

Accompanying the tweet was the hashtag #GuerraContraPandillas – “war on gangs” – and a statistics chart from the Salvadoran National Civilian Police indicating that, on August 1, there had allegedly been zero homicides nationwide.

Granted, the country is not very “safe” for the casualties of the war on gangs which is currently being waged in the context of a state of emergency imposed at the end of March in response to a spike in gang killings. The spike was occasioned by a breakdown in secret negotiations between the Bukele administration and the Salvadoran gangs – for which underhanded business Bukele assumed the codename “Batman”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

US gun violence: Capitalism is the culprit

 Al Jazeera English

On July 27, two top executives from prominent US gun companies – Marty Daniel of Daniel Defense and Christopher Killoy of Sturm, Ruger & Co – appeared before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform chaired by New York Democrat Carolyn Maloney. The hearing came on the heels of the latest succession of massacres – the Buffalo supermarket, the Uvalde elementary school, the Highland Park July 4 parade – that have come to define life in America.

As the Guardian noted, this “marked the first time in nearly two decades that the CEOs of leading gun manufacturers testified before Congress”. The CEO of Smith & Wesson Brands – which according to the committee earned at least $125m in 2021 alone from the sale of assault-style rifles, a frequent prop in mass shootings – had declined to participate in the attempt at “oversight”.

But the two willing invitees presumably spoke for the US gun industry as a whole when they shot down the notion that their products and aggressive marketing practices have anything to do with rampant killing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Beirut, fragmented

 Al Jazeera English

“How can I write about Beirut?”

So begins the Lebanese civil war memoir Beirut Fragments by Jean Said Makdisi – Jerusalem-born Palestinian scholar, longtime Beirut resident, and sister of the late Edward Said – which was published in 1990 at the end of the 15-year conflict.

Expanding on her introductory question, Said Makdisi wonders how she can “collect it all into one volume: the years of pain; of watching a world collapse” – and how to express her “strange love for this mutilated city [and] the lingering magic of the place that has kept me and so many other clinging to its wreckage”.

Some 32 years later, on May 31, 2022, I myself would arrive back in Lebanon – one of my regular pre-pandemic international destinations – following an absence of more than three years. By the end of my 10-day visit, I, too, was faced with the conundrum: “How can I write about Beirut?” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Ameri-coup: A brief history of US misdeeds

 Al Jazeera English

There is an old joke about why there are never coups d’état in the United States of America: because there is no US embassy there.

Granted, the joke’s foundations have been somewhat shaken now that former President Donald Trump stands accused of inciting an “attempted coup” in January 2021. Not everyone is on board with the “coup” designation, however – even among Trump’s critics.

In a recent interview with CNN about the congressional investigation into the matter, longtime US diplomat and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton – whose moustache “Trump never liked”, as the Associated Press reported – declared it a “mistake” to see the insurrection as a “carefully planned coup d’état”. In short, according to Bolton, Trump was simply too incompetent to pull off something of that magnitude: “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’état – not here, but, you know, other places – it takes a lot of work.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The ‘terror’ in Highland Park: The US is exceptional, indeed

Al Jazeera English

On the morning of Monday, July 4, as the United States was gearing up for its 246th annual celebration of independence from Britain, the National Rifle Association (NRA) – America’s ultra-powerful gun rights organisation – offered the following inspirational reminder on Twitter: “The only reason you’re celebrating Independence Day is because citizens were armed”. The tweet ended with the hashtag “#FourthofJuly”.

This was before Monday’s mass shooting in the affluent Chicago, Illinois suburb of Highland Park killed seven people and wounded dozens of others at July 4 festivities in what Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering described as an act of “terror that was brought upon us”. Parents with strollers and children on tricycles fled for their lives. And yet the horrific casualty toll was not even the tip of the iceberg in terms of things that can happen “because citizens were armed”.

As NBC Chicago reported before the clock had even struck 9am on Monday, at least 57 people had already been shot in the city of Chicago alone over the Fourth of July weekend – nine of them fatally. Nationwide as of July 4, the US had registered no fewer than 309 mass shootings in 2022, according to the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one with “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter”.

There are more guns than people in the US, and this is certainly a large part of the problem – particularly as states like Texas, which recently hosted the Uvalde massacre of 19 elementary school students and two teachers, ensure that it is essentially as easy to acquire a firearm as it is to acquire laundry detergent. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

This Fourth of July, I am not ‘proud to be an American’

 Al Jazeera English

Every year on July 4, to much fanfare and revelry, the United States marks its 1776 independence from Britain.

The date is also an official holiday in Puerto Rico and other de facto US colonies. So much for “independence”.

I was born in the US in 1982, and, before definitively freeing myself from the “land of the free” in 2003, got to experience many a Fourth of July celebration. One year, when I was 12 or 13 and living in the Texas capital of Austin, my family and I attended a massive Independence Day gathering by the river, complete with deafening music and fireworks that permanently traumatised our dog Bounder.

Although this was more than 25 years ago, I can still recall being disproportionately moved by the Lee Greenwood song, God Bless the USA – a staple of July 4th festivities – even as Bounder convulsed beside me. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: A day in the life of a never-ending war

 Al Jazeera English

My Salvadoran friend “Alfredo” is 49 years old and resides in the nation’s capital of San Salvador in a neighbourhood called “10 de Octubre” (“10th of October”), the date of a deadly earthquake that rocked El Salvador in 1986 – if ever there was a more auspicious name for a neighbourhood.

I met Alfredo, who works at a barely remunerated job at a San Salvador school, when I spent three months in the country just prior to the onset of the pandemic in March 2020. We bonded over a shared affinity for excessively shabby venues to drink beer and an excessive dislike of the United States – my homeland, where Alfredo had travelled years earlier on someone’s else’s passport but had promptly determined that poverty in El Salvador was preferable to the “American dream”.

Despite my nagging requests for a tour of his intriguingly titled neighbourhood, I would not visit Alfredo at his own home until April of 2022. I returned to El Salvador for one month just in time to experience the newly inaugurated state of emergency – the response by exuberantly totalitarian president and Twitter aficionado Nayib Bukele to the spike in homicides in late March that had followed the breakdown in negotiations between his administration and the Salvadoran gangs. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Roe v Wade/Right v wrong: US Supreme Court guilty on abortion

 Al Jazeera English

On June 24, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalised abortion nationwide. The so-called “pro-life” crowd in the US has entered into a predictable state of ecstasy following the decision, which will severely complicate life for tens of millions of women across the country – particularly poor women of colour, as is inevitable under the system of racialised patriarchal capitalism that Americans call “democracy”.

By coincidence, the Supreme Court action took place exactly one month after the May 24 massacre of 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas – the latest in a never-ending series of national horrors that ultimately benefit the gun lobby and the arms industry, and that serve to highlight where American priorities lie in terms of human existence.

In a recent hearing before Congress, Texas paediatrician Dr Roy Guerrero described the scene at Uvalde Memorial Hospital in the aftermath of the massacre: “Two children, whose bodies had been so pulverised by the bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been so ripped apart, that the only clue as to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them. Clinging for life and finding none.”

Which brings us to the conundrum: Why is a clump of cells in a woman’s womb deserving of greater protection by the US Supreme Court than children who actually exist? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Fear and loathing: The US travel guide to the world

 Al Jazeera English

The current US state department “Lebanon Travel Advisory”, updated on June 6, urges US citizens to “reconsider travel” to the diminutive Middle Eastern nation “due to crime, terrorism, armed conflict, civil unrest, kidnapping and Embassy Beirut’s limited capacity to provide support to US citizens”. Three significant “high-risk” sections of Lebanese territory have been assigned the even more dramatic “Do Not Travel” warning: the Lebanese-Syrian border, the Lebanese-Israeli border, and refugee settlements.

As a US citizen myself, I can definitively say that the greatest danger I felt during my recent 10-day stay in the country – where I have been a frequent visitor since 2006 – was at the top of Beirut’s seaside Ferris wheel, which somehow continues to make its rounds despite the notorious Lebanese electricity shortage that has plunged much of the landscape into darkness.

Years ago, the Ferris wheel operator commented to me that the only time the giant wheel had ceased functioning for an extended period of time was during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This incursion killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, primarily civilians, and culminated with the Israeli-backed massacre of up to several thousand unarmed people in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila – speaking of the “dangers” of refugee settlements. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Notes on a mask-less world

Al Jazeera English

At the end of May, as I was waiting to board a flight from Newark to Geneva, I overheard a high-decibel monologue being delivered by an older American businessman to a fellow passenger of undetermined nationality. The topic of the monologue was the coronavirus, which the American’s daughter – a nurse in New York – had just contracted for the first time since the onset of the pandemic in 2020.

The moral of the story, according to the American, was that “everybody’s acting like Corona is done, but it’s not”. Ironically, his own insight did not inspire him to don a face mask either in the airport or on the airplane.

I had just flown from El Salvador to the United States to visit my parents in Kentucky, and from Geneva would continue on to Istanbul and Beirut. The trajectory provided a swift reintroduction to a suddenly mask-less world – in which everyone seemed to be over the pandemic despite the fact that the pandemic was very much not over. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

A ‘cosmic stink’: Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, 40 years on

 Al Jazeera English

The front cover of the 1982 American University of Beirut (AUB) yearbook features a black and white sketch of a campus building, foregrounded by a dozen colourful cut-and-pasted students. Some of them are sporting attire that is conspicuously from the 1980s; some are gathered around an orange juice vendor.

Open the yearbook to the first page, and the scene becomes decidedly less wholesome. An image of the main gate of AUB – emblazoned with the university’s motto in English and Arabic: “That they may have life and have it more abundantly” – is superimposed on a photograph of smoke rising from apartment buildings. The AUB Yearbook Committee explains in its introduction that, while they had intended to dedicate the book’s first 16 pages to the theme of the “reinstatement of student representation”, that plan had been derailed when, on June 4, Israel invaded and occupied Lebanon.

Lebanon was already seven years into its bloody civil war of 1975-90, but the Israeli invasion took it all to another level of savagery. The Israeli siege of “West Beirut” – the reductionist wartime label assigned to the so-called “Muslim” half of the Lebanese capital, where AUB is located – lasted from June to August of 1982, leaving residents without food, water, electricity, or fuel. The term “West Beirut”, the Yearbook Committee noted, had “become a by-word for the disastrous”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: The psychology of mass incarceration

 Al Jazeera English

On May 17, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, the head of El Salvador’s National Civil Police, took to Twitter to broadcast the news that “more than 31,000 terrorists” had thus far been “captured” since the inception of the national state of emergency at the end of March.

The state of emergency was occasioned by a surge in homicides following a collapse in negotiations between Salvadoran gangs and members of the administration of President Nayib Bukele, including Carlos Marroquín, the director for the reconstruction of social fabric.

Before the latest “terrorist” roundup, El Salvador already boasted a prison population of about 39,000; as of October 2021, the diminutive country had the fourth-highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world (first place goes to – who else? – the United States). Now, under the ongoing state of emergency, the Bukele regime has spontaneously enacted a “special law” paving the way for the rampant construction of new jails. After all, locking up poor young men is clearly a better way to reconstruct El Salvador’s “social fabric” than, say, offering options for economic survival that would allow folks to refrain from joining gangs in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Uvalde school massacre: The American nightmare

 Al Jazeera English

In his official remarks on the May 24 elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas – during which 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two adults – United States President Joe Biden demanded: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Affirming that “to lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away”, Biden declared himself “sick and tired” of the whole mass shooting thing, adding: “And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage.”

He shared an epiphany he had just had on a 17-hour flight from Asia, which was that “these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world” – and went on to pose the question: “Why?”

The answer, of course, is far more complex than the handy assignation of all responsibility for “carnage” to the gun lobby – although the ludicrous ease with which armaments can be purchased in the “land of the free” is certainly a significant part of the problem. There are more guns than people in the US, and states like Texas have abolished laws requiring handgun carriers to possess any sort of permit or training. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

George W Bush is not funny

 Al Jazeera English

Everyone has by now heard about the latest gaffe by former United States president and unconvicted war criminal George W Bush, father of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and other fantastically bloody escapades.

In a recent speech at his very own George W Bush Presidential Centre in Dallas, Texas, Bush condemned the “absence of checks and balances” in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which had enabled “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq”.

Quickly realising his not-really-mistake, Bush corrected himself: “I mean, of Ukraine” – but added slightly under his breath: “Iraq, too, anyway”. The spectacle elicited gleeful laughter from the audience, as did Bush’s subsequent attribution of the Iraq-Ukraine mix-up to his age: “Seventy-five”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The El Salvador diaries: My days as a ‘terrorist’

 Al Jazeera English

When I arrived in El Salvador on April 12 – a bit more than two weeks into the national state of emergency imposed by President Nayib Bukele, self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world” – I did not mention my profession to the San Salvador airport immigration official who inquired as to the purpose of my visit. Instead, I announced enthusiastically that I had come to take surfing lessons – which, had it been true, would almost certainly have meant the death of me.

And yet journalism itself is dangerous business these days in El Salvador, at least if you are a journalist concerned with reporting what is actually happening rather than obsequiously regurgitating whatever Bukele says is happening. Armed as I am with a US passport, I obviously have precious little to worry about compared with Salvadoran reporters. But one can never be too careful in the world’s coolest dictatorship.

The state of emergency came about following an abrupt spike in homicides at the end of March – the result of a breakdown in government negotiations with Salvadoran gangs, discussion of which topic is now conveniently criminalised. A supremely ambiguous law enacted on April 5 threatens anyone who shares gang symbols or information alluding to gangs with up to 15 years in prison  – bad news, to say the least, for the likes of El Faro, the acclaimed Salvadoran investigative news outlet that initially exposed the negotiations. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s policy: Kill the messenger, attack the mourners

 Al Jazeera English

On Friday, May 13, The New York Times website ran the headline “Israeli Police Attack Funeral of Slain Palestinian Journalist”, which was then updated to “Israeli Police Attack Mourners at Palestinian Journalist’s Funeral”. The journalist in question, of course, was 51-year-old Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Al Jazeera reporter shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces on Wednesday in the occupied West Bank.

As the Times reported, Israeli police officers had commenced “beating and kicking mourners” at the funeral procession in Jerusalem, thereby “forcing pallbearers to nearly drop the coffin”. This, at least, was mercifully straightforward information coming from the same news outlet that had just days before opted to use the noncommittal phrase “Dies at 51” in its announcement of Abu Akleh’s murder. . . .

Over the course of her dedicated career, Abu Akleh herself embodied Palestinian humanity by speaking truth to power. Now, the occupying power has spoken back by shooting her in the head and attacking her mourners – a response that can only be classified as acute and multitiered state savagery, in keeping with Israel’s modus operandi of refusing to let Palestinians live, die, or be buried in peace. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US goes ballistic: America’s gun epidemic

 Al Jazeera English

While in Havana this past February, I made the acquaintance of a man in his mid-fifties, who hailed from the eastern Cuban province of Guantánamo and who in 1986 had endeavoured unsuccessfully to sail on a makeshift boat from Cuba to the so-called “land of the free”: my own homeland, the United States.

Apprehended by Cuban authorities, he was sentenced to three years of labour on a coffee farm – where, he said, he was treated in a reasonably civilised fashion, and where he was able to put his mechanical engineering degree to use by designing a coffee de-pulping machine.

Although his love for the Cuban system of government has hardly grown over the past three-and-a-half decades, the man declared that the only place on Cuban soil where you would find things like institutionalised torture was the US military base at Guantánamo Bay. In spite of his own attempted abandonment of the country in favour of the epicentre of global capitalism, he maintained that there were certain priceless perks that corresponded to life in Cuba, including free healthcare and the freedom to go to school or walk down the street without the fear of being shot. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The legal psychedelics industry: capitalism on drugs

 Al Jazeera English

On April 19, the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel hosted the inaugural Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference, advertised as “bringing together leaders of the BIGGEST publicly-traded Psychedelics companies with investors from across North America”. General admission was $697, plus a $26.86 fee. Attendees were promised a “chance to be in the room with the leaders who will take the Psychedelics industry to the next level”.

Indeed, capitalism is already tripping over itself to get people tripping on legal psychedelics. The estimated market opportunity of which is orbiting somewhere in the hundreds of billions of dollars, according to conference keynote speaker Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” reality television fame. The industry comprises an array of products beyond LSD, including psilocybin – the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms – as well as mescaline, MDMA, and the hallucinogen DMT, found in Amazonian ayahuasca.

Psychedelics are still illegal under United States federal law, in keeping with the longtime US “war on drugs” that has so handily served elite corporate interests and militarisation schemes abroad and at home – and that has historically criminalised, inter alia, Black Americans and protesters against the Vietnam War. But just as criminalisation is profitable for the powers that be, legalisation can also bear fruit. And as venture capitalists, investors, Silicon Valley tech bros, and Big Pharma players currently race to pound down the doors of perception into the realm of decriminalised psychedelics, capitalism’s latest hallucination is poised to become reality. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.