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.