The real ‘Person of the Year’

 Al Jazeera English

It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: lots of hubbub about Time magazine’s annual “Person of the Year,” a tradition that began in 1928 as “Man of the Year” but that now honours a “man, woman, group or concept.”

Given the ghastly course of 2023, it seems one obvious choice for “Person of the Year” would be the Palestinian doctors and medical personnel currently risking their lives to save others from Israel’s genocidal endeavours in the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, the Israeli military has slaughtered more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them at least 8,663 children. According to Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine, an independent monitoring initiative co-launched by Texas doctor Osaid Alser, no fewer than 340 healthcare workers were killed by the Israelis between October 7 and December 19, including 118 doctors and 104 nurses. . . .

[Taylor] Swift may indeed be the current protagonist of a superficial world rapidly combusting in self-absorbed banality, one wishes more credit were given to real-world heroes. And as 2023 comes to a close with no end to genocide in sight, give me the people of Gaza as “Person of the Year” any day. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US is no country for old men

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly prior to his death from prostate cancer in August of this year at the age of 72, my father emerged from a state of muteness to recite, with a burst of energy, the 1927 poem, Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That is no country for old men.”

My mother, my uncle, and I were present for the impromptu performance, which took place in my father’s bed in Washington, DC, where he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy treatments that had been forced upon him by profit-oriented doctors had accelerated his demise. . . .

Counterproductive chemotherapy treatments were but one of the ways he had been milked for all he was worth, before being turned over as prey to the lucrative realm of funeral and cremation services.

For example, for a one-month prescription of the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, a medication developed with none other than US taxpayer money, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – ie, more than many people in the United States earn in several months. For folks lacking the means to pursue healthcare and other basic needs, US capitalism can be deadly, too. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel is taking scorched earth policy to a new level

 Al Jazeera English

In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.

And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level. . . .

[T]he Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli military fired US-supplied white phosphorus rounds at southern Lebanon in October despite the use of such weapons in civilian areas being “generally prohibited under international humanitarian law”. As per the Post’s writeup, south Lebanese residents affected by the attack “speculated that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area”.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or in the Gaza Strip, which has seen its fair share of illegal white phosphorus bombardments by Israel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Hollywood’s Israel problem

Al Jazeera English

It’s that time of year again: when Hollywood’s thought police undertake to ensure that American celebrity culture remains firmly in the service of the Zionist narrative.

In one prominent case, actress Melissa Barrera – a star of the horror film franchise Scream – was recently fired from her role in the next instalment of the series for posting on social media about Israel’s latest real-life horror show in the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, the Israeli military has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them more than 6,000 children. Barrera’s crimes included calling for a ceasefire and quoting Israeli historian Raz Segal, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, who has argued that Israel’s current behaviour constitutes a “textbook case of genocide”.

The Spyglass Media Group production company was responsible for the firing, contending that Barrera’s social media posts on Palestine were anti-Semitic. After all, there is nothing more anti-Semitic than quoting an Israeli genocide scholar on the topic of genocide. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Walking to America

Al Jazeera English

The isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow strip of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific Ocean in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, is known for its spectacularly fierce winds, which have toppled many a cargo truck navigating its thoroughfares. The isthmus is currently also playing host to mass human movement, as refuge seekers from Central America to Africa and beyond navigate the landscape in the hopes of eventually reaching the United States, still some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) to the north.

And for these thousands upon thousands of humans in precarious transit, overpowering winds are but one of myriad existential obstacles.

I recently spent a few days in the isthmian town of Juchitán and took a taxi out to the nearby village of Santo Domingo Ingenio, where I met up with a 10-member Venezuelan family whose acquaintance I had made in early November in the neighbouring state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala. Driving up the highway from Juchitán, the taxi lurched in the wind as we passed staggered groups of people heading in the opposite direction, some carrying babies or pushing strollers, others shielding their faces from the punishing sun overhead.

The family had joined up with the latest northbound migrant caravan to form in Mexico – although the caravan has since largely dissolved in accordance with divide-and-conquer tactics of the Mexican government and mafia outfits, which jointly profit from the United States’s criminalisation of migration. Lacking any money for food – much less to avail themselves of mafia-organised transport options or the inflated “migrant prices” unofficially implemented by Mexican bus companies – this family belongs to the class of refuge seekers that has basically been reduced to walking to America. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Dying without borders

 Al Jazeera English

On November 6 in the city of Tapachula in Mexico’s Chiapas state, just down the road from the border with Guatemala, a young woman lay face down on the pavement in front of one of the offices of COMAR, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance. Generally speaking, “refugee assistance” means stymying the northward movement of desperate refugees at the behest of the United States.

I happened to be passing by the COMAR office on my way to the municipal cemetery of Tapachula, where earlier in the year I had visited a mass grave containing the unidentified remains of refugees who had perished in the city. As the policeman stationed in front of the office was busy staring into space, I stopped to ask bystanders what had befallen the prostrate woman.

“She suffers from high blood pressure,” was the response from Yessica, a Honduran woman holding a visibly ill infant in her arms as four other children ran in circles around her. Yessica had arrived in Tapachula 10 days earlier after travelling with her kids from the Honduran town of Tela through Guatemala, where, she said, they had been robbed of everything they had. They were now sleeping on the street trying to figure out how to proceed north in the face of “refugee assistance”.

In explaining why she had fled Honduras, Yessica cited a motive commonly invoked by refugees from the country: its spectacular levels of violence, which became even more so following the 2009 US-backed coup d’état when homicides and femicides surged. Yessica had another uniquely dreadful reason for needing to get to the US, however, which was that her son was buried there. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

How America’s bloodthirsty journalism cheers on Israel’s war on Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In a recent segment on how Hamas “frames the civilian casualties” of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, CNN’s Jake Tapper starts out by acknowledging that we “do know that innocent civilians in Gaza continue to be killed by Israeli strikes”. It is impossible to “not be affected by these horrific images that we’re seeing”, he states, as the humanitarian crisis in the enclave grows “increasingly dire”.

What is the solution, then? In Tapper’s view, apparently, it is for Israel to continue killing innocent civilians and presiding over a humanitarian catastrophe, because it is all Hamas’s fault anyway.

Near the beginning of the segment, we are shown a clip of Queen Rania of Jordan responding to those who argue that a ceasefire will help Hamas – an argument she says amounts to “endorsing and justifying the death of thousands of civilians”.

Then it is back to Tapper, who calls Queen Rania’s remarks an “interesting turn of phrase” and goes on to wonder condescendingly whether it did not occur to Hamas, when the organisation undertook its operation on October 7, that Israel would “retaliate in a way that would cause innocent Palestinians in Gaza to die”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s psychological operation in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In 2014, nine years prior to Israel’s current annihilative efforts in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army undertook what it dubbed “Operation Protective Edge” in the same territory. The 51-day campaign extinguished 2,251 Palestinian lives, among them 551 children.

Not long after the 2014 killing spree, a psychoanalyst acquaintance of mine in Barcelona sent me some photographs that he had acquired from a colleague in Gaza. The photos were of drawings by children in the town of Khuzaa in the southern Gaza governorate of Khan Yunis, close to the border with Israel.

At first glance, many of the drawings appear to be your standard children’s artwork, featuring colourful houses, smiling stick figures, grass, clouds, sun and so forth. Stylistic similarities aside, however, the illustrations depict a troublingly distinct landscape – one in which missiles, tanks, bulldozers and jets have clearly come to occupy central positions in the respective universes of the young artists. . . .

The children who drew those drawings are now teenagers – provided, that is, that they have survived the latest ongoing round of Israeli-induced carnage in Gaza, which has killed close to 10,000 people including more than 4,800 children. There is not a single safe place in the entire territory, as Israel proceeds to target homes, schools and hospitals alike with abandon. Israeli military officers have admitted to dispensing with pretences to “surgical” precision. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel is forcibly disappearing Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

On October 28, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari took to X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – with an “urgent message” for the residents of the Gaza Strip. For their “immediate safety”, Hagari said in a message entirely in English, residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City were urged to “temporarily relocate south”.

The performance was grotesquely preposterous for a variety of reasons, not least of them that English is the official language of neither Israel nor Palestine – which suggests that the intended audience was not, in fact, the population whose “immediate safety” was supposedly of such concern to Hagari & Co.

Indeed, if safety were actually a concern, the Israeli army would not have slaughtered more than 8,000 Palestinians in three weeks, among them more than 3,000 children. Nor would Israel have continued to carpet-bomb both northern and southern Gaza following its previous warning to Palestinians in the north of the enclave to evacuate south. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Guterres, Gaza and the consequences of countering ‘Israelspeak’

 Al Jazeera English

On top of its genocidal escapades in the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel is now also having a hissy fit.

The tantrum is primarily directed at United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who in recent remarks before the UN Security Council in New York had the audacity to point out the bleeding obvious. “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said, in reference to the October 7 Hamas operation that Israel sees as justifying the slaughter of more than 7,000 Palestinians in less than three weeks.

The Secretary-General continued: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Had Guterres wanted to fill in the vacuum a little more, he could have mentioned the past 75 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and massacres suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel, which has now added forced starvation to its deadly anti-Palestinian arsenal. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A PR stunt amid a massacre in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

Friday, October 20 was supposed to be a particularly humanitarian day for the “world’s most moral army”, ie, the one that has slaughtered more than 4,000 humans in the Gaza Strip over the past two weeks, half of them children.

According to United States President Joe Biden – who continues to wholeheartedly back the Israeli slaughter-fest in Gaza both morally and financially while pretending to care a tiny bit about the victims of the whole arrangement – Israel had agreed to allow some 20 humanitarian aid trucks to enter the besieged Palestinian enclave on Friday via the shuttered Rafah crossing from Egypt. Depending on how that went, the US president said, more aid trucks could then follow.

A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday affirmed that, “in light of President Biden’s demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population in the southern Gaza Strip”.

Biden, it seems, was a tad more excited about the PR stunt than everyone’s favourite “moral army”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel and the weaponisation of empathy

 Al Jazeera English

On October 9, two days into the current Israel-Hamas war – in which the Israeli army appears intent on semi-obliterating the Gaza Strip – the website of the New York-based magazine Women’s Health published some guidelines on “How To Cope With The Trauma Of Violent Images And Videos Of Hamas’ Attack on Israel”.

It is unsurprising, of course, that the potential for trauma has been detected solely as a reaction to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and not to, say, the past 75 years of Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestine – the cumulative depraved barbarity of which is what prompted Hamas’s actions in the first place.

After all, Israel’s carefully crafted monopoly on victimisation and the attendant dehumanisation of Palestinians means that footage of the ongoing Israeli terrorisation of Gaza has never compelled US media outlets to prescribe “steps to protect your mental health”.

And yet the Women’s Health intervention constitutes a novel sort of twist on the victimisation theme, in which even the vicarious trauma that is allegedly intermittently experienced by US audiences trumps the unmitigated trauma suffered by the people upon whom Israel wages perpetual war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

What’s behind the Washington, DC murder spike?

 Al Jazeera English

The capital of the United States of America is threatening to reclaim its reputation as the nation’s murder capital, as well.

According to preliminary data for 2023 from Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, a total of 214 homicides had been committed in the metropolis as of September 29, constituting a 37 percent increase over last year. This is the first time in a quarter-century that Washington’s homicide count has exceeded 200 before October.

Victims include 10-year-old Arianna Davis, who received a stray bullet to the head on Mother’s Day; 16-year-old Jamal Jones, shot near his high school on September 25; and 31-year-old father of four Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a Lyft driver shot on Capitol Hill in July.

Ahmad Yar had fled Afghanistan after serving as a translator for the US armed forces, only to end up a casualty of US gun violence in imperial headquarters itself – a morbid twist, no doubt, on the theme of “bringing the war home”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Corruption is as American as apple pie

 Al Jazeera English

On September 22, influential United States Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on corruption charges along with his wife, Nadine. It is the second time Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has faced such charges.

As per the indictment from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Menendez and his wife received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from three New Jersey businessmen in the form of gold, cash, a luxury vehicle and assorted other goodies. In exchange, the Democrat from New Jersey allegedly used his position of power to benefit the three businessmen as well as the government of Egypt, the home country of one of the men in question.

As the old saying goes, power tends to corrupt.

According to US mythology, of course, corruption is entirely the business of other, less civilised nations – particularly enemies of the US – that lack the proper commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and all that nice and noble stuff.

But here’s a news flash for those sectors of the domestic audience scandalised by the Menendez revelations: Corruption is about as American as apple pie. (And a related newsflash: Menendez or no Menendez, the US has spent decades flinging billions of dollars at Egypt’s repressive apparatus – which should constitute a scandal in itself.) READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A day in the life of the American dream

Al Jazeera

The day after my father died in August in Washington, DC, I was taking out the trash in my parents’ apartment building when I was intercepted by a garrulous 60-year-old janitor from El Salvador – we’ll call him César – who in the very short time he had known my dad had reportedly clocked double-digit hours of conversation with him.

Hearing that my dad had succumbed to prostate cancer after his doctors had pushed counterproductive but highly lucrative chemotherapy treatments on him, César offered his condolences and proceeded to tell me of his own latest run-in with the US healthcare system. This transpired after he had a heart attack in the street and bystanders called the cops on him, assuming he was drunk.

He eventually ended up at the hospital, where he was presented with an $80,000 bill in exchange for the luxury of not dying. While hospitalised, he received a phone call from his employer, who informed him that he was fired for having a heart attack rather than showing up to work.

Having resided in the US for 20 years as an undocumented worker, César would just as soon return to El Salvador, he said, but his adult son still clung to the notion of “el sueño americano”, or the American dream. He shrugged with a smile of resignation and launched into an energetic recounting of another misadventure in the so-called land of the free. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Mexico will elect a female president, but Mexican women will still lose

 Al Jazeera English

It is official: Mexico will elect its first female president next year.

One of the two top contenders in the June vote is 61-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City, a close ally of current President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and a member of his National Regeneration Movement (MORENA). The other is 60-year-old Xochitl Galvez, the candidate for the opposition Broad Front for Mexico coalition.

On the surface, of course, the prospect of a female head of state would appear to be an undeniably positive milestone. But will the arrangement actually do anything to resolve the existential challenges faced by women in Mexico?

Unlike the coalition headed by Galvez, which includes tiresomely right-wing forces, MORENA identifies as leftist, meaning that Sheinbaum appears better positioned to guide the nation in a more progressive direction in terms of women’s rights. And yet her mayoral reign in the Mexican capital, which lasted from 2018 to June this year and coincided with the bulk of AMLO’s presidency, was not exactly empowering for women.

After all, you cannot really claim female empowerment during an epidemic of femicides, which skyrocketed 137 percent in Mexico from 2015 to 2020. At least 10 women and girls are killed every day in the country although pretty much all statistics relating to femicides are presumed to be underestimates given that many crimes go unreported or are reported as regular homicides. Tens of thousands of women are missing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump is back and the liberal American media are loving it

 Al Jazeera English

On August 14, the evening of former US President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment of 2023, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hosted former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to discuss the indictments and the general domestic state of affairs.

In the Georgia case, Trump stands accused along with 18 others of attempting to subvert the 2020 election. Maddow’s 9pm show drew an unprecedented 3.93 million viewers.

One clip from the interview, posted to MSNBC’s social media networks, is titled “Hillary Clinton laments political system that rewards theatre over results”. In it, she explains that Trump’s successor Joe Biden is “not a performer in a political theatre sense”, which renders it more difficult to disseminate news of his alleged achievements as president across the “splintered information ecosystem” that dominates in the US – where most Americans “don’t get their news from MSNBC” but rather from “social media, if they get any news at all”.

Clinton wagers that, since talking about national infrastructure and other critical matters is “boring”, media venues choose to “talk about, you know, Donald Trump or one of these other people who do nothing but give us negative messages, [be]cause that is so much more exciting”.

Never mind that this is exactly what, you know, Maddow and Clinton were doing. READ MORE AT AL JAZZERA ENGLISH.

Panama’s doomsday warning is not about holiday shopping

 Al Jazeera English

The Panama Canal is in dire straits.

A severe drought is impeding navigation of the United States-dominated trade artery that bisects the isthmus of Panama in Central America.

As of mid-August, more than 200 ships were stuck at the canal. On August 26, CNN warned that the situation is “not a good sign for supply chains – or your holiday shopping”.

To be sure, even before the onset of accelerated anthropogenic climate change, the Panama Canal was never enormously environmentally compatible. The construction of the waterway, which began as a French undertaking in the late 1800s before being appropriated by the US and completed in 1914, encapsulated the recklessness and hubris of man’s efforts to dominate nature.

Thousands upon thousands of workers perished in the quest to bend the earth to imperial will. But at least they enabled future “holiday shopping”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remember that I love you most

 Al Jazeera English

The day before I found out that my father was dying, a dead cat appeared on the bottom step of the staircase in the apartment building where I was staying. It was late July, and I had rented a summer place in Fethiye, a town on Turkey’s southwestern coast where I had been a regular visitor since 2004.

Fearing that this was probably some sort of apocalyptic omen relating to my own life, I fought the urge to google “what it means when you see a dead cat”. When I finally did, it seemed there were a couple of possibilities. Seeing a dead cat could be “a symbol of death and rebirth”, Google said. Or it could be an apocalyptic omen.

The next day, my mother called to inform me that my dad had commenced in-home hospice care in Washington, DC, and that the end was near. His doctors at the hospital had been dispensed with, having shown themselves to be irremediably committed to the American way of pursuing profit at the expense of human wellbeing. My father’s final two chemotherapy treatments, which he had been reluctant to undergo, had done nothing to deter his prostate cancer and everything to ensure that his remaining moments on earth were spent in pure agony.

I began making preparations to travel to Washington, DC, my birthplace and the command centre of the country I had spent the past 20 years avoiding at all cost, having long ago diagnosed the United States as a downright sick land and disproportionately anxiety-inducing. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The murders of Indigenous activists mark the death of the planet

 Al Jazeera English

In January 2022, Breiner David Cucuñame, a 14-year-old Indigenous Colombian activist, was shot dead in Colombia’s southwestern department of Cauca.

He was killed in the company of his father, during a routine unarmed patrol of Indigenous lands for the purpose of deterring incursions by militant groups. While the killing made headlines on account of Cucuñame’s young age, it was pretty much business as usual in the South American nation.

As of September 2021, 611 environmental defenders had already been assassinated in Colombia since the signing of the so-called “peace deal” in 2016, according to the Colombian Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (Indepaz). Of those 611 people, 332 were Indigenous.

And yet this snapshot of bloodshed in Colombia is but part of a larger, sinister global picture. Last year, the London-based NGO Global Witness released a report documenting no fewer than 1,733 murdered environmental and land-defence activists in the decade since 2012, amounting to one murder approximately every two days.

Even so, the NGO emphasised that its figures were “almost certainly an underestimate”. In 2021 alone, as per the Global Witness report, 200 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide – nearly four per week. Significantly, more than 40 percent of the documented killings were of Indigenous people, who account for no more than five percent of the global population. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

I hate US sports. The women’s football team is making it more difficult

 Al Jazeera English

When I was in the ninth grade in Austin, Texas, I got it into my head that I wanted to join my high school football team – by which I mean American football and not the sport that most of the rest of the world calls football and the United States calls soccer.

It was not that I had any sort of talent for or even understanding of the game; I was simply irritated that only boys were permitted to play.

The team coach laughed at my proposal and told me I was not physically strong enough, and I became a cheerleader instead.

Jump ahead a few decades to the world of international football – yes, what the world calls football – and the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been rather more successful in combating gender discrimination in sport.

The favourites to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup currently under way in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT made headlines last year when the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay both the women’s and men’s national teams equally and to award the women’s team $22m in back pay. The Federation also announced the “equalisation” of World Cup prize money.

Despite consistently outperforming their male counterparts, the female players had been earning considerably less money – business as usual in a country that forever flaunts itself as a bastion of equality and other noble virtues. According to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, the gender pay gap in the US widened from 20.3 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2022. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Are you ready for a digital death?

 Al Jazeera English

In mid-June, after I had been in Italy for two weeks, I got around to reading the June 4 edition of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, which I had bought – on June 4, of course – in accordance with my never-fulfilled vision of being one of those people who buys and reads a physical newspaper every day.

Prominently featured was coverage of the murder of 29-year-old Giulia Tramontano, who had been stabbed to death outside Milan in May by her boyfriend Alessandro Impagnatiello. She was seven months pregnant.

Page 12 of La Repubblica was devoted to the WhatsApp correspondence between Tramontano and Impagnatiello, helpfully colour-coded and divided into categories like “the quarrel about the lipstick”; “the separation announcement”; “the future of the baby”; and “the messages after he killed Giulia”.

To be sure, humans have always exhibited a certain fascination with murder. But the digital era has created novel opportunities for morbid voyeurism – while also raising obvious issues of privacy. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel wants to turn Jenin into another Gaza, siege by siege

 Al Jazeera English

One of the protagonists of Palestinian actor-director Mohammad Bakri’s 2002 documentary Jenin, Jenin – which deals with that year’s Israeli military attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank – is a young Palestinian girl with brown bangs and no-nonsense eyes.

Picking her way in her school uniform through the rubble of the onslaught that killed 52 Palestinians, she swears: “We will not give up. Yes, they destroyed everything but we will rebuild it.” She also warns: “We’ll keep on having children. They’ll become stronger and braver than ever.”

Fast forward 21 years, and Jenin is once again on the receiving end of Israel’s fetish for destruction.

On June 19, Israeli combat helicopters fired missiles into the camp, ostensibly as part of an arrest operation that ended up killing five Palestinians, including a 15-year-old girl named Sadeel Naghniyeh.

Then in early July, in the worst attack on the West Bank since 2002, the Israeli armed forces terrorised the inhabitants of Jenin for two days and killed at least 12 people, including children. The massive aerial and ground assault involved helicopter gunships, missiles, drones, armoured vehicles, bulldozers and more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers.

That is what happens, it seems, when Palestinians keep rebuilding – and keep existing. Indeed, Al Jazeera quoted 56-year-old camp resident Ahmed Abu Hweileh on the takeaway from the bloody escapade: “The message to the world and the occupation is that this camp will keep on going. They tried to destroy it and it came back up.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Towards a Chinese missile crisis?

 Al Jazeera English

We have all heard the story. In October 1962, the world nearly suffered a nuclear holocaust on account of the so-called “Cuban missile crisis”, when the villainous Soviet Union undertook to install weapons of mass destruction on the island of Cuba, just 150km (93 miles) off the coast of the United States.

Often lost in the narrative – even to this day – is that Soviet missile activity in the Caribbean transpired only after the US had installed nuclear-equipped Jupiter missiles in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.

More than sixty years later, Cuba is still a thorn in the side of the US, in spite of the ongoing, asphyxiating US embargo – which dates from the same year as the missile crisis and constitutes a weapon of mass destruction in its own right.

The Soviet Union is long gone, but the annoyingly resilient island nation has now allegedly decided to play host to yet another existential menace: the People’s Republic of China.

On June 8, the right-wing Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Cuba would soon boast a “secret Chinese spy base” focusing on the US, with Beijing signing up to pay Havana billions of dollars for the “eavesdropping facility”. Then on June 20, the same newspaper sounded the alarm regarding a new joint Chinese-Cuban military training arrangement on the island, raising the “prospect of Chinese troops on America’s doorstep”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

SCOTUS is ramping up oppression in ‘the land of the free’

 Al Jazeera English

It is that time of year again: when the United States Supreme Court ruins everyone’s summer with its sociopathic rulings.

Last summer, on June 24, the top judicial body overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark ruling that legalised abortion nationwide in 1973. Hardest hit by the decision were poor women of colour, such being the institutionalised inequality that prevails in the world’s self-appointed paragon of justice.

The day prior to the demise of US abortion rights, the Supreme Court enshrined the right to carry a gun outside the home. This came almost one month after a gunman massacred 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Now in 2023, the court has proven equally committed to eroding the potential for wellbeing among significant sectors of the US population.

Take the recent ruling that bans colleges from considering race as a factor in admissions, a reversal of affirmative action policies that were meant to fuel diversity in schools and to atone, to some extent, for the country’s lengthy history of racialised socioeconomic oppression. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

What links Meloni, Mussolini and Mediterranean refugee deaths?

 Al Jazeera English

Sometime in the mid-1990s, a half-Italian cousin of mine who resided in a real, live castle outside Florence took a break from majestic existence to visit Texas, where my family and I were then living.

I must have been about 14. My cousin was slightly younger, and had made the transatlantic crossing with a prized possession in tow: a book about former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who met his ignominious demise in 1945.

As I recall, my cousin’s American mother regarded the text as an embarrassing accessory that was not to be flaunted in public and especially not among non-Italian audiences.

Fast forward a few decades, and fascist nostalgia is going strong in Italy – where many Italians are not too embarrassed about it at all. Italian Senate Speaker Ignazio La Russa, for example, keeps a statuette of Mussolini in his home along with other items of fascist décor. Earlier this year, he took it upon himself to announce that “there is no mention of anti-Fascism” in Italy’s constitution.

La Russa belongs to the far-right party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), which he helped found in 2012 with Giorgia Meloni, the country’s current prime minister. Back in 1996, Meloni had her own Mussolini moment, declaring in an interview: “I think Mussolini was a good politician. Everything he did, he did for Italy.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The real problem with Israel’s ‘collective punishment’

Al Jazeera English

In September 2006, I paid my first visit to Lebanon, arriving 34 days after the 34-day summer assault by the Israeli military that had killed some 1,200 people in the country.

While Israel was subsequently revealed to have planned the war in advance, the alleged casus belli was the cross-border kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, which had intended to use them as bargaining chips to secure the release of Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.

I was 24 years old, and it was my first up-close view of Israeli military handiwork: decimated villages, bombed-out bridges, craters in the ground where apartment buildings had once stood.

The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury would describe the scene as follows: “It is devastation. It is a pure devastation that is like nothing you have ever seen—apart from devastation. Ruins stretching to the horizon, challenging the sky.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Artificial intelligence without borders

 Al Jazeera English

Last year, the United States Department of Homeland Security advertised the impending “deployment” on the US-Mexico border of “robot dogs”. According to a celebratory feature article published on the department’s website, the goal of the programme was to “force-multiply” the presence of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as well as to “reduce human exposure to life-threatening hazards”.

In case there was any doubt as to which human lives were of concern, the article specified: “The American Southwest is a region that blends a harsh landscape, temperature extremes and various other non-environmental threats that can create dangerous obstacles for those who patrol the border.”

There is no denying that the US-Mexico border is an inhospitable place; just ask the countless refuge seekers who have died trying to navigate it, thanks in large part to ongoing US efforts to effectively criminalise the very right to asylum. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A post-pandemic homage to Catalonia

 Al Jazeera English

Twenty years ago, in 2003, I left the United States with no particular agenda aside from leaving the United States – which despite being my country of birth I found to be a terribly psychologically unsettling place. That same year, the US military had gone about pulverising Iraq and its people under the guidance of President George W Bush, who had subsequently found the whole affair to be highly amusing.

As a young child in Washington, DC and its environs, my envisioned future had entailed living with my parents forever, and I had beleaguered my mother with worried questions about how old she would be when I was 20, how old she would be when I was 25, and so on.

As things shaped up in adulthood, however, any potential for a sedentary existence was quickly swept away in favour of extended international hitchhiking expeditions and general continuous movement between countries – a frenetic itinerance that was of course only enabled by the privileged passport provided to me by the nation I was avoiding at all cost. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Fentanyl: The new face of the US war on the poor

Al Jazeera English

At an April 14 news conference in Washington, DC, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief Anne Milgram sounded the alarm about the country’s latest appointed public enemy number one: four Mexican guys known as “Los Chapitos”, the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Declaring El Chapo’s offspring “responsible for the massive influx” into the United States of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, Milgram insisted: “Let me be clear that the Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our country has ever faced.”

As if this were not news enough, the DEA chief threw in some additional alleged trivia, according to which the Chapitos had “fed their enemies alive to tigers, electrocuted them, [and] waterboarded them” – activities the likes of which the US has obviously never perpetrated against its own enemies.

There is no debating the deadliness of fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin. Drug overdoses, the majority of them fentanyl-related, are now killing more than 100,000 people a year in the US. Entire communities have been devastated.

And yet it is curious that the Chapitos are spontaneously to blame for the whole fentanyl epidemic – although the new narrative certainly comes in handy when justifying the continuing frenzied militarisation of the US-Mexico border. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The forever war on Julian Assange

 Al Jazeera English

Imagine, for a moment, that the government of Cuba was demanding the extradition of an Australian publisher in the United Kingdom for exposing Cuban military crimes. Imagine that these crimes had included a 2007 massacre by helicopter-borne Cuban soldiers of a dozen Iraqi civilians, among them two journalists for the Reuters news agency.

Now imagine that, if extradited from the UK to Cuba, the Australian publisher would face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison, simply for having done what media professionals are ostensibly supposed to do: report reality.

Finally, imagine the reaction of the United States to such Cuban conduct, which would invariably consist of impassioned squawking about human rights and democracy and a call for the universal vilification of Cuba.

Of course, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to deduce that the above scenario is a rearranged version of true events, and that the publisher in question is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The antagonising nation is not Cuba but rather the US itself, which is responsible for not only the obliteration of Assange’s individual human rights but also a stunning array of far more macro-level assaults on people across the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

It’s psychological warfare season on the US border

 Al Jazeera English

On April 8, three young Venezuelan men were detained in El Paso, Texas, where they had just crossed the border from Ciudad Júarez, Mexico. They were among the 183,000 undocumented people reportedly apprehended by the United States Border Patrol that month, which, according to the Reuters news agency, constituted a 13 percent increase from March.

I had met these three men in February in Panama when they had emerged with their three Colombian travel companions from the traumatic stretch of corpse-ridden jungle known as the Darién Gap. Over the next month and a half, we seven had remained in continuous contact on WhatsApp, and I had undertaken an informal fundraising campaign that consisted of harassing wealthy acquaintances to send me money that I could transfer to my friends to help offset the costs of undocumented movement.

Chief among these costs is the official extortion that currently reigns in Central America and Mexico. Police, immigration personnel and other state agents have wholeheartedly embraced the same sinister logic as criminal outfits that prey on asylum seekers – a logic that is based on extracting cash from people who have none to spare and who are often migrating for that very reason.

Of course, the blame for the whole twisted arrangement lies fundamentally with my own country, the United States, the unilateral sanctity of whose border has spawned a flourishing international anti-migrant industry and rendered the business of seeking refuge a very deadly one. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.