The American war on books

 Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time, George W Bush – former governor of Texas, 43rd United States president and accused war criminal – made a worrying observation: “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”

Bush did have a point; after all, that question is indeed rarely asked, at least not by people with a command of English grammar. And yet it is a question that increasingly comes to mind these days, and particularly today on World Book Day, as the US state of Texas leads the country in a book-banning frenzy.

According to the literary and free expression advocacy organisation PEN America, between July 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022, a total of 1,586 book bans took place in school libraries and classrooms across 26 US states. Texas was at the vanguard with 713 bans, followed by Pennsylvania with 456, Florida with 204 and Oklahoma with 43.

Heavily targeted for removal were books featuring LGBTQIA+ themes and characters as well as texts dealing with structural racism in US society – actions that naturally only reinforce the bigoted and malevolent foundations of the so-called “land of the free”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Ciudad Juárez fire – and other circles of made-in-USA hell

Al Jazeera English

On March 27, 40 men were killed in a fire at a migrant detention centre in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The victims hailed from Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Venezuela.

Like so many thousands of refuge seekers from around the world, they had been jailed in Mexico for the crime of aspiring to a better life in the United States – which forces its southern neighbour to act as deputy gatekeeper and migrant antagonist.

I arrived in Ciudad Juárez 10 days after the fire. An altar with candles, flowers, and portraits of the deceased had been erected in front of the detention centre’s charred façade. There I spoke with a young Venezuelan man who had lost a friend in the blaze and who had since been camping out in the cold next to the shrine.

Pulling out his battered phone, he showed me a TikTok tribute to his friend – a man with a big smile and a little son in Venezuela – as well as a series of photos of a pigeon who had recently come to pay respects at the altar. The images of the bird prompted a tender reflection from my interlocutor: “They are such delicate creatures.” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s violence is open terrorism — stop calling it ‘clashes’

 Al Jazeera English

Here we go again. The state of Israel is committing unchecked barbarism against Palestinians and the Western corporate media has decided it all comes down to “clashes”.

The latest round of so-called “clashes” – sparked when Israeli police decided to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan by repeatedly attacking Palestinian worshippers at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque – has produced predictably disproportionate casualties.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been arrested and wounded as Israeli forces have once again flaunted their handiness with rubber bullets, batons, stun grenades and tear gas. In return, the police have suffered minimal injuries, while also undertaking to accompany illegal Israeli settlers into the mosque compound.

And apparently not satisfied with simply unleashing violence in Jerusalem, Israel has also launched a barrage of air strikes on the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon following reported rocket fire.

As with all previous instances of Israeli-Palestinian “clashes”, the media’s choice to deploy such terminology serves to obscure the Israeli monopoly on violence and the fact that Israel kills, maims and mutilates at an astronomically higher rate than its supposed counterpart in “clashing”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Sorry for getting old

 Al Jazeera English

In February my friend Michelle visited me in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s southern Oaxaca state, where I have been semi-residing since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

I had last seen Michelle in Kazakhstan in 2014, when we were still in our 30s and I had descended briefly upon her apartment in the Kazakh capital of Astana before darting off to Lebanon and Vietnam. This pre-pandemic modus operandi of manic international itinerance had been driven by a combination of factors, including an apparent desire to thwart the passage of time by remaining in constant motion and a need to avoid my psychologically destructive homeland, the United States, at all cost.

Time passed anyway, of course. Michelle returned home to Washington; I ended up temporarily sedentary in Mexico, and we both entered our 40s. . . .

Our 2023 reunion began with requisite reminiscences of nearly freezing to death in the Kazakh countryside, patronising all-night karaoke bars, and placing our palms in the gilded handprint of then-dictator of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev in Astana’s looming Bayterek monument.

Michelle then filled me in on the homeland gossip from Washington – my own birthplace – where, she reported, she had found herself in the regular company of a much younger crowd. And it was in the context of this conversation that she remarked that she sometimes felt the urge to apologise for having wrinkles around her eyes.

This got me to thinking, as Michelle seemed to have articulated something I subconsciously felt – even though I had never considered myself overly concerned with physical upkeep. . . .When I thought about it candidly, however, I recognised an arc of guilt that had accompanied the ageing process and realised that I, too, felt reflexively apologetic whenever my gray hairs were too visible or my eyes looked tired. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.