Strikes on Iran: Can one demand ‘restraint’ while funding Israel?

 Al Jazeera English

Early on Friday, Iran activated its air defence systems after reports of explosions in Isfahan province. According to Iranian state media, three small drones were shot down over the city of Isfahan.

And while no one has officially claimed responsibility for the aerial attack and the Iranian government has not assigned blame, it is not difficult to hazard a guess as to its origins, given Iran’s recent launching of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. This, mind you, took place purely in retaliation for the lethal April 1 Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.

United States media outlets have reported confirmation from anonymous US officials that Israel was indeed the source of the latest attacks. For his part, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani – chairman of this week’s G7 meeting in Capri, Italy – has asserted that the US informed its Group of Seven partners that it had received a “last minute” warning from Israel re: impending drone action in Iran.

The action took place amid ubiquitous global calls for “restraint” to avoid further “escalation” in the region after the Iranian assault on Israel, which killed exactly zero people but saw Iran slammed with fresh US sanctions – something that obviously never happens in response to far more deadly Israeli behaviour. READ MORE AT AL JAZAEERA ENGLISH.

Sorry, but Iran is not the aggressor here

Al Jazeera English

On Saturday, April 13, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, that took place on April 1.

The vast majority of the projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s air defence system, with assistance from the ever-helpful United States military, and damage was minimal. Having completed its retaliation, Iran has now declared that the matter can “be deemed concluded” – although Israel is not usually one to let anyone else have the last word.

In the meantime, the barrage of criticism of Tehran’s “aggression” has continued unabated in the West. . . .

The Iranian attack, mind you, occurred a little over six months into Israel’s ongoing pulverisation of the Gaza Strip, which has killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians, including some 13,800 children. And yet given the thousands of missing persons presumed to be buried under the rubble, even these terrifying numbers are no doubt grave underestimates.

More than 76,000 people have been wounded, as the Israeli military has busied itself flattening entire neighbourhoods and blowing up schools, hospitals, and other basic infrastructure, all the while condemning the territory’s inhabitants to famine and starvation. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Weaponising underwear: Genocide with a semi-pornographic twist

 Al Jazeera English

Let’s pretend for a moment that, in the course of waging war against the state of Israel, Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip had taken to posing for social media posts with lingerie belonging to Israeli women who had been forced to flee their homes and/or killed in the war.

Imagine the moral outrage that would swiftly ensue, inevitably entailing racist and self-righteous allegations of Arab perverseness, the barbaric sexism of Islam, and the violent tendencies of sexually repressed Muslims.

The Fox Newses of the world would have had a field day.

As it turns out, a version of this hypothetical spectacle is true – except that it stars Israeli soldiers and Palestinian women’s lingerie. A recent Reuters article titled “Israeli soldiers play with Gaza women’s underwear in online posts” describes how combatants from the world’s self-appointed “most moral army” have been “posting photos and videos of themselves toying with lingerie found in Palestinian homes, creating a dissonant visual record of the war in Gaza”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Gaza is one big ‘kill zone’

Al Jazeera English

Four Palestinian men are walking in the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip through an area largely pulverised by Israeli bombardments. There is no indication that they are carrying weapons or doing anything aside from putting one foot in front of the other, as humans do to get from one place to the next.

Suddenly, a direct air strike on the pedestrians takes out two of the men. The third continues walking and is quickly blasted to bits as well. The fourth is eliminated by yet another strike after falling to his knees.

This episode, which reportedly took place in February, is depicted in Israeli drone footage released in March by Al Jazeera. Watching the defenceless men systematically picked off from the sky in a fanatical display of firepower, one is reminded of the Collateral Murder video published by WikiLeaks in 2010, in which a dozen Iraqi civilians were exuberantly massacred by helicopter-borne United States military personnel. . . .

An Israeli military spokesperson has huffily denied the “kill zone” reports. And yet at the end of the day, the Gaza Strip is one big kill zone – with literally no space off limits to killing. How else do you explain massacres at Palestinian hospitals and United Nations shelters or the slaughter of people waiting in line for food aid as children starve to death? READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US ‘contingency plan’: Send Haitians to Guantanamo, again

 Al Jazeera English

In March, amid a flare-up in gang violence that prompted the declaration of a state of emergency in Haiti, the United States made it known that – as usual – Haitians fleeing for their lives would not be welcome on US shores.

To that end, preparations were being made to deal with a potential mass maritime migration of US-bound Haitian refugees by diverting them to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, which is located on occupied Cuban territory and is of course better known for its illegal US prison-cum-torture centre.

A March 13 CNN article quoted General Laura Richardson, head of the US Southern Command, on the military’s preparedness for such an eventuality: “We did a full walkthrough of our contingency plan on Gitmo last summer with all of the interagency and all of my components.” The Stars and Stripes military magazine offered additional reassurance from Richardson: “Everything is refreshed – the equipment, everything is ready to go.”

And while media reports have been careful to specify that intercepted Haitians would be sent to a migrant processing facility in Guantanamo that is separate from the complex that houses “terrorist suspects”, it is hard to see the US’s “contingency plan on Gitmo” as anything but yet another racialised carceral undertaking. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

How I became a migrant trafficker in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In February 2024, far-right American activist and white nationalist Laura Loomer – whom former United States president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump once praised as “really very special” – descended upon Panama for a weeklong “investigative trip” to the Darién Gap to “report on the invasion of America” being staged thousands of kilometres south of the United States border.

The Darién Gap, of course, is the formidable stretch of roadless territory between Panama and Colombia that refuge seekers from around the world must navigate as they pursue a better life – pardon, as they seek to invade America. The Gap comprises a dense jungle where assault, rape and death are par for the course. And yet the US is somehow still the victim.

Loomer’s expedition brought her up close and personal with the enemy, including a number of “Venezuelan invaders”, some of whom told Loomer that Trump was a “bitch” and that they loved incumbent president Joe Biden. In other words, this was clearly war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The criminal hypocrisy of Hernandez’s drug conviction in a US court

Al Jazeera English

On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail.

Following the conviction, US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”. The US Department of Justice, Garland righteously bleated, has now shown its commitment to “disrupting the entire ecosystem of drug trafficking networks that harm the American people, no matter how far or how high we must go”.

And yet given the United States’ fundamental role in nurturing and sustaining this very ecosystem in the first place, the guilty verdict can safely be filed under the “Can’t Make This Up” category of imperial hypocrisy. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Birthright’ in a time of genocide

 Al Jazeera English

In January, the Birthright Israel programme resumed operations following a brief suspension of activity. The hiatus was triggered by the October 7 Hamas attack and the ensuing Israeli-perpetrated genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has thus far killed well over 30,000 Palestinians.

Since 1999, Birthright has treated some 850,000 Jewish young adults from around the world to 10-day, all-expenses-paid trips to Israel, jointly funded by the Israeli government and private donors. Participants ride around on buses, see the sights, enjoy “hormonal encounters” with Israeli soldiers, and otherwise bond with stolen Palestinian land.

Rather than being a coincidental byproduct of the whole experience, hormones in fact serve a calculated purpose in Birthright expeditions. Consider a 2013 Haaretz article on the frequency of romantic hookups and marriage resulting from Birthright trips, which quoted a 24-year-old Israeli soldier assigned to accompany one of the groups: “We come in uniform and they make a big deal out of us… [T]hese Jewish programmes are very well thought out. They really know what to do to get Americans emotional and excited.”

And the more “emotional and excited” young American Jews get, to be sure, the better for the Zionist project, given the key role of the United States in abetting the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Of the more than 400 Birthright trippers who descended upon Israel in January 2024 – a drop in the bucket compared with the 23,000 individuals the programme had reportedly envisioned sending this year – the majority were from the United States. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Suicide vs genocide: Rest in power, Aaron Bushnell

Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, February 25, 25-year-old active duty member of the United States Air Force Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in the US capital of Washington, DC, in a one-airman revolt against the US-backed slaughter currently being perpetrated by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip.

Over the past 143 days, Israel has killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave. In video footage recorded prior to and during his self-immolation, Bushnell states that he will “no longer be complicit in genocide” and that he is “about to engage in an extreme act of protest – but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonisers is not extreme at all”.

To be sure, Palestinians have long been accustomed to, well, burning to death at the hands of Israeli weaponry, ever since the state of Israel undertook to lethally invent itself on Palestinian land in 1948. The Israeli military’s use of skin-incinerating white phosphorus munitions in more recent years has no doubt contributed to the whole Palestinian “experience”.

After pertinently observing that US complicity in the genocide of Palestinians is “what our ruling class has decided will be normal”, Bushnell plants himself directly in front of the Israeli embassy gate – in full US military fatigues – and proceeds to douse himself with flammable liquid. As he rapidly burns to death, he repeatedly shouts: “Free Palestine”, while security personnel order him to get “on the ground”. One particularly helpful individual points a gun at the blaze. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The trials of Julian Assange: A death sentence for democracy

 Al Jazeera English

In June 2022, when Russia’s foreign ministry announced that it was considering “stringent measures” against United States media outlets in response to US restrictions on Russian media, the US Department of State huffily complained that the Kremlin was “engaged in a full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth”.

This sort of hypocrisy was nothing new; after all, the world’s self-appointed greatest democracy has long made it clear that basic rights and freedoms are things that only its enemies must abide by. The shameless double standard enables the US to do stuff like make a ruckus over Cuba’s political prisoners while simultaneously operating an illegal US prison on occupied Cuban territory – or call out China for an alleged “spy balloon” while simultaneously spying on China and everyone else on the planet.

And on Wednesday, February 21, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange completed one last legal attempt to avoid extradition to the US, the country’s own “full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth” was once again on full display. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on spying charges – which again is pretty rich coming from a nation with an extensive history of illegally spying on its own citizens. In reality, Assange’s only “crime” was to utilise WikiLeaks to expose the truth of US military crimes, as in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video that was released in 2010.

Thomas Friedman: Dehumanisation par excellence amid a genocide

Al Jazeera English

There are few American journalists who so transparently embody the United States’ pompous and demeaning approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples as Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times since 1995.

Prior to tormenting humanity with his biweekly opinions (such as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace), Friedman served in the 1980s as the Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem. His time in the Middle East permitted him to hone his Orientalist arrogance, which earned him the starring role in a 1989 essay by none other than Edward Said, who remarked on the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” and Friedman’s apparent conviction that “what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks”.

Of course, Friedman’s inauguration as a foreign affairs columnist gave him greater freedom to share what he, himself, thought. Over the years, these thoughts have included that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness”, that Afghanistan is the equivalent of a “special needs baby”, and that the nation of Iraq needed to “suck on this” in order to burst the “terrorism bubble” that had made itself known on 9/11 – an event Friedman nonetheless admitted Iraq had nothing to do with. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Facebook at 20: From virtual community to censorship of reality

 Al Jazerra English

When I joined Facebook in 2007, three years after the platform launched, I used it solely as a means of staying in touch with friends I had acquired while hitchhiking through Lebanon in the aftermath of the summer 2006 Israeli assault, which had destroyed much of the country but not its famed hospitality.

Old acquaintances from middle school and high school were gradually added to my Facebook friends list, including my seventh-grade boyfriend and a few Zionists who were purged once I mastered the “unfriend” function. Then came writers, academics, and activists of compatible political persuasions. This, for a while, seemed to endow Facebook with the potential to serve as an inspirational forum and genuine virtual community.

Of course, human solidarity was never the aim of Facebook, and capitalism quickly reared its ugly head. After effectively luring a significant sector of humanity into digital addiction, the Facebook powers that be went about eviscerating the very concept of privacy as a basic human right. And as Facebook now celebrates its 20th anniversary on February 4, the panorama is bleak indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Letter from Panama’s ‘Little Hiroshima’

 Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time, the United States was good buddies with a fellow named Manuel Noriega, a longstanding CIA asset and the dictator of Panama in the 1980s.

Then one day, Noriega outlived his usefulness as an imperial lackey and needed to be sent packing. And so with a straight face, the gringos accused him of the unpardonable offence of drug trafficking and undertook to overthrow him in 1989.

This was funny; after all, since at least 1972 the US had known about – and intermittently benefitted from – Noriega’s links to the drug trade. Furthermore, the US president spearheading the dictator’s removal was none other than George H W Bush, the very same George H W Bush who as director of the CIA in 1976 had ensured Noriega’s preservation on the agency payroll.

Anyway, boundless hypocrisy has always been America’s strong point. And it was once again on full display in the selection of the name for the unilateral US military operation to bring “democracy” to Panama by killing a bunch of Panamanian civilians, pulverising the impoverished Panama City neighbourhood of El Chorrillo to the extent that local ambulance drivers began to call it “Little Hiroshima”, and hauling Noriega off to Miami. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biden and the big border debacle

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly before Christmas, an extended Venezuelan family of 10 crossed into the United States from Mexico with a large contingent of other asylum seekers – part of a December “migrant surge” that propelled the panties of US politicians and media into a massive bunch.

On December 18 alone when US Customs and Border Protection tallied a record of more than 12,600 “migrant encounters” on the southern border, Fox News wailed, “Thousands flood into Texas.”

I had made the acquaintance of the Venezuelan family in early November in the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala and had met up with them again later in the month on the Mexican isthmus of Tehuantepec as they continued trudging north to “surge” into the United States.

After spending nearly a week navigating “La Bestia” – Mexico’s infamous “train of death” – they tried to enter the Texas border city of Eagle Pass from the Mexican city of Piedras Negras but were halted by US authorities. According to the family, a standoff ensued that lasted several days and only ended when people in the group began fainting from lack of food and water. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The (not so) surprising revelations of the Epstein list

 Al Jazeera English

What do former United States presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have in common with Hyatt Hotels executive chairman Thomas Pritzker and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz?

In addition to being white American men who have usurped a disproportionate share of the planet’s wealth, they were among the first names recently exposed in previously sealed court documents identifying associates of paedophile financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a US prison in 2019. . . . [and] Dershowitz has predictably slammed “radical feminists” for obsessing over the Epstein stuff rather than “condemning Hamas”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

New year, ‘new Middle East’?

 Al Jazeera English

In July 2006, in the middle of Israel’s war on Lebanon that ultimately killed approximately 1,200 people – the overwhelming majority of them civilians – then-United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nobly cast the onslaught as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.

While the metaphor was no doubt appropriately Orientalist, it did raise some questions since the objective of the birthing process is not usually to kill the baby. What role Rice and her boss, then-US president George W Bush, were meant to play in the metaphorical arrangement was also debatable, but “bloodthirsty obstetricians” was one potential option. This was particularly so, given the US decision to rush-ship bombs to the Israeli military to assist in the forging of the “new Middle East”. . . .

Summer 2006, of course, belonged to a previous era of Israeli slaughter-fests, when killing 1,200 people in 34 days was still considered extraordinarily shocking. Also belonging to this era was, for example, Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, during which Israel killed some 1,400 people over 22 days in December 2008 and January 2009. In Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, the Israeli military killed 2,251 people in 50 days.

We have now apparently transitioned into an age of obscenely intensified birth pangs; Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip murdered more than 20,000 Palestinians in the first two and a half months alone, and destruction in the besieged enclave is of a scale the human mind can barely process. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.