Donald Trump won in Argentina

Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, Argentinians voted in midterm elections that attracted an uncommonly high level of international attention. This was in part due to the potential $40bn bailout promised to cash-strapped Buenos Aires by Washington. Ahead of the vote, United States President Donald Trump had made clear the cash injection was contingent upon the election results. 

And Trump’s far-right buddy Javier Milei, the equally uniquely coiffed president of Argentina, did not fail to deliver. . . . 

Before the election, Trump explained that his generous gesture to Milei – made even as the US president was overseeing sweeping cuts to healthcare and other services at home – was his own way of “helping a great philosophy take over a great country”.

US Treasury Secretary similarly contended that the “bridge” the US was extending to Milei was in the hopes “that Argentina can be great again”. Call it MAGA – the South American version.

Call it MAGA – the South American version. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

 

Why the Louvre heist feels like justice — but isn’t

Al Jazeera English

On Sunday, the iconic Louvre Museum in the French capital played host to a speedy heist in which eight items of precious jewellery dating from the Napoleonic era were spirited away from its second floor. . . .

International news outlets reported the theft with predictable drama; CNN, for example, blared the headline: “Historic jewels stolen in ‘national disaster’ for France”. The article went on to note that one of the looted diadems “features 24 Ceylon sapphires and 1,083 diamonds that can be detached and worn as brooches, according to the Louvre”.

The sensational hand-wringing was almost reminiscent of another contemporary “national disaster” in Paris – namely, the April 2019 fire at the Notre Dame cathedral that broke the hearts of politicians worldwide, even as they remained apparently unmoved by such objectively more tragic events as Israel’s recurrent slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

And now that we have just witnessed two years of all-out genocide in Gaza courtesy of the United States-backed Israeli military, it seems that the loss of all those sapphires and diamonds might ultimately not really be so “disastrous”, after all – at least in terms of, you know, the general state of humanity and the future of the planet.

In fact, many of us might even find ourselves rooting for the thieves, to some extent – if only as a symbolic middle finger to a world predicated on obscene inequality and misplaced priorities. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

 FAIR

On October 10, a ceasefire was declared in the Gaza Strip, where more than 67,000 Palestinians were officially killed in just over two years of Israel’s United States-backed genocide. With an estimated 10,000 bodies still buried under the all-consuming rubble, and indirect deaths unaccounted for, this number is almost certainly a drastic underestimate. Shortly after the ceasefire took effect, US President Donald Trump pronounced the war in Gaza “over,” proclaiming that “at long last we have peace in the Middle East.”

In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

. . . on October 19, Israel bombed the living daylights out of central and southern Gaza and killed dozens after alleging a ceasefire violation by Hamas—an allegation that not even Trump found convincing, but that enabled such impressively passive headlines as “Strikes Hit Gaza After Truce Violations Alleged” (Guardian, 10/19/25). Once the carnage was complete, the BBC (10/19/25) assured readers that “Israel Says It Will Return to Ceasefire After Gaza Strikes.” For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu informed the Knesset that the Israeli military had dropped 153 tons of bombs on Gaza during this particular, um, pause in the ceasefire. READ MORE AT FAIR.

What Trump said and did not say at the Knesset

Al Jazeera English

United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count. A single protester undertook a brief outburst but was swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient” . . . .

Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end – for the moment – to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000. . . .

Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”. . . .

To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” – which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US president himself. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Jared Kushner ‘Out of the Spotlight’—But Not Out of Mideast Politics, or Out of the Money

FAIR

President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel’s US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.

Kushner’s inclusion in the Egyptian expedition may have come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news—and perhaps to many of those who have, given the dearth of reporting on the continuing Middle Eastern machinations of nepotism’s favorite poster boy.

A senior adviser in the first Trump White House, Kushner was a driving force behind the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He was also the brains behind the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” plan that was meant to resolve the pesky seven-decades-long Israeli/Palestinian conflict—an undertaking for which Kushner famously felt qualified on account of having read 25 whole books on the subject. READ MORE AT FAIR. 

From Kabul to Chicago: The empire comes home

 Al Jazeera English

A hot discussion topic in Afghanistan these days is the extreme crime allegedly plaguing various cities in the United States, most of them Democratic-led ones.

This, at least, is one of the notions to have recently emerged from the brain of US President Donald Trump, as justification for his efforts to unleash the National Guard on the city of Chicago, Illinois: “It’s probably worse than almost any city in the world. You could go to Afghanistan, you can go to a lot of different places, and they probably marvel at how much crime we have.” 

In reality, of course, a lot of folks in Afghanistan and other “different places” are probably marvelling at the fact that the country that has made a name for itself illegally waging war across the world is now illegally waging war on its own cities.

As Trump himself put it: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Never mind that the military is intended for use abroad – the president has detected an “enemy within”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ promises Tony Blair yet another payday

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH 

Just when you thought prospects for the future of the Gaza Strip could not get any bleaker, United States President Donald Trump has unveiled his 20-point “peace plan” for the Palestinian territory, starring himself as the chair of a “Board of Peace” that will serve as a transitional government in the enclave. This from the man who has been actively aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians since January, when he took over the US presidency from former honorary genocidaire Joe Biden. 

But that is not all. Also on board for the “Board of Peace” is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will reportedly play a significant governing role in Gaza’s proposed makeover. To be sure, importing a Sir Tony Blair from the United Kingdom to oversee an enclave of Palestinians smacks rather hard of colonialism in a region that is already quite familiar with the phenomenon.

And yet the region is also already quite familiar with Blair himself, owing in particular to his notorious performance during the 2003 war on Iraq, led by his buddy and then-chief of the so-called war on terror, George W Bush. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, earning him a most deserved reputation as a war criminal.

In other words, he is not a guy who should under any circumstances turn up on a “Board of Peace”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

‘Near Daily’ Israeli Assaults on Lebanon Have Become Non-News for Western Media

FAIR

The Israeli military unleashed a large wave of air strikes on densely populated towns in South Lebanon on Thursday, September 18—although you’d never know it from the Western corporate media, who have increasingly lost interest in reporting on Israel’s unceasing war on its northern neighbor. . . .

Given that Hezbollah is the only force in Lebanese history that has proved capable of defending the country from Israeli predations, pretending that Israel isn’t continuously bombing Lebanon during a “ceasefire” also seems like a pretty good way of denying that there is any further need for Hezbollah. The Lebanese army, for its part, has not once managed to protect the nation from its bellicose neighbor to the south—a failure directly related to the US’s longtime “security cooperation” with Lebanon’s armed forces.

When corporate media outlets do find themselves obliged to document Israeli strikes on Lebanon, this is done in typically decontextualized fashion. Hezbollah are generally understood to be the “bad guys”; rarely is it mentioned that the group owes its very existence to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, greenlit by the US, that killed tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians, and occurred in the context of a brutal 22-year Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Around the world in a Free Palestine hoodie

 Al Jazeera English

Earlier this month, my mother and I took the train from Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to the city of Bukhara, two and a half hours away. While I was waiting in line for the toilet, an Uzbek train attendant approached to express his delight at the hoodie I was wearing, which is black with a Palestinian flag and the words “Free Palestine” in both English and Arabic.

During our ensuing conversation in modified English, the young man advised me to steer clear of Wagon Seven of the train, as it was full of Israeli tourists. He himself had requested to be reassigned from said wagon, he told me, so as to avoid having to deal with them. He proceeded to wonder how people could live with themselves while their government was slaughtering children en masse.

Indeed, of the more than 65,000 Palestinians Israel has officially killed in less than two years in the Gaza Strip – likely a severe underestimate – nearly 20,000 have been children. This is to say nothing of the countless kids who have been permanently maimed, mutilated and traumatised. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

With the Doha strike, Netanyahu has declared war on the world

Al Jazeera English

And so Israel has struck again.

On Tuesday, the Middle East’s favourite perennial aggressor launched missiles against the Qatari capital of Doha, targeting Hamas leaders involved in negotiations surrounding a proposal from the United States for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has officially killed more than 64,000 people in less than two years.

To be sure, Israel has never been a fan of ceasefires – even ones proposed by the reigning global hegemon and most devout backer of Israeli atrocities. After all, the state’s very existence is predicated on wiping out Palestinians and engaging in unceasing belligerence.

And while anyone harbouring an iota of common sense will have long regarded Israel as a rogue state, the unprecedented attack on Qatar appears to have opened some international eyes with regard to just how out of control the Israeli government actually is. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Distraction 101: Blow them up

 Al Jazeera English

On September 2, the United States conducted a sensational military strike on a speedboat in the southern Caribbean Sea in violation of both international and US law. The extravagant attack killed 11 civilians on board, whom US President Donald Trump had magically intuited to be drug traffickers affiliated with Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.

The spectacle was staged amid the ongoing deployment of US warships off the Venezuelan coast under the pretence of fighting “narcoterrorists” whose ringleader, according to the current Trumpian narrative, is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – no surprise given the country’s lengthy role as a thorn in the side of US imperialism. . . .

But why the sudden need on Trump’s part to project a warrior image by blowing up a speedboat in the Caribbean? To put it briefly, it serves as a convenient distraction from the president’s dismal failure on other fronts to live up to his super-tough-guy vision of himself.

His ultimatums to Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine, for example, have proved fruitless. Ditto for intermittent pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wrap up the genocide in the Gaza Strip, where in less than two years Israel has officially killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Path Is Made by Walking

 THE BAFFLER

Hanging from the ceiling at the open-air albergue, or shelter, in the Colombian village of Capurganá—one of the jumping-off points for traversal of the Darién Gap—was a sign featuring “general information,” in both Spanish and English, for the migrants who had gathered in the hopes of reaching the United States, more than three thousand miles away. The English version read:

Darién jungle crossing Colombia–Panamá
“Walker there is no path, the path is made by walking”
Generating more hope, to achieve the American Dream

A U.S. flag occupied one section of the sign, atop which were perched a pair of rain boots and four dirt-caked children’s shoes, one of them bearing the Nike swoosh. The albergue is where refuge seekers from around the world pay Colombian “guides” for passage to Panama, a journey that can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Said guides do not chaperone the entire trajectory—a detail that is often not made clear to migrants at the outset and revealed only when their smugglers turn back prior to reaching the Panamanian border. The sixty-six-mile Darién Gap is notorious for its lethal perils, ranging from rushing rivers to armed assailants to hostile wildlife, and a countless number of those who have set out “to achieve the American Dream” have ended up corpses in the jungle. (Lest anyone underestimate the intellectual credentials of Colombian organized crime, it bears noting that the inspirational quote directed to the walker is a line from a poem by Antonio Machado, who died in French exile from Spain in 1939, the year that Francisco Franco forged his path to the Spanish dictatorship.) READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

A Reporter’s Journey through the Darién Gap: A Q&A with Author Belén Fernández

 The Border Chronicle

What has been happening on the Darién Gap, one of the deadliest border crossings in the Western Hemisphere? Luckily, we have author Belén Fernández here to give us an in-depth rundown. Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that. She accomplishes this in her new book, The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, and she does it here with her answers in this interview.

Here, she discusses the Gap as an extension of the U.S. border, her own travel in it in 2024, the people she met—including the smugglers—and the testimonies she heard from people about the Darién Gap when she was locked up in an immigration prison in Mexico. Fernández is a prolific author, and her other work includes Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up inside Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center and Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera. READ MORE AT THE BORDER CHRONICLE.

Media Dance Around Illegality of Trump’s Third-Country Deportation Scheme

 FAIR

Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.

The US government itself acknowledged that Ábrego García’s removal had transpired as a result of an “administrative error.” However, both the Trump administration and that of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele—the self-described “coolest dictator in the world”—were huffily opposed to rectifying said error. Ábrego García was at last returned to the US in June, only to now face deportation to…Uganda, the east African country that has been roped into serving as one of numerous international dumping grounds for asylum seekers and undocumented persons who are unwanted in the US. READ MORE AT FAIR.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony says a lot about our dystopia

 Al Jazeera English

And so the verdict is out. United States President Donald Trump’s name has been cleared of ignominious association with the late disgraced financier and child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. This is according to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years behind bars on sex trafficking charges.

Earlier this year, US Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly informed the president that his name appeared in the so-called “Epstein files”, the content of which Trump had said on the campaign trail he would be quite keen on releasing.

Once in office, however, he spontaneously decided that the Epstein case was old news, going so far as to reprimand those in his own MAGA base who were “stupid” and “foolish” enough to continue insisting that the files be declassified.

Now, the US Justice Department has released transcripts of a July interview between Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, and Maxwell, who had nothing but praise for the president’s moral solidity. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Darien Gap ‘closure’: Border theatre in the jungle

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

In January, just before Donald Trump resumed command of the United States on a bevy of sociopathic promises, incoming US border czar Tom Homan announced that the new administration would be “shutting down the Darien Gap” in the interests of “national security”.

The Darien Gap, of course, is the notorious 106km (66-mile) stretch of roadless territory and treacherous jungle that straddles Panama and Colombia at the crossroads of the Americas. For the past several years, it has served as one of the only available pathways to potential refuge for hundreds of thousands of global have-nots who are essentially criminalised by virtue of their poverty and denied the opportunity to engage in “legal” migration to the US.

In 2023 alone, about 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap, which left them with thousands of kilometres still to go to the border of the US – the very country responsible for wreaking much of the international political and economic havoc that forces folks to flee their homes in the first place. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Fortress Beirut

THE BAFFLER

At the 2017 groundbreaking ceremony for the United States’ $1 billion-fortified new embassy in Beirut, then-U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard offered some words on the momentousness of the occasion:

"Breaking ground today on our new embassy compound is a strong message to the Lebanese people that we are with you for the long term. We intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for two hundred years."

Given America’s history of backing Israel’s bouts of mass slaughter in the country, many Lebanese were presumably not overly reassured by the prospect of further “cooperation.” The ambassador’s chronological calculations regarding the joint “journey” were curious, as two hundred years ago Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Lebanese still can’t get a break. In October 2023, Israel launched a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and decided to take advantage of the bellicose momentum to go after Hezbollah as well. The Israeli military was no doubt encouraged by the obscene increase in military aid and weaponry from the United States; after President Joe Biden authorized an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel in April 2024, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Israel Katz took to X to applaud the aid package as sending “a strong message to all our enemies.” READ MORE AT THE BAFFLER.

The Alaska summit was a spectacular distraction

 AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Say you are the president of the United States and the relationship with a significant chunk of your political base has become less than blissfully harmonious. What do you do?

Well, one option is to stage a summit, accompanied by much fanfare, with the president of Russia, ostensibly in order to end that country’s war in Ukraine.  

And this is precisely the manoeuvre that was pulled by US President Donald Trump, who on Friday rolled out the red carpet in Alaska for his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. The short-lived encounter was ultimately anticlimactic, with Trump offering the incisive assessment that “There’s no deal until there’s a deal.”

 . . . the no-deal talks constituted a convenient distraction from current intra-MAGA strife, which owes to a couple of factors. There is, for example, the matter of the files relating to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019. . . And while the Alaskan red-carpet stunt provided little to write home about, distraction may yet prevail as folks ponder what the hell that was all about. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Respecting the human right to sleep? Dream on

 Al Jazeera English

When I was a freshman at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my Literature Humanities course shared some personal information with my class, which was that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what prompted the disclosure, though I do recall it was made not to elicit pity but rather as a matter-of-fact explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow her sufficient time to simultaneously maintain her professorship and tend to her baby.

This, of course, was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of rampant sleep deprivation to another level. But modern life has long been characterised by a lack of proper sleep – an activity that happens to be fundamental to life itself. . . .

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States, approximately one-third of US adults and children under the age of 14 get insufficient sleep, putting them at increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and a host of other potentially life-threatening maladies. As per CDC calculations, a full 75 percent of US high schoolers do not sleep enough. . . .

Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip, residents of the occupied territory are well acquainted with acute sleep deprivation, which is currently a component of the Israeli military’s genocidal arsenal for wearing Palestinians down both physically and psychologically. Not that a good night’s sleep in Gaza was ever really within the realm of possibility – even prior to the launch of the all-out genocide in 2023 – given Israel’s decades-long terrorisation of the Strip via periodic bombardments, massacres, sonic booms, the ubiquitous deployment of buzzing drones, and other manoeuvres designed to inflict individual and collective trauma. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Yes, The New York Times is committing genocidal journalism

 Al Jazeera English

The Israelis certainly owe Bret Stephens a favour.

Yesterday, The New York Times opinion columnist took to the pages of the United States newspaper of record to promote his latest deranged argument, headlined: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza”. . . .

In the very first paragraph of his Times intervention – which should perhaps come accompanied by a trigger warning for readers prone to aneurysms – Stephens demands defiantly: “If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal – if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans – why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly?”. . . . He goes on to proclaim that “the first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher?” READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump’s big beautiful police state is here

 Al Jazeera English

On July 4, United States President Donald Trump signed into law his so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”, which will reduce taxes for the rich, punish the poor, and otherwise propel American plutocracy to ever more noxious heights.

Just days earlier, Trump’s Vice President JD Vance took to X to underline the key component of the legislation: “Everything else — the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

Indeed, the bill allocates the unprecedentedly ludicrous sum of $175bn to anti-immigration efforts, approximately $30bn of which will go directly to the notorious federal law enforcement agency ICE, known in long form as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another $45bn is earmarked for the construction of new immigration detention centres, which, as the American Immigration Council notes, “represents a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget”. 

Thanks to these budgetary machinations, ICE now occupies the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money at its annual disposal than the military of any country in the world apart from the US and China. 

Given that ICE agents have as of late made a name for themselves running around in masks and kidnapping people, however, one would be forgiven for seeing this sudden windfall to the agency as something less than, um, “beautiful”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Massive Expansion of Trump’s Deportation Machine Passes With Little Press Notice

 FAIR

And so it has come to pass: US President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” has set the stage for tax cuts for the rich, slashed services for the poor, and a host of other things that qualify as “beautiful” in the present dystopia. Some cuts, like those to Medicaid, have been heavily covered by the corporate media. But one key piece of the bill has gotten much less media scrutiny: The preposterous sum of $175 billion has been allocated to fund Trump’s signature mass deportation campaign, which, as a Salon article (7/3/25) points out, exceeds the military budget for every single country in the world aside from the US and China.

Approximately $30 billion of that is destined directly for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the goons who have recently made a name for themselves by going around in masks and kidnapping people. This constitutes a threefold increase over ICE’s previous budget, and propels the outfit to the position of the largest US federal law enforcement agency in history. $45 billion will go toward building new ICE detention centers, including family detention centers.

Prior to the signing into law of the sweeping bill on July 4, US Vice President JD Vance took to X to highlight what really mattered in the legislation: "Everything else—the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement." READ MORE AT FAIR.

Who better than Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize?

 Al Jazeera English

In the latest instalment of the “can’t-make-this-sh*t-up” contest in global politics and diplomacy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nominated United States President Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In other words, the person currently presiding over the genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has proposed that the world’s top peacemaking prize be awarded to the primary enabler of that genocide – the man who in March announced that he was “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job” in Gaza. That “everything” has entailed billions of dollars in lethal weaponry and other assistance.

From October 2023 to the present, nearly 60,000 Palestinians have officially been slaughtered in the diminutive territory, although the true death toll is no doubt far higher considering the surplus of bodies lost under the pervasive rubble. More than 700 Palestinians have been killed in recent weeks while seeking food at aid distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation backed by both the US and Israel. . . .

Of course, it should go without saying that anyone who positively invokes the nuking of hundreds of thousands of civilians should be categorically ineligible for any sort of serious peace prize. But in a world in which the supposed pursuit of peace is so often utilised as an excuse for more war, Trump’s nomination might very well be meaningful, indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Did God want Trump to bomb Iran?

 Al Jazeera English

After ordering the United States military to bomb Iran last month, US President Donald Trump made a brief address at the White House to laud the “massive precision strike” that had allegedly put a “stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror”.

The speech, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military – protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.” . . . .

This, to be sure, was not the first time that Trump relied on God to sign off on worldly events. Back in 2017, during the man’s first stint as president, the deity made various appearances in Trump’s official statement following a US military strike on Syria. God, it seems, just can’t get enough of war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

By bombing Iran, the US continues to make the world safe for war

 Al Jazeera English

It seems like just yesterday that United States President Donald Trump was pushing a “diplomatic resolution” to the Iranian nuclear issue.

Now, the US has joined Israel’s illegal assault on Iran, striking three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday in what Trump has boasted was a “very successful attack”.

As CNN dramatically put it, “a midsummer night in June 2025 could come to be remembered as the moment the Middle East changed forever; when the fear of nuclear annihilation was lifted from Israel; when Iran’s power was neutered and America’s soared”.

Of course, a “fear of nuclear annihilation” has nothing to do with Israel’s current strikes on Iran, which have been dutifully portrayed in the US media as targeting military and nuclear facilities but have somehow managed to slaughter hundreds of civilians. . . .

[A]side from being a persistent thorn in the side of US imperialism, Iran’s behaviour has been rather less apparently, um, “evil” than certain other international actors – like the US itself. For instance, Iran is not the one currently funding a straight-up genocide to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.

Nor is Iran the one that has spent the past several decades bombing and otherwise antagonising folks in every corner of the world – from backing right-wing state terror in Latin America to conducting mass slaughter in Vietnam.

Furthermore, the sole clandestine nuclear weapons power in the Middle East is not Iran but Israel, which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has never allowed UN safeguards on its facilities. READ  MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.