Gal Gadot as Cleopatra: Hollywood whitewashing in the 'woke' era

 Middle East Eye

On 11 October, Israeli actress Gal Gadot tweeted an oil painting of Cleopatra by 19th-century Orientalist artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman of Tuskegee, Alabama. Accompanying the photo was the announcement that Gadot would be teaming up with director Patty Jenkins and screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis to bring the iconic Queen of Egypt “to the big screen in a way she’s never been seen before”.

The novelty of the approach, in Gadot’s view, is that Cleopatra’s story will be told “for the first time through women’s eyes, both behind and in front of the camera”.

As if that weren’t already the most exciting news to hit the world of Orientalist showbiz since the time Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra in 1963, Gadot appended another tweet specifying: “And we are especially thrilled to be announcing this on #InternationalDayoftheGirl. We hope women and girls all around the world, who aspire to tell stories will never give up on their dreams and will make their voices heard, by and for other women.”

It’s always moving, of course, when the ultra-rich emit platitudes about female voices and dreams, notwithstanding the fact that their own ultra-richness is entirely dependent on the general misery of the masses - and especially the female masses.

It’s even more moving when the hashtag track record of the person tweeting about #InternationalDayoftheGirl also includes things like “#loveidf” - an homage to the Israeli military. This particular expression of love took place in a July 2014 Facebook post by Gadot, in the midst of Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip. In a matter of 50 days, the Israeli army eliminated some 2,251 Palestinians in Gaza, among them 551 children and 299 women. Hard to make your voice heard if you’re dead. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Nas Daily's normalisation tour: Loving the UAE

 Middle East Eye

When I was growing up in Maryland in the 1980s, the highlights of existence included visits to a gaudy family entertainment centre with a compelling whack-a-mole game. 

Nowadays, whenever a certain Palestinian-Israeli video blogger who goes by the brand Nas Daily pops up on my Facebook feed, I feel a similar physical compulsion.

The 28-year-old Harvard graduate, whose real name is Nuseir Yassin and who hails from the town of Arraba in the Galilee, shot to internet stardom in 2016 when he left his $120,000-a-year high-tech job in New York to travel the world posting daily 60-second videos oozing with cliche and orchestrated cheer. 

His Facebook page currently boasts 17 million followers, which does not inspire enormous confidence in the human race. Video topics have ranged from "The Most Lovable Country!" (the Philippines) to “Serbian Food Heaven!” to “AFRICA’S SECRET COUNTRY!”, Swaziland, where Yassin documented "half naked" dancers and, as Steven Salaita writes, it all "looked like a research trip for a 1940s Disney feature".

It gets more problematic, of course, when Yassin takes a break from revelling exuberantly in superficiality and engages in blatantly political commentary - like the time he explained, in one minute, the mass slaughter, destruction, and expulsion of Palestinians that attended the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948: "Some Palestinians left, some got killed, and some stayed in their land. My people stayed."

Stating that he had opted to "accept the borders of Israel" and to "move on", Yassin lectured his audience that "in life there are better and bigger things to focus on than the name of a piece of land!"

This is a fine and dandy sentiment, to be sure, unless the land in question continues to make life hell for millions of Palestinians more than seven decades after it was forcibly renamed.

It’s not quite clear how residents of the Gaza Strip, for example, are to "move on" in the midst of a blockade and regular Israeli military massacres of civilians. The vast majority of Palestinians - not to mention the vast majority of humans on this planet - don’t have the option to move from Harvard to a $120,000 salary to a career of international gallivanting that entails being lodged for free in executive suites in exchange for a mention on Instagram. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Neoliberal obesity and coronavirus in Mexico

 Al Jazeera English

In August, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca banned the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to children under the age of 18.

Mexico's Assistant Health Secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell, who has denounced soda as "bottled poison", expressed support for the new law, which has begun to catch on in other Mexican states as well. 

Lopez-Gatell is also the government's coronavirus tsar, and early on highlighted the role of the country's "epidemic" of diabetes and obesity in exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico has reportedly recorded more than 70,000 COVID-19 related deaths to date - although the actual toll is likely much higher.

In recent years, Mexico has vied with the US for the title of most obese nation on earth - three-fourths of adults there are overweight, and at least one in 10 have diabetes.

Oaxaca, one of the poorest Mexican states, has among the highest obesity levels and the highest child obesity rate in the country.

I have been in Oaxaca since March, and can confirm that - as is the case in much of Mexico - it sometimes seems impossible to take a step without tripping over Coca-Cola advertisements or similar propaganda. 

Indeed, Mexicans drink more soda per capita than any other country in the world, and former Mexican President Vicente Fox was once the CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico. In 2017, diabetes became the nation's number one killer.

How, then, did Mexico end up in such a deadly position?

To answer this question, a good place to start is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada, and Mexico, which came into effect in 1994 - and was recently repackaged as something-way-better-than-NAFTA under the auspices of resident continental megalomaniac Donald Trump. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel-UAE deal: The two-(police)-state solution

Middle East Eye

In 2016, award-winning Emirati human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor - who is now serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United Arab Emirates for such unspeakable crimes as insulting the “status and prestige of the UAE and its symbols,” including its leaders - was the victim of a hacking attempt by NSO Group, an Israel-based cyber warfare firm.

According to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which analysed the attack, the goal of the operation was to convert Mansoor’s iPhone into a "digital spy in his pocket" - taking control of the camera and microphone and recording the activist’s communications and movements.

This, mind you, was four years before the normalisation of UAE-Israeli relations last month - the culmination of a longstanding, secret love affair between the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms and the Zionist state known for habitually massacring Palestinians and otherwise tormenting the Emiratis’ fellow Arabs.

The targeting of Mansoor is hardly the only instance of pre-normalisation surveillance collaboration. There’s also Falcon Eye, a mass civil surveillance system installed in Abu Dhabi by an Israeli-owned company.

A Middle East Eye article from 2015 quoted a source on the system’s utter creepiness: “Every person is monitored from the moment they leave their doorstep to the moment they return to it. Their work, social and behavioural patterns are recorded, analysed and archived.”

Indeed, the UAE is believed to possess one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras on the planet.

Then there’s DarkMatter, the Emirati cyber-intelligence and hacking firm that has been described as “Big Brother on steroids”. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Abu Dhabi-based outfit employed not only former US National Security Agency personnel, but also former Israeli military intelligence operatives. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Tehran: New Israeli spy thriller is Orientalist brainwashing

Middle East Eye

On 24 June, Haaretz ran the exuberant headline: “New Israeli Spy Thriller ‘Tehran’ Is Even Better Than ‘Fauda’” - the wildly popular Netflix show that gets off on Palestinian suffering while pretending not to.

The article’s author swears that the three episodes of Tehran that she viewed “reveal a television series that is outstanding, polished and very effective by American criteria”, and that “when you watch it you will curse the screen and the broadcasting corporation, because there’s no option for binge watching”.

The series is furthermore “beautifully filmed in Athens, which suddenly looks like the capital of Iran as we imagine it” - calling to mind the sensational Orientalism of like-minded productions such as Homeland, the Beirut portions of which were filmed in Tel Aviv. 

Apple TV has purchased the new show and it is, well, pretty much exactly what you would expect from an Israeli TV show called Tehran. The storyline of the first season goes something like this: a young Mossad operative named Tamar Rabinyan, who is Iranian by birth, returns to her homeland as part of a plot to hack into Iran’s air defence system and take control of its radar so that Israel can bomb a nuclear reactor. . . .

According to Moshe Zonder, a co-creator of Tehran who also co-wrote Fauda, the new series “presents a different, pleasant side of Iran, which as far as I know, no western series has ever shown”. It’s anyone’s guess, of course, how a show about Israeli spies running around the Iranian capital constitutes presenting a pleasant side of the country.

But Zonder is sure of it, and also hopes that the series “will do something to help with the total disconnect between Israelis and Iranians”. Indeed, just imagine if the Islamic Republic were to produce a series called Tel Aviv about Iranian spies trying to blow up Israel: there’d be all sorts of de-disconnecting! READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Israel Is an Army With a Country Attached

Jacobin

A week into Israel’s summer 2006 assault on Lebanon — which killed 1,200 people, mainly civilians — Harvard Law School’s resident psychopath Alan Dershowitz surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal with his latest upbeat intervention on behalf of Israeli war crimes.

The article, titled “Arithmetic of Pain,” posited the need for a “reassessment of the laws of war” in light of what Dershowitz determined to be an increasingly blurred distinction between combatants and civilians. Unfurling his concept of a “continuum of ‘civilianality,’” he explained:

"Near the most civilian end of this continuum are the pure innocents — babies, hostages and others completely uninvolved; at the more combatant end are civilians who willingly harbor terrorists, provide material resources and serve as human shields; in the middle are those who support the terrorists politically, or spiritually."

The upshot: even purely innocent Lebanese babies were merely “near” the civilian-ish end of the continuum, while Israel was entirely exempt from the whole scheme because it is a “democracy.”

As it happens, however, it is Israel that is suffering from a dearth of “civilianality” — something that is made painfully clear in a new book, An Army Like No Other: How the Israel Defense Forces Made a Nation, by Haim Bresheeth-Zabner. Recalling Prussian minister Friedrich von Schrötter’s characterization of Prussia as “not a country with an army, but an army with a country,” Bresheeth-Zabner contends that this is “even more apt regarding the relationship between Israel and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces].”

The process was facilitated by Zionism’s embrace of the “mythical biblical Jew” and invention of an “unambiguous trait of Jewish militarism,” thanks to which two millennia of history were excised from the equation and the “new Jew became the imagined heir of genocidal Joshua, Bar Kochba, and Judas Maccabeus — a rogues gallery of militarized heroes who formed the foundation for the conquest of Palestine.”

And as the conquest of Palestine proceeds apace — with the army-with-a-state continuing its traditions of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and massacres to this day — brutal militarism remains the unifying national element. Alongside near-universal conscription is the near-universal approval among Israeli Jews for IDF-inflicted slaughter. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Against the Loveless World: A Palestinian tale of exile and resistance

Middle East Eye

When Nahr, the thirty-something Palestinian protagonist of Susan Abulhawa’s new novel Against the Loveless World, is tried in an Israeli court, the trial is conducted entirely in Hebrew; Nahr doesn’t find out until she’s in jail what the nature of her alleged crime is.

As the trial takes place near the end of the book, the reader is already sufficiently acquainted with Nahr’s individualistic personality - and the pleasure she derives in throwing Israelis in particular for a loop by behaving in unconventional fashion - that her comportment in the courtroom doesn’t come as a great shock. She launches into a medley of Arabic songs, hoping to make her husband Bilal - himself a frequent prisoner of Israel and a model of defiance - proud, wherever he is:

"I started with ‘Yumma Mweil elHawa,’ to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. ‘El Hawa Hawaya’ followed by my favorite, ‘Qariatol Fingan.’ The judge was baffled, then irate, yelling at me, at the prosecutors, lawyers, bailiffs. She ordered the guards to silence me."

As she sings, Nahr - the first-person narrator of the book - summarises the function of her performance for the reader: “I colonised the coloniser’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.”

It turns out that Nahr’s words are fitting beyond the immediate context, as Against the Loveless World itself constitutes a defiance of colonising narratives and a reclaiming of Palestinian space - by both Abulhawa and her characters.

A Palestinian-American writer, human rights activist and biologist, Abulhawa hails from Jerusalem and currently resides in Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books, including The Blue Between Sky and Water and her acclaimed first novel, Mornings in Jenin - about various generations of a Palestinian refugee family - which has been published in more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies worldwide. Abulhawa is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organisation that builds recreational spaces for children under Israeli occupation.

From her writings and public appearances, Abulhawa seems - much as the fictional Nahr does - as someone who doesn’t take nonsense from anyone, regardless of the effects on personal reputation or career. Case in point: some years ago she publicly took on Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School’s former resident cheerleader for Israeli war crimes, at the Boston Book Festival in 2010, calmly and collectedly tearing him and his arguments to pieces. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Virus Gives Erratic El Salvador Strongman Excuse to Fill Jails

The Washington Spectator

On April 21, in the midst of El Salvador’s hard-core coronavirus lockdown, President Nayib Bukele tweeted a photo of himself seated behind a desk in an elegant office, wearing a face mask. Accompanying the photo was the following reassurance: “The rumors of my kidnapping by aliens are completely unfounded.”

As if that weren’t odd enough, the next day he updated his profile picture to the same image of him face-masked, this time with the desk photoshopped out—and replaced by a spaceship.

Granted, Bukele had already gone orbital long before the coronavirus struck—like that time he announced: “President Trump is very nice and cool, and I’m nice and cool, too … we both use Twitter a lot, so, you know, we’ll get along.” This, mind you, was after the same Trump had referred to Bukele’s country as a “shithole.”

A former advertising executive and mayor of San Salvador, Bukele assumed power in June 2019 at the age of 37, having successfully marketed his Nuevas Ideas party as a desperately needed break from ARENA and the FMLN, the two parties that have dominated contemporary Salvadoran politics since the end of the bloody civil war in 1992. It seems, though, that Bukele’s ideas aren’t so nuevas—in that phenomena like unchecked authoritarianism and power-tripping have been around for quite a while.

In addition to tweeting ad nauseam and taking selfies from the podium at the United Nations, Bukele’s presidential activities have included deploying heavily armed soldiers and police inside El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly in February and threatening to dissolve it if lawmakers didn’t cooperate on a loan he was demanding for his Territorial Control Plan. According to Bukelian fantasy, this plan will resolve the country’s gang problem—and to hell with democracy. The militarization of the Assembly was a stunt unseen even during the 12-year civil war, during which the vast majority of atrocities were committed by a U.S.-backed right-wing military and allied death squads. But, you know, new ideas.

I happened to be in San Salvador at the time of the Assembly spectacle this winter and attended a brief pro-Bukele demonstration in front of the building. Demonstrators, many of whom had been bused in from outside the capital, were given black crosses adorned with a hashtag denouncing the recalcitrant lawmakers as mierda, signified by the poop emoji. The crosses were meant to symbolize how Salvadorans were dropping dead because Bukele wasn’t getting his loan; it was not clear, however, how anyone in such a fanatically religious country had deemed it prudent to put a poop emoji on a cross. The lawmakers, for their part, were given at least a temporary reprieve when Bukele called off the siege of the Assembly, informing his followers that he had spoken with God, who had told him to be patient. READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR.

The United Arab Emirates Is One of the US’s Favorite Middle East Monarchies

Jacobin

Last week, the Associated Press reported that efforts by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to combat coronavirus had “renewed questions about mass surveillance” in the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms.

Believed to have “one of the highest per capita concentrations of surveillance cameras in the world,” the UAE is well poised to use the current pandemic to eviscerate civil liberties — not that there are really any to speak of in the first place.

The slightest criticism of the government can get you imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared; talking about human rights is a particularly dangerous pastime. In a country of obscene material wealth and malls with ski slopes, ubiquitous surveillance — of both physical movement and personal communications — means that freedom of speech, expression, association, and thought are practically nonexistent luxuries.

The AP report notes that, in May, the Dubai police announced the local surveillance camera system would start checking temperatures and ensuring social distancing. An experiment for thermal helmet cameras for police officers is underway, too, while “‘disinfection gates,’ which fog chemicals on people, similarly use thermal cameras that also can record and upload their data.” And as pleasant as fogging chemicals sound, there’s more: “Nothing prevents these additional cameras and their data from being fed into wider facial recognition databases.”

Having had the misfortune to find myself in the Emirates on a smattering of occasions, I can confirm the distinctly criminalizing sensation of having security cameras pointed at you from every direction. In fact, the UAE is one of the few places on earth where a mere few minutes in the country was enough to convince me that human existence is itself one big cruel experiment. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Friedman at 50 Friedman Units: What Did We Do to Deserve This?

FAIR

In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job security as an impediment to progress, innovation and national competitiveness—even lambasting the US Congress in 2004 for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean” (how’s that for unfeeling capitalism?)—it’s not clear why he’s suddenly concerned with saving US jobs in the middle of a pandemic.

As for Friedman’s own highly remunerated job (as of 2009, his speaking fee alone was no less than $75,000), this year marks the 25th anniversary of his service as foreign affairs columnist at the Times, where he has held various posts since 1981. To put it another way, Friedman has been writing a column on international relations for more than 50 Friedman Units—to use the metric coined by blogger Atrios (5/21/06) in honor of the pundit’s penchant for declaring that “the next six months” were always the critical ones in Iraq (FAIR.org, 5/16/06).

Unlike Susie Smith, Friedman’s livelihood has never been in jeopardy, despite his myriad professional defects. These range from rhetorical incoherence and continuous self-contradiction (e.g., Iraq was “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched,” even as Friedman self-defined as “a liberal on every issue other than this war”) to his tendency to imbue utterly frivolous jet-setting experiences with global political significance (e.g., that time on an Emirates Air flight from Dubai when the Pakistani passenger sporting a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” spontaneously evolved into a sign that Pakistan was the Titanic, or possibly the iceberg). (In the same article, Friedman cautioned that an American victory in Afghanistan was possible only if the US recognized that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.”)

Then, of course, there’s the fact that he is certifiably wrong on a regular basis. (“There is never going to be any European monetary union,” he wrote on October 4, 1995, a little more than three years before the launch of the euro. “Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”) And yet, thanks to his relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continue churning out his pseudo-thoughts week after week—even if, as he inexplicably joked in his 2005 ode to corporate globalization The World Is Flat, “some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.” READ MORE AT FAIR.