UAE National Day: Lavish celebrations in a surveillance state

 Middle East Eye

On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates celebrates 49 years of existence.

The Gulf News website suggests "49 things to do" in honour of National Day, such as “go shopping” - no doubt a fitting activity in a police state of mega-malls, soul-obliterating materialism and shameless overconsumption, where basic freedoms of speech, expression and association are effectively criminalised, while bombing and starving the nation of Yemen are not.

In a 2006 essay titled “Fear and Money in Dubai”, American historian and urban theorist Mike Davis described the iconic Emirati city-state as epitomising “apocalyptic luxuries”. Dubai, he wrote, had become a “huge circuit board upon which the elite of transnational engineering firms and retail developers are invited to plug in high-tech clusters, entertainment zones, artificial islands, glass-domed ‘snow mountains’, Truman Show suburbs, cities within cities - whatever is big enough to be seen from space and bursting with architectural steroids”.

Nearly a decade and a half later, things have naturally only gotten more apocalyptic. And as if there weren’t already enough luxury and fake cheer to go around, the UAE is set to hold a Golden Jubilee when it turns 50 next year. Think midlife crisis on steroids.

But in the meantime, the current year has been a momentous one for the Middle Eastern federation of sheikhdoms - and not only because the Covid-19 pandemic has given the Emirati monarchs an excuse to further eradicate civil liberties at home, while also engaging in nefarious collaboration with the UAE’s newly unveiled BFF, Israel.

As detailed on the official web portal of the Emirati government, the year 2020 - excitingly themed “Towards the next 50” - had been dedicated to preparing the country not only for the golden jubilee celebrations, but also for the next half century of existence, ideally culminating in a centennial in 2071. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

“You Pay to Die” — New Anthology ‘Asylum for Sale’ Assesses the Global Anti-Immigration Regime

 El Faro

In 2016, Uyi, a Nigerian artist, attempted to leave Libya—where he had endured months in prison-like accommodations following a perilous overland journey from his home country—and make it to Europe on an overpacked rubber dinghy. Reflecting on the time he spent being tossed by waves in the Mediterranean, Uyi says: “We stayed on that boat for what felt like days. It was so horrible. You pay to die. That is how it is: you pay to die.”

Uyi survived the voyage thanks to a migrant rescue ship that has since been forced out of service by the homicidal European Union policies often collectively referred to as “Fortress Europe,” which envisions mass drownings as a handy deterrent against continued immigration. In 2016 alone, an estimated five thousand people perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, by far the deadliest migrant corridor in the world. And yet physical death is, it seems, only one way to die in the context of a thoroughly dehumanizing industry that has arisen around anti-migration policies—and that essentially makes migrants pay for their own dehumanization. 

I recall an elderly Syrian refugee I met in 2015 in Lebanon, where widespread physical and economic abuse of refugees has merely compounded the trauma of the war they fled at home. As a result, the old man said, many saw themselves as dead already.

Uyi’s reflections appear in one chapter of Asylum for Sale, a new book edited by Siobhán McGuirk—a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London—and Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC. The anthology of writings and artwork takes on the commodification of asylum as a lucrative industry under neoliberal capitalism. Contributors include scholars, activists, journalists, and asylum seekers themselves—such as José López, the pseudonymous author of the book’s first chapter: “On Seeking Refuge from an Undeclared War.”

The war in question is in Honduras, a nation that has long occupied a special place in the sadistic heart of the United States, serving as a base for imperial military and economic operations in the region. In the aftermath of the right-wing coup in 2009, the US increased aid to Honduran security forces that were murdering, raping, and otherwise terrorizing Hondurans; after all, maintaining a corporate-friendly regime in the country was more important to the gringos than, you know, worrying about human rights. The climate of violence and impunity would ultimately cause countless Hondurans to flee towards the United States in the direction of potential safety —for many, a hazard-ridden trajectory rendered only more lethal by frenetic border militarization schemes and the effective criminalization of migration.

López, a gay man involved in the anti-coup resistance, sought asylum in the US in 2016 after concluding that remaining in Tegucigalpa was likely a death sentence. He was interned for three months at the Atlanta City Detention Center — “one of the worst immigration prisons in the country,” he describes it — where the city received $78 per day from the federal government for each Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee, putting the price-tag for López’s own suffering at $7,020. Remarking on the “massive money in asylum”—from private sector prisons to corporate contractors to the exploitation of an underpaid immigrant workforce by the very setup that criminalizes them, as with “illegal” immigrants employed in the prisons themselves—López observes that “it’s an entire economic system,” a “vicious cycle with profit at every stage.” Indeed, not only is profit wrung from the US-backed neoliberal war on Honduras, the victims of that war are then revictimized in the interest of further neoliberal profit and the expansion of the asylum industry. READ MORE AT EL FARO.

The Biden plan for Central America: Militarised neoliberal hell

 Al Jazeera English

On November 1, just prior to the elections in the United States, US President Donald Trump tweeted with regard to his Democrat rival: “[Joe] Biden is a proven Castro puppet! Vote TRUMP.”

The tweet did not specify any Castro in particular, but it is likely the reference was to late iconic Cuban leader Fidel, a staunch critic of US imperial aggression in Latin America and capitalism in general – a system he accurately saw as perpetuating poverty.

Considering now-President-elect Biden’s Latin American track record, however, it appears the deceased Castro is a rather terrible puppet master.

For eight years, Biden served as vice president to US “Deporter-in-Chief” Barack Obama, who assumed power in 2009. That same year, the democratically-elected president of Honduras was overthrown in a right-wing coup d’état, the success of which was ultimately ensured by the Obama-Biden administration.

The coup plunged Honduras into a seemingly irreversibly violent neoliberal hell, with skyrocketing homicides and widespread impunity for murders, rapes, and other abuses committed by Honduran security forces – and all with the help of increased US military and police aid.

A principal excuse for such aid to Honduras and other trigger-happy states like Mexico was, of course, the “war on drugs” – the gift that keeps on giving in terms of legitimating post-Cold War US imperialism and continuing militarisation of Latin America.

During a 2012 excursion to the region to reiterate US satisfaction with the panorama of right-wing, corporate-friendly brutality, Biden affirmed that there was no possibility for drug legalisation in the eyes of him and his boss, despite the horrific levels of violence generated by the drug war itself.

The perils of existence in Honduras have only been compounded by the post-coup privatisation binge, mega “development” projects entailing land grabs and environmental despoliation, and other US-backed neoliberal experiments in mass impoverishment and communal displacement. Given this reality, it is only logical that a whole lot of Hondurans – as well as other Latin Americans in a similar boat – would attempt to migrate in the direction of potential physical and economic safety.

And yet when a surplus of unaccompanied minors, most of them from Honduras, turned up on the US frontier in 2014 to seek asylum, Biden saw it as a “dangerous surge in migration”. This opinion was espoused in his 2015 New York Times article, “A Plan for Central America”, in which the vice president outlined his strategy for ameliorating violence and poverty in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and thereby stemming the migrant surge.

Biden’s plan, also known as the “Alliance for Prosperity”, was based on the notion that “security makes everything else possible”. The plan prescribed collaboration between the US, the three aforementioned governments, and “international financial institutions and the private sector”. Never mind that, in all three locations, the current lack of security has pretty much everything to do with decades of US interference and furtherance of the interests of – what else – international financial institutions and private sector. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Coronastalgia

Evergreen Review

I had been in Zipolite for more than two months when I learned it was called la playa de la muerte.

I arrived in mid-March from El Salvador, via Mexico City and Oaxaca City. In Mexico City I slept on the airport floor until scolded for uncivilized behavior by a security guard. From Oaxaca City I embarked on what I assumed would be a short bus ride to Zipolite but turned out to be seven hours of mountain curves and speed bumps taken at high speed. My stay in the village was meant to be brief. I was rendezvousing with Marwan, a friend from Lebanon—Mexico being one of a select group of countries that doesn’t make life hell for the Lebanese visa applicant—after which I would continue on to Turkey-Spain-Greece-Albania and a slew of other places, in keeping with the essentially schizophrenic itinerancy since I abandoned the United States 17 years ago.

The pandemic brought to a halt any aspirations to motion. Marwan was able to return to Lebanon on a series of flights that the Lebanese embassy in Mexico City assured him was his last chance to get home for the foreseeable future. I had no home but was committed to avoiding the homeland at all cost. I rented an apartment on the main road into Zipolite from the nearby town of Puerto Ángel and prepared myself for what seemed to be an inevitable claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown after so many years of being constantly on the move.

As if the prospect of having to sit still and deal with myself weren’t awful enough, a coronavirus checkpoint was erected directly in front of my house. It was one of many such checkpoints throughout the region, manned by a fluctuating array of civilian volunteers and policemen. Heavily armed Marines were added later, when it was determined that the first two groups were disproportionately focused on eating and not sufficiently intimidating to aspiring violators of the quarantine. The checkpoint and I got off to a rough start. On the day of its materialization, I was not allowed into my house for lack of a face mask. Numerous futile appeals to logic and a near-aneurysm later, I was taken aside by a policeman, given a disposable mask, and told to wear it within ten meters of the checkpoint, after which the need spontaneously expired.

I was under de facto 24-hour surveillance. An act as simple as lighting the gas stove in the kitchen was liable to elicit loud and teasing speculation from the permanent band of eavesdroppers about what I was cooking for my supposed novio, who although never showing himself in the flesh was a constant source of speculation. Granted, the checkpoint did have its uses, like whenever I needed a jar of hot sauce opened or a wasp killed—a feat requiring two cops, one civilian, and a frisbee—or a coconut sliced with a machete, and despite the initial friction I gradually got used to stepping over a rope every time I went outside, just as I also grew accustomed to the rotation of upbeat songs about the coronavirus with which someone somewhere had decided to inundate radio waves. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW.

Robert Fisk: Shining a light on western abuses in the Middle East

 Middle East Eye

It was the Day of the Dead here in Mexico when I received news of the death of Robert Fisk, who himself spent much of his life writing about dead people. 

The award-winning journalist and author passed away on 30 October in Dublin at the age of 74. Based in Beirut since 1976 - the year after the launch of the 15-year Lebanese civil war - Fisk joined the Independent in 1989 as the British paper’s correspondent in the region.

Various obituaries have commemorated him as an acclaimed but “controversial” figure, with the Guardian specifying that he was “known for his criticism of the US”.

Indeed, while the ostensible function of journalism is to speak truth to power, the few journalists who actually do so are labelled as problematic. Much of the “controversy” surrounding Fisk stemmed from his efforts to place the 9/11 attacks - the horrific and criminal nature of which he fully acknowledged - within the necessary context of malevolent US-led machinations in the Middle East. 

Nor did the powers-that-be appreciate Fisk’s insistence on connecting the dots back to that time in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden was fighting on, you know, our side. Fisk, who interviewed bin Laden on three occasions, understood quite well that history mattered not a bit in the propagation of the “war on terror”, and was instead something to be actively covered up in favour of reductionist rhetoric featuring hordes of Muslims who hate us for no reason.

As Fisk writes in his tome The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East: “‘Terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

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.