Trump's worldwide war on abortion

Al Jazeera English

"Population control", as defined by the Collins English Dictionary, is "a policy of attempting to limit the growth in numbers of a population, esp[ecially] in poor or densely populated parts of the world, by programmes of contraception or sterilisation".

The current "pro-life" regime of United States President Donald Trump, of course, is no fan of such programmes. But it is all about controlling human populations and behaviour worldwide in accordance with unhinged religio-imperialist visions - many of them especially damaging to the poor. 

In 2017, for example, the Trump administratiodramatically discontinuedfinancial support for that diabolically radical outfit known as the United Nations Population Fund, which is allegedly attempting to overthrow civilisation by promoting abortion and other evils.

That same year hosted the unveiling of the "Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance" policy, which cuts US government funding to foreign NGOs considered to be involved in abortion work. 

A vastly more punishing version of the so-called "global gag rule" that has been regularly implemented by Republican presidents since 1984, the policy now also applies to organisations that work across a range of health issues. In short, this means that an NGO dealing with HIV/Aids, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, gender-based violence, and so on cannot receive US funds for these activities if it also chooses to inform patients about the existence of abortion as a possible method of family planning.

So much for "protecting life" - not that such a noble concept would ever really be expected of a government that specialises in slaughtering people around the world. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Please Don’t Embarrass Our Apartheid State

Jacobin

This month, Israel’s new education minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz came out as a fan of “gay conversion therapy,” a technique that “tries to change someone’s sexual orientation through psychological and spiritual means and even electroshocks.”

In an Israeli television interview, Peretz stressed his faith in the abominable practice, and even suggested that he had personally done his part to push potential converts in that direction.

Peretz, a former helicopter pilot in the Israeli air force and head of a yeshiva in the Gaza Strip prior to the so-called Israeli disengagement of 2005, served as the army’s chief rabbi from 2010 to 2016 and has twelve children. This year, he became leader of the Jewish Home party as well as the Union of Right-Wing Parties (if ever there was a more endearing union!). In the run-up to Israel’s general election this April, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu enthusiastically nurtured the bond between Jewish Home and other even more whack-job circles, seeking to boost his own chances of forming a majority government.

In the aftermath of the gay conversion therapy spectacle, however, Netanyahu has felt the need to reprimand Peretz for “unacceptable” comments that don’t reflect the government’s position. Of course, it is still entirely acceptable for Israel to shoot Palestinian children in the head and bomb hospitals. Indeed, while the torrent of criticism presently directed at Peretz is certainly well-deserved, the credentials of many of his critics are — as with Netanyahu — less than impeccable.

The Times of Israel catalogues some key soundbites from the uproar, such as Labor leader Amir Peretz’s contention that the education minister’s remarks were “neither humane nor Jewish” — a sentiment that is, on its own terms, entirely accurate, yet tragically silly within the context of Israeli brutality and Amir Peretz’s own history.

This particular Peretz served as Israeli defense minister during the 2006 war on Lebanon that killed some 1,200 people, the vast majority of them civilians, in thirty-four days. Following Israel’s attack on the south Lebanese village of Qana — which even the New York Times described as an event “the survivors will remember . . .  as the day their children died” — Amir Peretz appeared before the Knesset to express his “regret [at] the outcome”: “We will not hesitate to investigate this incident [that] claimed so many lives, in order to learn how to prevent loss of life in the future. We are not doing this to make a good impression on anyone. We are doing it for ourselves, for our own moral conscience.”

Clearly, the Israeli moral conscience hadn’t evolved much since Israel’s military attack on the very same village in 1996, which obliterated 106 refugees sheltering at a United Nations compound — half of them children. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

The UAE’s latest soap opera - and what was that about women’s rights?

Middle East Eye

Earlier this summer, Palestinian-Dutch-American supermodel Bella Hadid posted an Instagram Story featuring her shoe against a backdrop of an airport runway on which an Emirati and Saudi airplane were parked.

This led to calamity as Twitter erupted in accusations of Hadid’s “racism”. Of course, if photographing footwear is racist, one can only surmise as to what the proper descriptor might be for the manic Saudi-Emirati bombardment and starvation of Yemen.

Meanwhile, in other Gulf-related news of the rich and famous, the United Arab Emirates was recently dealt another underhanded blow by its very own Princess Haya, the sixth-or-so wife of Dubai ruler and prolific poet Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

The princess, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan, is currently reportedly “in hiding” in an £85m ($106m) townhouse in London, where, according to a source cited by the New York Times, she is seeking political asylum as well as a divorce.

There are varying hypotheses as to the motives behind Princess Haya’s flight, many involving the idea that she had “discovered disturbing facts” (BBC) about last year’s failed escape attempt by Sheikha Latifa, one of Sheikh al-Maktoum’s numerous offspring, who was intercepted off the coast of India and forcibly returned to the UAE.

As the New York Times notes, Princess Haya is “at least the third woman to flee Sheikh Mohammed’s palaces in Dubai”. Granted, given the present context of Europe’s lethal war on refugees, one might find it difficult to muster much empathy on behalf of someone pursuing political asylum from within an £85m property in the UK.

But the defection of Princess Haya - not to mention less-high-profile escapes from the UAE of females claiming domestic abuse - is at least as good an occasion as any to contemplate the Emirates’ self-portrayal as an island of women’s rights in the midst of a gulf of oppression. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The Mainstream Media Is Aiding Trump’s Saber-Rattling

Jacobin

On July 7, the New York Times produced an alarming headline: “Iran Announces New Breach of Nuclear Deal Limits and Threatens Further Violations.” The “breach,” we were told — which would enable the Islamic Republic to enrich uranium above the 3.67 percent limit set by the 2015 deal — “inches Iran closer to where it was before the accord: on the path to being able to produce an atomic bomb.” To hell, then, with the assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran had been on no such path.

Other media outlets blared similar alerts. CBS News went with the headline “Iran ignores Trump’s warning, breaks another nuclear deal limit on uranium enrichment,” while the Associated Press opted for “Iran breaches key uranium enrichment limit in nuclear deal.” Politico spotlighted Iran’s “brazen move” in a dispatch titled “Trump will have to settle on a strategy after Iran violates 2015 nuclear deal,” and the New York Post editorial board charmingly contended that, because Iran is “asking for more pain by violating” the accord, “the correct response is to hit Tehran even harder.” A July 11 Newsweek op-ed fretted that “Iran’s nuclear clock is ticking once again” and advised the United States to prepare “military exercises for neutralizing Iran’s nuclear facilities and missiles.”

But wait a minute. How do you breach, violate, or break an accord that the United States already destroyed by unilaterally withdrawing from it last year? And why is the character that spearheaded the withdrawal allowed to issue warnings on the subject?

Granted, most of the articles on the “breach” do manage to mention Donald Trump’s abandonment of the accord. But this rather crucial factoid is apparently deemed not overly relevant to the overall story — which seems to be whatever the Trump administration says it is.

So much for speaking truth to power. And while Trump can foam at the mouth all he wants about the US media’s alleged hostility, they’re clearly not doing a very good job of it. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Facial recognition technology: The criminal among us

Al Jazeera English

When I was a child, I used to dream of growing up to live in a magical world where my every move would be monitored by cameras tracking my identity, behaviour, and emotions.

Just kidding. But that reality is exactly where we are headed.

Welcome to the age of total surveillance and the extinction of the concept of privacy - the latest efforts by the global politico-corporate elite to render existence as oppressive as possible before the planet combusts in a climate catastrophe.

One pillar of the surveillance industry is facial recognition technology, which has been making waves as of late with headlineslike The FBI Has Access to Over 640 Million Photos of Us Through Its Facial Recognition Database and Facial recognition smart glasses could make public surveillance discreet and ubiquitous.

Of course, there are plenty of dedicated cheerleaders as well. In June, the New York Times ran an op-edtitled How Facial Recognition Makes You Safer, in which New York police commissioner James O'Neill swears on behalf of the technology's "worth as a crime-fighting resource".

But how can anyone be made safer by something that is so often frighteningly inaccurate?

Last year, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) conducted a test of Rekognition, Amazon's facial recognition software, which compared images of all the members of the US Congress with a database of mugshots.

The results, according to Rekognition: 28 US Congresspeople were identified as criminals. And what do you know: the false matches pertained disproportionately to people of colour.

Now imagine the complications that might arise when you have such technology in the hands of US law enforcement officials who have already proven themselves predisposed to shooting black people for no reason.

In addition to marketing its product to officials from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other notoriously abusive entities, Amazon has also pushed for Rekognition's use in police body cameras - which would presumably only increase the chances of pre-emptive misidentification by trigger-happy forces of law and order.

Despite pushback from Amazon employees and others alarmed by the implications of surveillance collaboration with the state, the company remains committed. A recent Vox article quotes Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy as arguing that "just because tech could be misused doesn't mean we should ban it and condemn it" since other things like email and knives can also be misused: "You could use a knife in a surreptitious way."

Fair enough, but knives at least serve a wide variety of useful purposes for the average human, as opposed to simply sustaining a dystopian landscape built for the enrichment of a tyrannical elite minority. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Peace to Prosperity: Will Jared Kushner have his knafeh and eat it too?

Middle East Eye

Back in 2010, New York Times columnist and faithful Zionist Thomas Friedman complained: “Destructive critics dismiss Gaza as an Israeli prison, without ever mentioning that had Hamas decided - after Israel unilaterally left Gaza - to turn it into Dubai rather than Tehran, Israel would have behaved differently, too”.

The dubious merits of Dubai aside, Friedman himself never managed to mention that the purpose of Israel’s not-really-withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was, as then-Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s own senior adviser put it, the “freezing of the peace process” and “prevent[ing] the establishment of a Palestinian state”.

Nor did the columnist care to devote much thought to the fact that Israel’s “behaviour” has often consisted of bombing Palestinians to smithereens, or that it’s not quite possible to build Dubai while under brutal military occupation and siege.

Now, nine years after the Friedmanian prescription for Gaza, we’ve got another, higher profile non-solution to the Palestinian question - this one courtesy of the nepotistic administration of Donald Trump and specifically his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Kushner’s recently unveiled economic plan, titled "Peace to Prosperity", purports to offer “a vision to empower the Palestinian people to build a prosperous and vibrant Palestinian society” and to “realise an opportunity to pursue their dreams”.

Never mind that the Palestinians themselves are not on board; after all, Arabs cannot possibly understand their own best interests without some guidance. Luckily, thanks to a Western habit called Orientalism, Kushner & Co can totally read their minds. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The war next time: Militant theatrics on the Israel-Lebanon border

Middle East Eye

A recent Times of Israel headline announced: “Israeli army cadets train for takeover of Hezbollah-held Lebanese village.”

Lest the innocent reader deduce from this phrasing that there is in fact a specific Lebanese village held by Hezbollah facing imminent assault by Israeli cadets, the article goes on to explain that the training is merely in preparation for “a future war”.

Indeed, Israel has been talking about the next war with Lebanon since, well, the last one, which took place in 2006 and resulted in the Israeli military slaughter of some 1,200 people, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Granted, the concept of civilians versus combatants can be tricky in the Lebanese context, since one can assume that many Hezbollah militants wouldn’t be militants at all if Israel had not brutally occupied the country for 22 years while perpetrating periodic massacres.

At the start of the 2006 war, former Israeli army chief of staff Dan Halutz threatened to “turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years” - an objective that was dutifully pursued as Israel went about obliterating roads, bridges and entire neighbourhoods.

South Lebanon was particularly battered, as were Beirut’s southern suburbs of Dahiyeh - also known as a “Hezbollah stronghold” in the mindless and carnage-abetting lingo of the Western media.

I visited the area a month after the conclusion of the war, and was able to witness the landscape of craters where apartment blocks had once stood. From this malevolent Israeli performance emerged the so-called “Dahiyeh Doctrine”, which the Times of Israel defines as a “military strategy that advocates the use of disproportionate force against a militant entity by destroying civilian infrastructure”.

So much for the Geneva Conventions. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Fortress Europe Is Sociopathic

Jacobin

Imagine, for a moment, that you saved someone from drowning. Chances are you’d be seen as a hero.

Now imagine you saved thousands of people from drowning. In Europe these days, you might just be labeled a criminal.

Take the case of thirty-five-year old German boat captain Pia Klemp, who personally helped rescue more than one thousand migrants in the Mediterranean — that deadly body of water protecting Fortress Europe from hapless humans seeking a better life. For her efforts, Klemp is now facing twenty years in prison thanks to the sociopathic machinations of the Republic of Italy, which has been at the forefront of criminalizing sea rescues and other humanitarian activity.

In 2018, fascist groupie Matteo Salvini — who serves as both Italy’s interior minister and deputy prime minister — closed Italian ports to NGO rescue boats, while also vowing to deport half a million migrants and refugees as part of a “mass cleaning” of the country.

Of course, it has always been perfectly fine for Europe to plunder Africa and other migrant-producing territories in any way it sees fit. Never mind, too, that the legacy of colonialism has more than a little to do with current migration patterns. The casting of the migrant as an apocalyptic menace comes in handy in corrupt European locales — ciao, Italia — where public attention must be constantly redirected from all the ways the state is actively fucking over the citizenry.

According to the official unhinged rhetoric, Klemp and her ilk are guilty of collaborating with human traffickers and of aiding and abetting illegal migration to Europe — namely, by guaranteeing invading migrants that they’ll be promptly scooped up from the Mediterranean and deposited on dry land with VIP service. But this argument, you might say, hardly holds water.

A recent press release from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) quotes Frédéric Penard, director of operations of the NGO SOS Méditerranée: “The reality is, even with fewer and fewer humanitarian vessels at sea, people with little alternatives will continue to undertake this deadly sea crossing regardless of the risks.” Penard continues: “The only difference now is people are nearly four times more likely to die compared to last year, according to the International Organization for Migration.”

MSF notes that, since Italy’s decision one year ago to block humanitarian vessels from its ports, “at least 1,151 vulnerable men, women and children have died” at sea, and more than ten thousand have been forcibly returned to the point of embarkation in Libya, an infamous hotspot for migrant torture, rape, kidnapping, and slavery. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Has the New York Times declared war on Iran?

Middle East Eye

Once upon a time, the United States launched a war on Iraq with the help of false allegations of WMD. 
 
The corporate media - and most memorably the US newspaper of record, the New York Times -thrust itself onto the PR frontlines by presenting as reality the unhinged claims of the George W Bush administration.

Now, more than 16 years and an obscene quantity of Iraqi deaths later, it seems we may be witnessing a repeat performance of the same old media tricks, this time targeting Iran - although at least Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has not yet decreed that the Iranians be made to “suck on this”.
 
First off, of course, there’s the ongoing nuclear hysteria, which apparently can’t be put to rest no matter how many times we review the facts.

As Mehdi Hasan points out over at The Intercept, theTimes report of 13 May on US visions of “sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons” fails to answer a simple question: “How can the Iranians 'accelerate work' on weapons that do not exist?” 

Then there’s that Times editorial cartoon, published the same day with the title “Will Iran Revive Its Nuclear Program?" and featuring a caricature of the Ayatollah Khamenei retrieving a "nuclear programme" from his kitchen freezer. 

A helpful correction published three days later notes that “[a]n earlier version of a caption with this cartoon erroneously attributed a distinction to Iran’s nuclear program. Iran has not produced highly enriched uranium”.

But selective retroactive fact-checking can hardly reverse a tsunami of radioactive propaganda.

Nor does the US media, in its quest to paint Iran as a violent aggressor, generally care to provide relevant history re: US violence vis-à-vis Iran- like the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, which enabled the long-term rule by terror of the torture-happy shah, dedicated customer of the US arms industry.

And guess what: the shah’s reign also saw intense US efforts in support of a nuclear Iran.

The recent reported sabotage of four oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates - the timing of which seems rather suspiciously convenient - has meanwhile offered anonymous US officials exciting new opportunities to point the finger at Iran in the press.

See, for example, the Wall Street Journal’s announcement that "U.S. Says Iran Likely Behind Ship Attacks”, in which “a U.S. official” is credited with relaying this most explosive “finding”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Euro-Washing the Nakba

Jacobin

Earlier this month, Israel treated the Gaza Strip to a quick military assault that killed nearly thirty Palestinians, among them two infants and two pregnant women. Four Israelis were also killed by rocket fire from Gaza — an unusually high casualty count, proportionally speaking, for Israel, whose recent track record also includes wiping out 2,251 people in Gaza in fifty days.

As usual, Western media outlets were quick to blame the Palestinians, while valiantly upholding the Israeli monopoly over the right to retaliation and self-defense — which, it bears mentioning, is kind of like saying the car wheel was defending itself against the crushed armadillo.

According to the Daily Beast, the upshot of the bloody showdown was as follows: “Hamas Started a War Over Eurovision, the Song Contest That Gave Us ABBA.” We are left to understand that the occasional Palestinian decision to fire generally ineffective rockets has nothing to do with being under continuous Israeli attack but rather with strategic objectives like wrecking Eurovision, the annual gaudy affair that launched the Swedish pop group in 1974 and that is currently underway in this year’s host city: Tel Aviv.

Conveniently for Israel, Eurovision 2019 overlaps with Nakba Day on May 15, which commemorates the Nakba — or “catastrophe” — of 1948, when Israel set up shop on Palestinian land, destroying more than four hundred villages, murdering some ten thousand Palestinians, and expelling three-quarters of a million more. Needless to say, the ethnic cleansing, killing, and dispossession that have for the past seventy-one years characterized the Israeli enterprise show no signs of abating. On top of straightforward methods like bombing and sniping, there’s also plenty of contemporary Israeli news of a can’t-make-this-shit-up variety, such as the orders to demolish homes belonging to hundreds of Palestinians because they are located in what Israel considers its national “peace forest” — and because Jewish settlers need to build homes there. Hence, perhaps, some additional PR perks of hosting the Eurovision spectacle and thereby Euro-washing Israel’s criminal orientation.

On May 10, Israel’s official Eurovision Twitter page unleashed a promotional video that qualifies as a catastrophe in its own right: four-and-a-half excruciating minutes of cheery song and dance about how Israel is “so much more” than a “land of war and occupation” — it’s a “startup nation,” a “land of honey, honey” where Israelis are “smooth as silk,” “gays are hugging in the streets,” and there are “some” Arabs, lots of shawarma, and “lovely bitches.” (Haaretz notes: “The issue of whether the mistranslation [of ‘beaches’] was an error or a deliberate attempt to poke fun at bad pronunciation has been discussed extensively on Twitter.”) READ MORE AT JACOBIN.