Trump Doesn’t Care About War Crimes

The Nation

In mid-November, President Donald Trump pardoned three American servicemen implicated in war crimes: Lt. Clint Lorance, serving a murder sentence for ordering his soldiers to open fire on unarmed Afghan men in 2012; Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, charged with the murder of an unarmed Afghan in 2010; and CPO Edward Gallagher, convicted and demoted for posing with the corpse of an ISIS detainee in Iraq.

Judging from the uproar in much of the US media over the pardons, you’d have thought these were the only three members of the US military to have ever done anything wrong.

The Washington Post, for example, unfurled the headline: “Trump pardons people accused of war crimes because he thinks war should be savage.” The author went on to speculate that the commander in chief “rejects…as a pointless quibble” the combatant-noncombatant distinction that supposedly makes US-waged war civilized, orderly, and non-savage.

Never mind, then, all the civilian noncombatants wiped out on a regular basis by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and beyond—without much of a peep from the corporate media about the need for justice and accountability. Think of the recent murder by US drone of at least 30 Afghan pine nut farmers, the US habit of bombing wedding parties, and the joint Amnesty International-Airwars investigation that documented at least 1,600 civilian deaths in four months of US-led coalition airstrikes on the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017.

Over at Time magazine, US military veteran Elliot Ackerman contends that Trump’s pardons “show…how little he knows about war,” while an NBC News intervention by Jeff McCausland—retired US Army colonel and former dean of the US Army War College—suggests that the president “lacks an in-depth understanding of the military, its culture and its professional ethic.” Both Ackerman and McCausland condemn Trump’s indignant October tweet on behalf of Golsteyn: “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”

And yet it seems that Trump has in fact better understood—or at least more transparently embraced—the actual function of the US military, compared to all the folks tripping over themselves to swear by the killing machine’s oh-so-noble essence.

Obviously, few people enlist in the military with the explicit goal of committing war crimes—though, as Financial Times reporter Matt Kennard has revealed, the US military has a worrying history of recruiting neo-Nazis to fill out the ranks (an issue the military continues to grapple with). But as Trump’s tweet makes clear, the US military is in the business of creating killing machines, which it then deploys to brutally maintain US hegemony across the globe, “collateral damage” be damned. And with the ouster of Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer on Sunday, the commentariat has whipped up another round of hand-wringing about the tarnishing of our military institutions. READ MORE AT THE NATION.

Smash the patriarchy to save the planet

Al Jazeera English

Last December, the Trump administration enacted a scheme requiring Central American asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their legal proceedings drag on indefinitely in the United States.

The Migrant Protection Protocols policy - a handily perverse euphemism - is the approximate equivalent of calling the Exxon Valdez oil spill the Marine Life Protection Initiative. As various human rights and advocacy organisations have pointed out, the border programme has exposed tens of thousands of asylum seekers to violence; including rape, kidnapping and assault, in the unsure border regions of Mexico.

In light of the surplus of rapes and other abuses already documented as a result of so-called "protection", the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women - marked annually on November 25 - is an ideal occasion to reflect on the violence facing migrant women in an era of mass migration.

As the UN Women website observes : " Rape is rooted in a complex set of patriarchal beliefs, power, and control that continue to create a social environment in which sexual violence is pervasive and normalised."

For an idea of the extent of normalisation, just recall Patriarch-in-chief President Donald Trump's own previous advice about fondling women without their consent: "Grab 'em by the p****."

Migrant women, of course, are particularly vulnerable to "grabbing" - and much worse - especially given that crimes against migrants are not generally reported or prosecuted. And for Central American women transiting Mexico to the US border, sexual assault is frequently par for the course.

Lest anyone assume that this validates the Trumpian vision of Mexico as composed of rapists and criminals , however, just recall the epidemic of rape in the US's own military - not to mention rampant claims of sexual abuse of immigrant children held at US detention facilities. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

'Gaza Fights for Freedom': An antidote to Israel’s criminal propaganda

Middle East Eye

On 1 June 2018, 21-year-old Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar was shot and killed by Israeli forces while tending to casualties during the Great March of Return - the unarmed protests that had begun two months earlier along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel and that continue to this day.

In predictable fashion, Israeli officials have cast the protesters - from children to elderly women to disabled persons -  as diabolical minions sent by Hamas to lay waste to Israel via “kite and balloon terrorism” and other Scary Stuff.

As with every other manifestation of the Palestinian demand for dignity, Israel has used the Great March of Return as an opportunity to engage in mass slaughter: on a single day in May 2018, some 59 protesters were killed, including children.

In the case of al-Najjar and other medics targeted by Israeli snipers, the whole pesky business of war crimes is magically dispensed with Israel’s signature assault on logic, according to which Palestinian doctors are merely “human shields” for Hamas - and thus, somehow, fair game.

For an antidote to Israel’s criminal propaganda surrounding the Great March of Return, a good place to start is Gaza Fights for Freedom, a new film by the Empire Files’ Abby Martin. From film footage of al-Najjar and interviews with her family members and colleagues, it becomes evident that - forget the “human shield” business - her real crime was in fact being entirely human.

Al-Najjar’s mother recounts how her daughter was most affected by the death of a deaf protester named Abu Sabla: “When he was shot he fell into her arms, so she held him with her hands. His brain went entirely out of his head and into her hands.”

Obviously, humanity is not something that can be attributed to any component of the Israeli killing machine - as is particularly clear in footage recorded by Israeli soldiers themselves, who yelp and shriek with delight as they apparently shoot a Palestinian child through the border fence: “Wow what a video! Yes! That son of a bitch.”

While al-Najjar is certainly one of the heroines of Gaza Fights for Freedom, the film covers a ton of other ground. Martin exhaustively categorises Israel’s violations of international law, providing details of Palestinian victims too often written off as “collateral damage” - or worse, “terrorists”.

There’s the 29-year-old man, for example, whose legs were both amputated following an Israeli air strike in 2008 and who, a decade later, is finished off by Israeli snipers as he sits in his wheelchair at the protest.

There’s the man who is shot while smoking a cigarette, and the man who is shot while wrapped in a Palestinian flag. There’s the two-year-old child, the 71-year-old woman. The journalists, the doctors. The list goes on. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

BOOK REVIEW: The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman

North American Congress on Latin America

During an interview in 2014, Miguel Ángel Tobar, an assassin for the Mara Salvatrucha gang, asked Salvadoran brothers Óscar and Juan José Martínez—a journalist and an anthropologist, respectively—why they wanted to tell his story:

“‘Because,’ we answered, ashamed, ‘we believe that your story, unfortunately, is more important than your life.’”

Tobar, a.k.a. “the Kid” of the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha clique of MS-13 in El Salvador, would be killed that same year, but his story now lives on in the Martínez brothers’ masterful The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman, translated from the Spanish by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz. The book is based on years of interviews with Tobar when he was a “protected” (read: conspicuously unprotected) witness of the state after a falling out with fellow gang members who had killed his brother.

Tobar was born in the dusty town of Las Pozas in rural western El Salvador in 1983, in the middle of the country’s brutal civil war. At the age of 11, he attempted his first murder: the coffee plantation foreman whom his crippled father had permitted to repeatedly rape Tobar’s sister. At age 12, in order to seal his pact with MS-13, he killed and decapitated another youth, a baker from a small village who had pledged allegiance to the rival Barrio 18 gang. “They said the guy was a witch,” he told the Martínez brothers, 17 years later. “So that’s why I cut the dude’s head off, because they say that witches can put their brains back together.” It was all downhill from there, until he “fulfilled his own prophecy by getting murdered” as he was heading home from registering the birth of his second daughter.

The authors use the trajectory of this individual gangster—who killed more than 50 people over the course of his career, even removing one victim’s heart with his bare hands—as a vehicle to recount the country’s violent history. The book is nonlinear, an effective format for piecing together Tobar’s life alongside the national one. The timeline begins in the late 1800s, at “the moment we all went crazy in El Salvador”: when the government decided that the country would become fixated on growing for-export coffee on the backs of Indigenous folks performing slave labor after their lands had been stolen for the project.

The book extends through to the present day, with El Salvador’s intermittent distinction as the most murderous place on the planet and Donald Trump’s apoplexy over MS-13, a gang the U.S. created in the first place. Trumpian hysteria has sent the elite of Long Island scurrying to weaponize their wine cellars, while also giving a toxic boost to general xenophobia and justifying manic U.S. border fortification and deportation schemes.

In El Salvador, to be sure, life is cheap—and even more so, perhaps, if you belong to a demographic widely seen as uniquely evil, subhuman, and in need of extermination. That’s why, among other reasons, the Martínez brothers’ undertaking is so important. Not only do they humanize the Kid, they also show him to be a product of history and of “a long series of violent acts.” They depict him as a man whose “personal agency…had always been limited, always tied to distant decisions made by US and Salvadoran politicians.” As Tobar himself observed: “We were born of the war. We lived the war, and it was the people of the war that made these gangs.” Ultimately, when it came to joining the ranks of MS-13, he said, “They didn’t give me no other choice.”  READ MORE AT NACLA.

EXILE Excerpt: Italy and Beyond

The Washington Spectator

Once upon a time in Italy, a prominent citizen declared: “It is unacceptable that sometimes in certain parts of Milan there is such a presence of non-Italians that instead of thinking you are in an Italian or European city, you think you are in an African city.”

In case the message was not crystal clear, he then spelled it out: “Some people want a multicolored and multiethnic society. We do not share this opinion.”

The citizen in question was none other than Silvio Berlusconi: billionaire three-time Italian prime minister, intermittent convict, and head of a superpowerful media empire, who, as the New York Times put it in January 2018, has now “cleverly nurtured a constituency of aging animal lovers—and potential voters—by frequently appearing on a show on one of his networks in which he pets his fluffy white dogs and bottle-feeds lambs.”

Panic over the devolving color-scape of the patria is, of course, of a piece with the greater right-wing narrative of Fortress Europe, which shuns the possibility that centuries of European plunder and devastation of the African continent might have any bearing on current migration patterns. But while history lessons may not be as entertaining as lamb-nursing sessions or bunga bunga parties, it’s worth noting that, in the not-so-distant past, Italians voluntarily found themselves in many African cities—and for purposes far less dignified than trying to survive.

In The Addis Ababa Massacre: Italy’s National Shame, published by Oxford University Press, for example, author Ian Campbell explains that the Italian military occupation of Ethiopia (1936–41) was “underpinned by a policy of terror” and entailed a three-day bloodbath in February 1937 by Italian militants and civilians that wiped out—by Campbell’s estimates—some 19–20 percent of the Ethiopian population of Addis Ababa. A 2017 post on the Brookings Institution website furthermore recalls such highlights of Italy’s colonial adventures in Libya as the internment “in a dozen concentration camps” of 10,000 or so civilians from semi-nomadic tribes.

While the Berlusconian warning re: the creeping Africanization of Italy’s northern metropolis was issued back in 2009, more recent years have also produced a deluge of xenophobic rhetoric courtesy of the Italian political élite. During an ultimately successful candidacy for the president of Lombardy in 2018, Attilio Fontana alerted Italian radio listeners to the existential threats posed by that most awful of phenomena known as immigration: “We must decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society should continue to exist or should be erased.”

This same campaign season saw Matteo Salvini—who subsequently acquired the posts of Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister— freak out about the “Islamic presence” in the country, which had resulted in a situation in which “we are under attack; at risk are our culture, society, traditions, and way of life.” READ MORE AT THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR