‘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.