Review: Syria war: Rebuilding in the middle of a cyclone

Middle East Eye

Once upon a time in Syria, there was an evil dictator against whom the people rose up. They were brutally repressed, and war ensued.

This, at least, is one of the versions of the Syrian conflict (2011-present) that is mass-marketed on the international scene, in all of its oversimplified, decontextualised, and politically expedient glory. It's fortunate, then, that antidotes to such deceptive reductionism exist - among them the newly edited collection Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War.

The editors are Linda Matar of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Ali Kadri of NUS and the London School of Economics, who explain in their introduction - titled "Syria in the Imperialist Cyclone" - that the objective of the compilation is to provide a "broad-scope analysis of what went wrong in Syria" and perspectives from "different angles of the political spectrum".

Obviously, this is not a book that will go down well with Western cheerleaders for the opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who delight in smearing as "Assad apologists" anyone who dares to deflect a bit of blame for the conflict onto any other party.

And while the various contributors to Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War do deliver significant criticism of Assad and his policies, the overarching role of the aforementioned cyclone is made painfully clear. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The guacamole famine, the Super Bowl, and other American dramas

Al Jazeera English

As part of a crackdown on corruption and crime, Mexico's new president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has revamped the national fuel distribution system to deter petrol theft - a move that has resulted in temporary shortages across various Mexican states.

The United States media have turned up to highlight the real takeaway: the shortages may affect the transport of Mexican avocados and the availability of guacamole for the annual massively hyped, televised sporting event known as the Super Bowl to be held this year on February 3. 

A recent Reuters headline blared: "Holy guacamole! Mexican fuel shortage threatens Super Bowl snack." Other outlets followed suit. CNN warned that "Super Bowl guac may be off the table if gas shortage sidelines Mexican avocados," Maxim magazine foretold a "major guacamole crisis", and the Eater website took the (foot)ball and ran with it: "Cue the guacpocalypse." 

In short, while the avocado dip may be in short supply, the cheesiness definitely isn't. And speaking of cheesy, concerned Super Bowl viewers are reminded that at least there's always queso - that staple dish of Texas that often involves "cheese" that is not actually cheese. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Gaza's superbug epidemic: Bacteria without borders

Middle East Eye

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism recently ran a report titled “Unseen enemy: Doctors in Gaza battling superbug epidemic”.

Given the regular atrocities to which the Gaza Strip is subjected by a very visible enemy - the state of Israel - the last thing that’s needed is an unseen one, to boot.

In the past five years alone, Israel’s activities vis-a-vis the Palestinian territory have included a 50-day assault in 2014 that killed some 2,251 Palestinians - most of them civilians, and more than 550 of them children - along with repeated attacks on peaceful Palestinian protesters in the context of the Great March of Return, which saw more than 60 Palestinians killed on a single day last May.

According to a December report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 25,000 people in Gaza were injured by Israeli forces in 2018.

And as it turns out, Gaza’s visible enemy is primarily to thank for the emergence of the invisible one: the superbug - defined in the Oxford dictionary as a “strain of bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotic drugs”.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism notes that Gaza is a “particularly fertile breeding ground for superbugs because its health system has been crippled by years of blockade and antibiotics are in short supply… Shortages of water, power and fuel for generators mean doctors often cannot meet even basic hygiene standards.”

Citing medical professionals, the report goes on to specify that “staff sometimes can’t even wash their hands… and there are shortages of gloves, gowns and chlorine tablets for sanitising the hospitals”. Indeed, the Israeli blockade, imposed in 2007, has brought Gaza’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse.

B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, details some of the numerous impediments to healthcare in the besieged coastal enclave, such as Israeli restrictions that “apply to replacing broken equipment, importing advanced medical equipment and drugs, [and] travel by physicians for professional training outside Gaza”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

A Tough Time to Be a Spy, NPR Reports

FAIR

Imagine, for a moment, that a prominent media outlet in Iran decided to produce a story about the trials of being an Iranian spy in this technological day and age—in which the all-pervasiveness of surveillance mechanisms and social media complicates slightly the process of entering other countries under false identities.

It’s safe to assume that the United States would find this less than entertaining, and that a fair amount of ruckus would ensue, with concerned politicians and other fearmongers bleating about terror attacks and the sanctity of US borders. 

Of course, no Iranian media outlet has actually done this. NPR’s Morning Edition (1/3/19), on the other hand, has just run an upbeat segment on how violating other people’s borders is now a tad more challenging for American spies than it was in past decades: “CIA Chief Pushes For More Spies Abroad; Surveillance Makes That Harder,” reported by Greg Myre.

The “push,” in fact, came in September, when CIA Director Gina Haspel—herself a former longtime undercover officer abroad—announced her desire for a “larger foreign footprint” for the CIA. Four months later, it’s the hook for NPR’s human interest story on frustrating impediments to spying.

Myre brings in various characters to populate his narrative, all of them current or ex-CIA employees. First is Jonna Mendez, former CIA “chief of disguise,” whom Myre tells us will give us “a few key tips” for Americans trying to appear European:

[Europeans] wear their wedding rings on different fingers. They eat differently than we do. They don’t shuttle that fork back and forth…. They stand up straight.

Exciting stuff.

Then there’s retired CIA officer John Sipher, who “says it could be tough today to enter the same country twice with different sets of documents.” Things were much easier back in the 1980s, we’re told, when airports didn’t scan faces and fingerprints, and everyone wasn’t online.

Next up with some remarks on social media are Sheronda, the CIA’s chief of recruiting, and Mary, an undercover officer. Incidentally, Sheronda’s soundbite—“People here do use social media. And yes, specific guidelines are provided”—is the same one that appeared in Myre’s March 2018 NPR report “CIA Recruiting: The Rare Topic the Spy Agency Likes to Talk About” (3/26/18), which might as well have been titled “Hey Kids! Here’s How to Join the CIA.”

Myre’s latest pro bono public relations effort on behalf of the agency meanwhile ends on some thoughts about how all the technology in the world can’t replace “the human touch” when it comes to intelligence gathering. “It’s a job of human beings,” says Mendez.

Which brings us to the following question: Why is NPR trying so hard to humanize an organization that is downright anti-human? After all, it’s not like the CIA’s machinations abroad are restricted to wedding ring protocol, fork-shuttling and improved posture—and a few details from its sordid history might have helped to contextualize Haspel’s current CIA proliferation scheme. READ MORE AT FAIR.

How capitalism is killing us

Al Jazeera English

Hitchhiking through Venezuela some years ago, a friend and I availed ourselves of the novel opportunity to receive free medical care at health clinics established by late President Hugo Chavez, a much-vilified enemy of the international capitalist order.

I had never experienced the danger of free healthcare in my own homeland - that glorious vanguard of capitalism known as the United States - which was too busy waging wars and otherwise facilitating obscene corporate profit accumulation to be bothered with basic human rights. At one Venezuelan clinic, a female doctor from Cuba appropriately remarked that, like the US military, Cuban medics also operated in global conflict zones - but to save lives.

A December 2017 statement from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights notes that, while the US manages to spend "more [money] on national defence than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined", US infant mortality rates were, as of 2013, "the highest in the developed world".

The Special Rapporteur provides a barrage of other details from his own visit to the US, during which he was able to observe the country's "bid to become the most unequal society in the world" - with some 40 million people living in poverty - as well as assess "soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction". 

Capitalism, it seems, is a deadly business indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Trump's message to the Middle East

Middle East Eye

During a press briefing on Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump was asked whether he was “concerned that by not punishing Saudi Arabia more” for the October murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, “it could send a message to other world leaders that they can do as they please, and America could be weak in their eyes”.

Trump’s response - “not at all” - was followed by a rambling list of all the wondrous functions of the Saudi kingdom, from keeping oil prices low to buying US “equipment”, to being good for Israel. To be sure, US allies, not to mention the US itself, have long gotten away with murder - and on a much larger scale; see for example America’s bloody destruction of Iraq under the pretence of saving the country.

The August massacre of 40 Yemeni children on a school bus by the US-backed Saudi-led coalition also comes to mind, as does the fact that the Israeli tradition of “do[ing] as they please” by obliterating Palestinians left and right is met with ever-increasing US solidarity and funds.

Now, as we enter 2019, the Trumpian “message” to the Middle East might be summed up as follows: For US buddies and clients of the US arms industry, brutality is no longer a cause for shame - or even pretend shame. Impunity is in infinite supply, journalists are legitimate targets, and human rights and freedoms are things to be brought up only when America’s favourite Iranian nemesis can be cast as violating them. In other words, welcome to the era of unabashed enthusiasm for authoritarian repression. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

A Milestone on the Timeline of Israeli Brutality

Jacobin

Ten years ago today, on December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the Gaza Strip — a twenty-two-day affair that ultimately dispensed with some 1,400 Palestinian lives, among them more than three hundred children.

The name of the operation was inspired by a Hanukkah poem by H. N. Bialik, national poet of Israel. The Daily Beast mused at the time: “It might seem strange that Israel would name a military operation after a holiday associated with gifts and dreidels, but in Israel, the Hanukkah story celebrates national liberation.”

In other words, perhaps, the slaughter of innocents was not just fun and games — it was also crucial to Israel’s “liberation” from the people it had occupied and abused for no fewer than six decades, since the violent establishment of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948.

The Israeli fatality count from Cast Lead totaled three civilians and ten soldiers (four of them from friendly fire), which put the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths at 400:1. Predictably, however, Israel unfurled its signature brand of criminal illogic to claim the role of victim, portraying itself as under attack from Hamas rockets despite the negligible damage inflicted.

The victimhood effort got a helpful boost when the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs opted to include 584 victims of “shock and anxiety syndrome” in its official Cast Lead casualty tally — although we can safely assume that shock and anxiety in Israel are often a result of the government’s obsession with air raid sirens and other forms of politically expedient fearmongering rather than any actual physical threat.

Were the Palestinians of Gaza permitted the luxury of psychological suffering, casualty figures would presumably be fairly indistinguishable from the population count itself, considering the regular Israeli bombardments, ubiquitous drones, and other perks of existence in what is frequently called the “world’s largest open-air prison.” As former Oxfam spokesman in Gaza Karl Schembri once put it: “How can you talk about post-traumatic stress interventions in Gaza when people are still in a constant state of trauma?”

Western mainstream media outlets, ever-reliable conduits for Israeli propaganda, explained Cast Lead in the same way they explain all Israeli onslaughts: as “retaliation” for some Palestinian offense. In this case, Hamas was accused of breaking a ceasefire by firing rockets into Israel — even though the rockets (which injured no one) were themselves a response to Israel’s lethal, ceasefire-violating raid into the Gaza Strip.

The media’s insistence on endowing Israel with a perennial monopoly on retaliation obscures the reality that any Palestinian action against Israel is fundamentally a reaction to Israel’s brutal usurpation of Palestinian territory, institutionalized policy of ethnic cleansing, and habitual massacres. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

'Barbed wire-plus': Borders know no love

Al Jazeera English

During a Thanksgiving Day teleconference with members of the US armed forces, US President Donald Trump took the opportunity to exult over the intensified militarisation of the nation's southern border in response to the US-bound Central American migrant and refugee caravan:

"We have the concertina fencing and we have things that people don't even believe. We took [the] old, broken wall and we wrapped it with barbed wire-plus … We're fighting for our country. If we don't have borders, we don't have a country". 

Nevermind that the United States' disregard for other people's borders is a major cause of Central American migration in the first place, as US political and economic meddling in the region continues to increase poverty and violence.

Now, the "barbed wire-plus" scheme has resulted in a situation in which thousands of asylum seekers are stuck on the Mexican side of the border waiting to have their cases processed, with black numbers written on their arms as part of an informal tracking system.

Even the ultra-Zionist Times of Israel - another country well known for its manic and deadly border fortification projects - felt compelled to note that the "marking of asylum seekers" recalled the "Nazi practice of tattooing prisoner numbers".

Nor has "barbed wire-plus" worked out well for some of Trump's fellow citizens as 32 people were recently arrested at a pro-migrant demonstration on the border, organised by a Quaker group. Time Magazine explains that the protest "was meant to launch a national week of action called Love Knows No Borders: A moral call for migrant justice, which falls between Human Rights Day on [December 10], and International Migrants' Day on December 18".

And as we mark this year's International Migrants' Day, right-wing efforts rage on to selectively criminalise not only migration but also human solidarity and empathy. After all, the prevailing capitalist system - in which the financial tyranny of the minority is predicated on the severance of interpersonal bonds - can't really handle love. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The Saudi-Israeli love affair: Traffic jam of the century?

Middle East Eye

On Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump participated in a teleconference with members of the US military from his Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago.

The chat elicited many an enthusiastic presidential soundbite, such as: "Good old army. We love the army." The good cheer came to an abrupt end, however, during the post-teleconference press briefing, when Trump was forced to field a couple of questions about the October murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Asked whether the CIA was in possession of a recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman demanding that Khashoggi be silenced, the president responded: "I don't want to talk about it. You have [to] ask them."

And yet, he did manage to talk at length about how, regardless of who ordered the murder, "we have a very strong ally in Saudi Arabia" - which, in addition to helping make America great in many other ways, had apparently also facilitated Trump's self-marketing as the god of cheap gasoline: "I see that yesterday, [in] one of the papers, I was blamed for causing traffic jams because I have the oil prices so low ... let's have some traffic jams."

Also working in the Saudis' favour, according to Trump's analysis, was that "Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia" - a statement that generated some backlash from Israelis peeved at the suggestion that anyone but Israel was to thank for staving off big trouble in the world.

Incidentally, Trump's Thanksgiving Day allusion to the Saudi-Israeli alliance - a subject that has generally fallen under the category of Things We Absolutely Do Not Talk About - was merely one of a recent string of similar comments.

In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump praised Saudi Arabia as "a very good ally with respect to Iran and with respect to Israel". A presidential statementissued on 20 November - headlined with the exclamation "America First!" - once again addressed the centrality of the Saudi kingdom to "our very important fight against Iran," with support for Saudi Arabia being crucial to "ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region".

Among these interests, we are told, is "our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!" But while this may indeed sound like a noble aim, it is presumably not best achieved with the help of the state that has spent the past 70 years terrorising Palestinians, or the one currently presiding over the terrorisation of Yemen (and that also happened to produce 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers). READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Why is this Iranian regime change cult building a base … in Albania?

Middle East Eye

In early September, Albanian Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati travelled to Israel to participate in a counterterrorism summit and some nauseating photo ops with an Israeli cast of characters, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom Bushati joked around a bit before getting down to terror-fighting and other business.

Israel, of course, has already conspicuously advertised the hypocrisy of its self-appointment to the counterterrorist vanguard by, inter alia, regularly terrorising Palestinians. Albania's counterterrorism credentials, while less well-known, are also pretty dubious: the Balkan nation currently hosts the headquarters of the Iranian terrorist cult known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, dedicated to violent regime change in Iran.

Delisted as a terrorist organisation in 2012 by the United States - another entity well-versed in the art of terror disguised as counterterror - the MEK is almost comprehensively reviled within Iran on account of its history of allying with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, as well as numerous other attacks and assassinations on Iranian soil.

The group’s near-total marginalisation notwithstanding, their regime change message is most welcome in Washington - and indeed was so even before the terror delisting. 

Between 2013 and 2016, at the behest of the US, several thousand MEK members were relocated from their former base in Iraq to Albania. Now, the MEK presides over a sprawling, heavily fortified camp not far from the Albanian capital of Tirana.

But why Albania? Simply put, it’s not that difficult for the global superpower to twist the arm of a small and often overlooked country that was, until the 1990s, isolated on the world stage, and that is now eager to make up for lost time by ingratiating itself with empire. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.