Women’s rights and the US’s ‘civilising’ mission in Afghanistan

 Al Jazeera English

In July, former United States president and war criminal turned portrait artist George W Bush bewailed the impending withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after he ordered the invasion of the country.

Afghan women and girls, Bush warned, would suffer “unspeakable harm” on account of the American departure – an ironic assessment, to say the least, coming from the man who kicked off a “war on terror” that has thus far killed more than 47,000 civilians (including women) in Afghanistan alone and displaced millions.

To be sure, the plight of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban has from the get-go offered a handy pretext for US military devastation.

Long before the 9/11 attacks even transpired, US politicians, celebrities and self-declared feminist activists had been pushing for a “liberation” of women in Afghanistan that conveniently dovetailed with imperial geostrategic interests. As if “B-52 carpet bombing”- to borrow the New York Times’ terminology – has ever been good for female humans, much less any other organism. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The great US ammunition famine of 2021

 Al Jazeera English

Some years ago, my estranged grandmother – a psychologically unstable resident of Florida and a devout believer in the right to bear arms – threatened my aunt, i.e. her own daughter, with a handgun.

The weapon was confiscated from my grandmother’s possession by authorities, only to be returned at a later date – such being life in a country that is, for all intents and purposes, mentally ill.

As the Washington Post reported back in 2018, there were already “more guns than people” in the United States, not even counting the gobs of guns belonging to trigger-happy law enforcement agencies or the military.

According to a study by the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, the Post summarised, Americans comprised 4 percent of the world’s population in 2017 but “owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock” of civilian firearms. This meant that, in the US, there were enough civilian-owned firearms “for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Who’s afraid of Hamas summer camps?

 Al Jazeera English

Recently, Lawrence J Haas of the American Foreign Policy Council took to the pages of Newsweek to publicise a dangerous phenomenon: “Western Silence as Gaza Summer Camps Train Future Terrorists”.

According to Haas – whose panties have been propelled into a massive bunch by the (hallucinated) idea that Western media and academia are obsessed with a “narrative of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimisation” – Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are teaching teenage boys in the Gaza Strip how to “shoot guns, launch anti-tank missiles and protect themselves while peering around walls”.

Fortunately, however, alleged “silence” about the summer camps has been more than compensated for by the likes of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) – a notorious US taxpayer-subsidised factory of Zionist propaganda – and similarly devoted institutions. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

SOS: A plea for freedom from the media narrative on Cuba

 Al Jazeera English

In the wake of this month’s protests in Cuba over food and medicine shortages and other complaints, the New York-based magazine Travel + Leisure ran an item titled “4 Ways to Help the People of Cuba Right Now”.

First on the list is “asking the US for humanitarian intervention” in order to “help alleviate the dire situation citizens are in”. Never mind that Cuba’s dire situation has just about everything to do with United States interference in the first place – particularly the six-decades-long blockade that, under international law, technically qualifies as an act of war – or that magazines called Travel + Leisure should perhaps stick to the subjects at hand rather than serving as conduits for imperial propaganda.

The fourth suggestion on the list is to “drink some Cuba libres in Miami”, the unofficial capital of right-wing Cuban exiles. The name “Cuba libre”, which literally means “free Cuba” and generally involves rum and Coca-Cola, evokes nostalgia for the good old days when the island existed blissfully under a brutal US-backed dictatorship.

But the problem extends far beyond Travel + Leisure. The US corporate media as a whole have been less than serious in their coverage of recent events in Cuba – to the extent that many outlets have deceitfully published images of pro-government demonstrations cast as the opposite. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Siglo XXI: My 24 hours in Mexico’s 21st-century migrant prison

 Al Jazeera English

On July 11, I found myself imprisoned at Mexico’s infamous Siglo XXI “migration station” in Tapachula – a city in the state of Chiapas near the border with Guatemala – which specialises in detaining US-bound migrants from Central America and beyond.

Mine was a curious predicament, to say the least, for a citizen of the United States, exempt as we usually are from the fallout of border militarisation policies that make the world safe for US imperialism.

I had come to Tapachula for four days to write about migrants. When I attempted to board my return flight to Mexico City, I was apprehended for visa irregularities of my own and loaded into a van bound for Siglo XXI, which means “21st century” in Spanish.

According to the Associated Press, the detention centre is said to be the largest in Latin America, and is a “secretive place off-limits to public scrutiny where … journalists aren’t allowed”.

Whoops. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Nayib Bukele: El Salvador’s Bitcoin messiah

 Al Jazeera English

In June, El Salvador became the first country ever to recognise the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as legal tender, just days after millennial President Nayib Bukele – who defines himself on Twitter as “officially the coolest president in the world” – announced his cool crypto-vision at a Bitcoin extravaganza in Miami.

As of September, all Salvadoran businesses will be required to accept payment in Bitcoin as well as the US dollar, which was itself hurriedly adopted as the domestic currency in 2001 under similarly dubious circumstances.

The new Bitcoin bill hurtled through the Salvadoran legislature in five hours – which at least meant Bukele did not have to send the national army and police into the parliament building to threaten lawmakers, as he did in February 2020 when he was not getting his way.

Rather than address impoverished Salvadorans whose tax money and livelihoods will now be gambled on an inconceivably volatile cryptocurrency, Bukele took to a Twitter Spaces livestream with two of his brothers to tell foreign investors about the beachfront property and other perks awaiting them in Bitcoin wonderland. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Memories of a Honduran coup

 Al Jazeera English

Twelve years ago, in the wee hours of June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras, was abducted from his residence by heavily armed Honduran soldiers and carted off to Costa Rica in his pyjamas, never to be restored to his rightful post.

Prior to the coup, the slightly left-leaning Zelaya had raised the urban minimum wage to $300 a month and pursued a smattering of other domestic adjustments. While these measures hardly did much to alleviate institutionalised misery, they were still too abominable a departure from business as usual for the right-wing Honduran elite – faithful acolytes of American empire and replicators of capitalist oppression.

Following Zelaya’s overthrow, the Barack Obama administration in the United States took its sweet time debating whether the coup had actually been a coup and should therefore trigger the required cutoffs in aid to Honduras.

Ultimately, the US heel-dragging allowed the Honduran right wing to re-entrench itself in power, and subsequent illegitimate and fraudulent elections – swiftly signed off on by Obama & Co – sealed the deal.

When the coup transpired, I was in Argentina visiting my parents, who had recently relocated there from the US homeland. I had just spent four months hitchhiking through Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela – a trip that, like my previous international hitchhiking jaunts, had offered me a first-hand glimpse of my country’s malevolent machinations worldwide. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

As the drug war turns 50, the US is still public enemy number one

 Al Jazeera English

Fifty years ago, on June 17, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon convened a press conference with a grave message for his fellow citizens: “America’s public enemy number one, in the United States, is drug abuse”. To vanquish the enemy, he declared, it was “necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive”, which would be “worldwide” in nature and would naturally require “more money” from Congress.

To be sure, it was fortunate that Nixon included the geographic specification “in the United States” – lest Americans forget the terrible communist menace that was allegedly also imperilling their lives at every moment and that required, inter alia, a multitude of US soldiers to go kill and be killed in Vietnam.

As it turned out, part of Nixon’s professed motive for launching the so-called “war on drugs” had to do with none other than the Vietnam War, which had spawned an epidemic of heroin abuse and similar phenomena in the US military. It was hardly rocket science: if you are a poor American dispatched to kill and die for no other reason than imperialism, you are probably more likely to seek a narcotic-fuelled escape from said miserable reality. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Why does Mexico have the world’s ‘most violent’ cities?

 Al Jazeera English

In 2020, according to a report by the Mexico City-based Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice, seven out of the ten “most violent” cities in the world were located in Mexico.

The organisation ranks cities with populations of 300,000 or more – which are not in declared conflict zones – based on official tallies of intentional homicides.

The city of Celaya in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato came in first with 109.38 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and Ciudad Obregón. Guanajuato’s Irapuato took fifth place, while Baja California’s Ensenada took sixth. Uruapan in the state of Michoacán came in eighth.

For the country as a whole, 2019 and 2020 were the most violent on record, with more than 34,000 intentional homicides each year. Many critics of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) have blamed his “hugs, not bullets” policy vis-à-vis the drug cartels for the bloody state of affairs.

But while AMLO is certainly deserving of more than a little criticism – particularly with regard to his appallingly dismissive attitude towards Mexico’s surge in femicides during the pandemic – he did not exactly create the current landscape of violence out of thin air. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The New York Tides: Is discourse on Israel-Palestine truly shifting?

 Middle East Eye

On 23 May, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page article titled “The Misery of Life Under Occupation”, recounting the personal stories of various Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem subjected to lifetimes of misery by the state of Israel.

The article appeared just days after a ceasefire halted the Israeli military’s latest bout of butchery in the Gaza Strip, which killed 248 Palestinians - including 67 children - and was touched off by, inter alia, Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem.

Among those profiled in the Times piece was Muhammad Sandouka, 42, who was forced to tear down his own family’s Jerusalem home after being given a choice between do-it-yourself demolition and Israeli government demolition - the latter option also entailing a $10,000 fee to be paid by Sandouka, for the privilege of being made homeless.

The alleged reason for disappearing the Sandouka home: it was interfering with touristic views of the Old City.

Stressing that “no Palestinian is insulated from the occupation’s reach”, the Times writers note that - for the approximately three million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem - the impending forcible removal of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah was a “story [that] was exceptional only because it attracted an international spotlight”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.