Hollywood’s Israel problem

Al Jazeera English

It’s that time of year again: when Hollywood’s thought police undertake to ensure that American celebrity culture remains firmly in the service of the Zionist narrative.

In one prominent case, actress Melissa Barrera – a star of the horror film franchise Scream – was recently fired from her role in the next instalment of the series for posting on social media about Israel’s latest real-life horror show in the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, the Israeli military has killed more than 16,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them more than 6,000 children. Barrera’s crimes included calling for a ceasefire and quoting Israeli historian Raz Segal, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, who has argued that Israel’s current behaviour constitutes a “textbook case of genocide”.

The Spyglass Media Group production company was responsible for the firing, contending that Barrera’s social media posts on Palestine were anti-Semitic. After all, there is nothing more anti-Semitic than quoting an Israeli genocide scholar on the topic of genocide. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Walking to America

Al Jazeera English

The isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrow strip of land that separates the Gulf of Mexico from the Pacific Ocean in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, is known for its spectacularly fierce winds, which have toppled many a cargo truck navigating its thoroughfares. The isthmus is currently also playing host to mass human movement, as refuge seekers from Central America to Africa and beyond navigate the landscape in the hopes of eventually reaching the United States, still some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) to the north.

And for these thousands upon thousands of humans in precarious transit, overpowering winds are but one of myriad existential obstacles.

I recently spent a few days in the isthmian town of Juchitán and took a taxi out to the nearby village of Santo Domingo Ingenio, where I met up with a 10-member Venezuelan family whose acquaintance I had made in early November in the neighbouring state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala. Driving up the highway from Juchitán, the taxi lurched in the wind as we passed staggered groups of people heading in the opposite direction, some carrying babies or pushing strollers, others shielding their faces from the punishing sun overhead.

The family had joined up with the latest northbound migrant caravan to form in Mexico – although the caravan has since largely dissolved in accordance with divide-and-conquer tactics of the Mexican government and mafia outfits, which jointly profit from the United States’s criminalisation of migration. Lacking any money for food – much less to avail themselves of mafia-organised transport options or the inflated “migrant prices” unofficially implemented by Mexican bus companies – this family belongs to the class of refuge seekers that has basically been reduced to walking to America. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Dying without borders

 Al Jazeera English

On November 6 in the city of Tapachula in Mexico’s Chiapas state, just down the road from the border with Guatemala, a young woman lay face down on the pavement in front of one of the offices of COMAR, the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance. Generally speaking, “refugee assistance” means stymying the northward movement of desperate refugees at the behest of the United States.

I happened to be passing by the COMAR office on my way to the municipal cemetery of Tapachula, where earlier in the year I had visited a mass grave containing the unidentified remains of refugees who had perished in the city. As the policeman stationed in front of the office was busy staring into space, I stopped to ask bystanders what had befallen the prostrate woman.

“She suffers from high blood pressure,” was the response from Yessica, a Honduran woman holding a visibly ill infant in her arms as four other children ran in circles around her. Yessica had arrived in Tapachula 10 days earlier after travelling with her kids from the Honduran town of Tela through Guatemala, where, she said, they had been robbed of everything they had. They were now sleeping on the street trying to figure out how to proceed north in the face of “refugee assistance”.

In explaining why she had fled Honduras, Yessica cited a motive commonly invoked by refugees from the country: its spectacular levels of violence, which became even more so following the 2009 US-backed coup d’état when homicides and femicides surged. Yessica had another uniquely dreadful reason for needing to get to the US, however, which was that her son was buried there. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

How America’s bloodthirsty journalism cheers on Israel’s war on Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In a recent segment on how Hamas “frames the civilian casualties” of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip, CNN’s Jake Tapper starts out by acknowledging that we “do know that innocent civilians in Gaza continue to be killed by Israeli strikes”. It is impossible to “not be affected by these horrific images that we’re seeing”, he states, as the humanitarian crisis in the enclave grows “increasingly dire”.

What is the solution, then? In Tapper’s view, apparently, it is for Israel to continue killing innocent civilians and presiding over a humanitarian catastrophe, because it is all Hamas’s fault anyway.

Near the beginning of the segment, we are shown a clip of Queen Rania of Jordan responding to those who argue that a ceasefire will help Hamas – an argument she says amounts to “endorsing and justifying the death of thousands of civilians”.

Then it is back to Tapper, who calls Queen Rania’s remarks an “interesting turn of phrase” and goes on to wonder condescendingly whether it did not occur to Hamas, when the organisation undertook its operation on October 7, that Israel would “retaliate in a way that would cause innocent Palestinians in Gaza to die”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel’s psychological operation in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

In 2014, nine years prior to Israel’s current annihilative efforts in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army undertook what it dubbed “Operation Protective Edge” in the same territory. The 51-day campaign extinguished 2,251 Palestinian lives, among them 551 children.

Not long after the 2014 killing spree, a psychoanalyst acquaintance of mine in Barcelona sent me some photographs that he had acquired from a colleague in Gaza. The photos were of drawings by children in the town of Khuzaa in the southern Gaza governorate of Khan Yunis, close to the border with Israel.

At first glance, many of the drawings appear to be your standard children’s artwork, featuring colourful houses, smiling stick figures, grass, clouds, sun and so forth. Stylistic similarities aside, however, the illustrations depict a troublingly distinct landscape – one in which missiles, tanks, bulldozers and jets have clearly come to occupy central positions in the respective universes of the young artists. . . .

The children who drew those drawings are now teenagers – provided, that is, that they have survived the latest ongoing round of Israeli-induced carnage in Gaza, which has killed close to 10,000 people including more than 4,800 children. There is not a single safe place in the entire territory, as Israel proceeds to target homes, schools and hospitals alike with abandon. Israeli military officers have admitted to dispensing with pretences to “surgical” precision. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel is forcibly disappearing Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

On October 28, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari took to X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – with an “urgent message” for the residents of the Gaza Strip. For their “immediate safety”, Hagari said in a message entirely in English, residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City were urged to “temporarily relocate south”.

The performance was grotesquely preposterous for a variety of reasons, not least of them that English is the official language of neither Israel nor Palestine – which suggests that the intended audience was not, in fact, the population whose “immediate safety” was supposedly of such concern to Hagari & Co.

Indeed, if safety were actually a concern, the Israeli army would not have slaughtered more than 8,000 Palestinians in three weeks, among them more than 3,000 children. Nor would Israel have continued to carpet-bomb both northern and southern Gaza following its previous warning to Palestinians in the north of the enclave to evacuate south. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Guterres, Gaza and the consequences of countering ‘Israelspeak’

 Al Jazeera English

On top of its genocidal escapades in the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel is now also having a hissy fit.

The tantrum is primarily directed at United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who in recent remarks before the UN Security Council in New York had the audacity to point out the bleeding obvious. “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said, in reference to the October 7 Hamas operation that Israel sees as justifying the slaughter of more than 7,000 Palestinians in less than three weeks.

The Secretary-General continued: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Had Guterres wanted to fill in the vacuum a little more, he could have mentioned the past 75 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and massacres suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel, which has now added forced starvation to its deadly anti-Palestinian arsenal. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A PR stunt amid a massacre in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

Friday, October 20 was supposed to be a particularly humanitarian day for the “world’s most moral army”, ie, the one that has slaughtered more than 4,000 humans in the Gaza Strip over the past two weeks, half of them children.

According to United States President Joe Biden – who continues to wholeheartedly back the Israeli slaughter-fest in Gaza both morally and financially while pretending to care a tiny bit about the victims of the whole arrangement – Israel had agreed to allow some 20 humanitarian aid trucks to enter the besieged Palestinian enclave on Friday via the shuttered Rafah crossing from Egypt. Depending on how that went, the US president said, more aid trucks could then follow.

A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday affirmed that, “in light of President Biden’s demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population in the southern Gaza Strip”.

Biden, it seems, was a tad more excited about the PR stunt than everyone’s favourite “moral army”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel and the weaponisation of empathy

 Al Jazeera English

On October 9, two days into the current Israel-Hamas war – in which the Israeli army appears intent on semi-obliterating the Gaza Strip – the website of the New York-based magazine Women’s Health published some guidelines on “How To Cope With The Trauma Of Violent Images And Videos Of Hamas’ Attack on Israel”.

It is unsurprising, of course, that the potential for trauma has been detected solely as a reaction to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and not to, say, the past 75 years of Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestine – the cumulative depraved barbarity of which is what prompted Hamas’s actions in the first place.

After all, Israel’s carefully crafted monopoly on victimisation and the attendant dehumanisation of Palestinians means that footage of the ongoing Israeli terrorisation of Gaza has never compelled US media outlets to prescribe “steps to protect your mental health”.

And yet the Women’s Health intervention constitutes a novel sort of twist on the victimisation theme, in which even the vicarious trauma that is allegedly intermittently experienced by US audiences trumps the unmitigated trauma suffered by the people upon whom Israel wages perpetual war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

What’s behind the Washington, DC murder spike?

 Al Jazeera English

The capital of the United States of America is threatening to reclaim its reputation as the nation’s murder capital, as well.

According to preliminary data for 2023 from Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, a total of 214 homicides had been committed in the metropolis as of September 29, constituting a 37 percent increase over last year. This is the first time in a quarter-century that Washington’s homicide count has exceeded 200 before October.

Victims include 10-year-old Arianna Davis, who received a stray bullet to the head on Mother’s Day; 16-year-old Jamal Jones, shot near his high school on September 25; and 31-year-old father of four Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a Lyft driver shot on Capitol Hill in July.

Ahmad Yar had fled Afghanistan after serving as a translator for the US armed forces, only to end up a casualty of US gun violence in imperial headquarters itself – a morbid twist, no doubt, on the theme of “bringing the war home”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.