The trials of Julian Assange: A death sentence for democracy

 Al Jazeera English

In June 2022, when Russia’s foreign ministry announced that it was considering “stringent measures” against United States media outlets in response to US restrictions on Russian media, the US Department of State huffily complained that the Kremlin was “engaged in a full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth”.

This sort of hypocrisy was nothing new; after all, the world’s self-appointed greatest democracy has long made it clear that basic rights and freedoms are things that only its enemies must abide by. The shameless double standard enables the US to do stuff like make a ruckus over Cuba’s political prisoners while simultaneously operating an illegal US prison on occupied Cuban territory – or call out China for an alleged “spy balloon” while simultaneously spying on China and everyone else on the planet.

And on Wednesday, February 21, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange completed one last legal attempt to avoid extradition to the US, the country’s own “full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth” was once again on full display. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on spying charges – which again is pretty rich coming from a nation with an extensive history of illegally spying on its own citizens. In reality, Assange’s only “crime” was to utilise WikiLeaks to expose the truth of US military crimes, as in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video that was released in 2010.

Thomas Friedman: Dehumanisation par excellence amid a genocide

Al Jazeera English

There are few American journalists who so transparently embody the United States’ pompous and demeaning approach to Arab and Muslim lands and peoples as Thomas Friedman, the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times since 1995.

Prior to tormenting humanity with his biweekly opinions (such as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace), Friedman served in the 1980s as the Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem. His time in the Middle East permitted him to hone his Orientalist arrogance, which earned him the starring role in a 1989 essay by none other than Edward Said, who remarked on the “comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas” and Friedman’s apparent conviction that “what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks”.

Of course, Friedman’s inauguration as a foreign affairs columnist gave him greater freedom to share what he, himself, thought. Over the years, these thoughts have included that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness”, that Afghanistan is the equivalent of a “special needs baby”, and that the nation of Iraq needed to “suck on this” in order to burst the “terrorism bubble” that had made itself known on 9/11 – an event Friedman nonetheless admitted Iraq had nothing to do with. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH

Facebook at 20: From virtual community to censorship of reality

 Al Jazerra English

When I joined Facebook in 2007, three years after the platform launched, I used it solely as a means of staying in touch with friends I had acquired while hitchhiking through Lebanon in the aftermath of the summer 2006 Israeli assault, which had destroyed much of the country but not its famed hospitality.

Old acquaintances from middle school and high school were gradually added to my Facebook friends list, including my seventh-grade boyfriend and a few Zionists who were purged once I mastered the “unfriend” function. Then came writers, academics, and activists of compatible political persuasions. This, for a while, seemed to endow Facebook with the potential to serve as an inspirational forum and genuine virtual community.

Of course, human solidarity was never the aim of Facebook, and capitalism quickly reared its ugly head. After effectively luring a significant sector of humanity into digital addiction, the Facebook powers that be went about eviscerating the very concept of privacy as a basic human right. And as Facebook now celebrates its 20th anniversary on February 4, the panorama is bleak indeed. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Letter from Panama’s ‘Little Hiroshima’

 Al Jazeera English

Once upon a time, the United States was good buddies with a fellow named Manuel Noriega, a longstanding CIA asset and the dictator of Panama in the 1980s.

Then one day, Noriega outlived his usefulness as an imperial lackey and needed to be sent packing. And so with a straight face, the gringos accused him of the unpardonable offence of drug trafficking and undertook to overthrow him in 1989.

This was funny; after all, since at least 1972 the US had known about – and intermittently benefitted from – Noriega’s links to the drug trade. Furthermore, the US president spearheading the dictator’s removal was none other than George H W Bush, the very same George H W Bush who as director of the CIA in 1976 had ensured Noriega’s preservation on the agency payroll.

Anyway, boundless hypocrisy has always been America’s strong point. And it was once again on full display in the selection of the name for the unilateral US military operation to bring “democracy” to Panama by killing a bunch of Panamanian civilians, pulverising the impoverished Panama City neighbourhood of El Chorrillo to the extent that local ambulance drivers began to call it “Little Hiroshima”, and hauling Noriega off to Miami. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Biden and the big border debacle

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly before Christmas, an extended Venezuelan family of 10 crossed into the United States from Mexico with a large contingent of other asylum seekers – part of a December “migrant surge” that propelled the panties of US politicians and media into a massive bunch.

On December 18 alone when US Customs and Border Protection tallied a record of more than 12,600 “migrant encounters” on the southern border, Fox News wailed, “Thousands flood into Texas.”

I had made the acquaintance of the Venezuelan family in early November in the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico near the border with Guatemala and had met up with them again later in the month on the Mexican isthmus of Tehuantepec as they continued trudging north to “surge” into the United States.

After spending nearly a week navigating “La Bestia” – Mexico’s infamous “train of death” – they tried to enter the Texas border city of Eagle Pass from the Mexican city of Piedras Negras but were halted by US authorities. According to the family, a standoff ensued that lasted several days and only ended when people in the group began fainting from lack of food and water. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The (not so) surprising revelations of the Epstein list

 Al Jazeera English

What do former United States presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have in common with Hyatt Hotels executive chairman Thomas Pritzker and celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz?

In addition to being white American men who have usurped a disproportionate share of the planet’s wealth, they were among the first names recently exposed in previously sealed court documents identifying associates of paedophile financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a US prison in 2019. . . . [and] Dershowitz has predictably slammed “radical feminists” for obsessing over the Epstein stuff rather than “condemning Hamas”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

New year, ‘new Middle East’?

 Al Jazeera English

In July 2006, in the middle of Israel’s war on Lebanon that ultimately killed approximately 1,200 people – the overwhelming majority of them civilians – then-United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nobly cast the onslaught as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.

While the metaphor was no doubt appropriately Orientalist, it did raise some questions since the objective of the birthing process is not usually to kill the baby. What role Rice and her boss, then-US president George W Bush, were meant to play in the metaphorical arrangement was also debatable, but “bloodthirsty obstetricians” was one potential option. This was particularly so, given the US decision to rush-ship bombs to the Israeli military to assist in the forging of the “new Middle East”. . . .

Summer 2006, of course, belonged to a previous era of Israeli slaughter-fests, when killing 1,200 people in 34 days was still considered extraordinarily shocking. Also belonging to this era was, for example, Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, during which Israel killed some 1,400 people over 22 days in December 2008 and January 2009. In Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, the Israeli military killed 2,251 people in 50 days.

We have now apparently transitioned into an age of obscenely intensified birth pangs; Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip murdered more than 20,000 Palestinians in the first two and a half months alone, and destruction in the besieged enclave is of a scale the human mind can barely process. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The real ‘Person of the Year’

 Al Jazeera English

It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: lots of hubbub about Time magazine’s annual “Person of the Year,” a tradition that began in 1928 as “Man of the Year” but that now honours a “man, woman, group or concept.”

Given the ghastly course of 2023, it seems one obvious choice for “Person of the Year” would be the Palestinian doctors and medical personnel currently risking their lives to save others from Israel’s genocidal endeavours in the Gaza Strip.

Since October 7, the Israeli military has slaughtered more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them at least 8,663 children. According to Healthcare Workers Watch – Palestine, an independent monitoring initiative co-launched by Texas doctor Osaid Alser, no fewer than 340 healthcare workers were killed by the Israelis between October 7 and December 19, including 118 doctors and 104 nurses. . . .

[Taylor] Swift may indeed be the current protagonist of a superficial world rapidly combusting in self-absorbed banality, one wishes more credit were given to real-world heroes. And as 2023 comes to a close with no end to genocide in sight, give me the people of Gaza as “Person of the Year” any day. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

The US is no country for old men

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly prior to his death from prostate cancer in August of this year at the age of 72, my father emerged from a state of muteness to recite, with a burst of energy, the 1927 poem, Sailing to Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats, which begins: “That is no country for old men.”

My mother, my uncle, and I were present for the impromptu performance, which took place in my father’s bed in Washington, DC, where he had commenced in-home hospice care after the chemotherapy treatments that had been forced upon him by profit-oriented doctors had accelerated his demise. . . .

Counterproductive chemotherapy treatments were but one of the ways he had been milked for all he was worth, before being turned over as prey to the lucrative realm of funeral and cremation services.

For example, for a one-month prescription of the prostate cancer drug Xtandi, a medication developed with none other than US taxpayer money, my father had been charged $14,579.01 – ie, more than many people in the United States earn in several months. For folks lacking the means to pursue healthcare and other basic needs, US capitalism can be deadly, too. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel is taking scorched earth policy to a new level

 Al Jazeera English

In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.

And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level. . . .

[T]he Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli military fired US-supplied white phosphorus rounds at southern Lebanon in October despite the use of such weapons in civilian areas being “generally prohibited under international humanitarian law”. As per the Post’s writeup, south Lebanese residents affected by the attack “speculated that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area”.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or in the Gaza Strip, which has seen its fair share of illegal white phosphorus bombardments by Israel. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.