Mexico's 'vigilante monster'

Al Jazeera

Mexico's army and federal police were recently deployed to the Mexican state of Michoacan to deal with the ongoing battle between the Knights Templar drug cartel and vigilante groups known as "autodefensas".

Formed in February 2013 as a response to the state's unwillingness and inability to safeguard its people, these self-defense forces have succeeded in "liberating" a number of areas from cartel control, and have refused to comply with orders to disarm.

According to an AP report titled "Mexico Gov't Faces Vigilante Monster It Created", the US State Department "said that the warring between vigilantes and the cartel is 'incredibly worrisome' and [that it is] 'unclear if any of those actors have the community's best interests at heart'".

This is a curious assessment coming from an entity that prefers to showcase its concern for Mexican community interests by destroying Mexico's agriculture and industries via free trade schemes and by converting the country into a battlefield in the war on drugs. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.

E-radicalisation and Islamophobia

Al Jazeera

A concise news item in the January 6 edition of the British Independent  bears the headline: "Muslim mothers should be trained in computing 'to help to spot radicalisation'."

The article summarises the findings of a study conducted by the London-based women's charity JAN Trust:

"The study of 350 Muslim women, conducted between last June and October, found that 92 percent did not understand the term 'online radicalisation', nor that their children could be radicalised online. It said three-quarters of all mothers surveyed had seen or heard their children accessing Islamic lectures, yet 90 percent were unaware of their content."

No matter, of course, that the majority of people in the world presumably do not understand the term "online radicalisation". Such unawareness is apparently only cause for concern when associated with a certain religious cohort. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.

Jihad on Drugs

Al-Akhbar

In a recent ThinkProgress article called “What Everyone Should Know About Legal Pot and Terrorism," Zack Beauchamp warns that “there’s a clear and increasingly tight relationship between illicit drug profits and terrorism."

Offered in support of Beauchamp’s thesis is the alleged fact that Hezbollah “pockets millions by distributing drugs from South America in Africa and the Middle East … Because illegal drugs flourish in the same places and spaces that terrorist organizations do – the poorly governed, poorly policed global shadows – a mutually beneficial relationship between drug dealers and terrorists emerges with alarming frequency."

This analysis acquires slightly different implications in light of this week’s confirmation of the longstanding mutually beneficial relationship between the US government and certain Mexican drug cartels. According to an investigation by Mexico’s El Universal newspaper, the United States collaborated for years with the notorious Sinaloa cartel – among others – against rival outfits. READ MORE AT AL-AKHBAR.

Reassessing the Syrian Spillover

WARSCAPES

As Lebanon accrues more carnage to its violent CV—most recently with the deadly bombings in downtown Beirut and the southern suburb of Haret Hreik—the media has increasingly rallied around the mantra that terrorism in Lebanon constitutes a “spillover” from the war in Syria.

According to the mainstream media chorus, this is thanks to Hezbollah's decision to participate in the Syrian conflict on the side of the government of Bashar al-Assad—and there is surely a connection. Hezbollah's intervention, however, is repeatedly cast as the fundamental starting point in the timeline of Lebanese current events, after which all other occurrences become reactive in nature.

This anti-cerebral, anti-historical approach to journalistic analysis leaves much to be desired. READ MORE AT WARSCAPES.

The real danger of Uruguay’s pot legalization

Al Jazeera America

In December, Uruguay became the first nation in the world to legalize the production, sale and consumption of marijuana. While the International Narcotics Control Board, a body of experts established by the United Nations, condemned the move as a violation of international drug treaties, other observers consider it an alternative model in the debate over drug policy — and one to watch closely.

President Jose Mujica’s logic is that the decriminalization of marijuana will undermine drug cartels by depriving them of the lucrative nature of the trade in illicit substances. Newsweek quoted Mujica’s reasoning: “How do you combat drug trafficking? By stealing away part of the market.”

The law, which, among other things, will allow registered Uruguayans older than 18 to buy pot over the counter from licensed pharmacies, is a milestone in the war on the war on drugs — the fight against influential interests, both American and foreign, that profit from the war on drugs and, in fact, depend on its continued existence. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA AMERICA.

Judges and Jurors in Beirut

Jacobin

On Friday morning, my Beirut apartment shook to the sound of an explosion. My roommate and I made our way to the site of the blast downtown with the help of a man on a street corner who, pointing in two different directions, remarked drily: “If you want to see the bomb go that way. If you want to go shopping go that way.”

To be sure, such violence has long been a part of the Lebanese landscape. So too have the self-appointed tribunals that spring up in the aftermath of political assassinations. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Fun with chronology: misreporting the Israeli assault on Gaza

Al Jazeera

The New York Times' rendering of recent violence on the border between Gaza and Israel is a shining example of the chronological sleights of hand that have come to characterise mainstream reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Isabel Kershner's December 24 dispatch, "Killing and Retaliation at Gaza-Israel Border Continue Violent Cycle", sets up the timeline as follows:

"An Israeli labourer who was repairing the security fence along the border with Gaza was fatally shot on Tuesday by a Palestinian sniper, according to the Israeli military, and Israel immediately responded with airstrikes and tank and infantry fire against targets it associated with militant groups in the Palestinian coastal territory."

The seeming cause-and-effect relationship is emphasised by two photographs appearing side by side at the top of the article. On the left: the body of the sniper victim. On the right: the body of the three-year-old Palestinian girl cast as unintended collateral damage in the photograph's caption: "A shell killed her as Israel, responding to the sniper attack, struck targets it associated with militant groups."

Buried in a paragraph in the second half of the article, however, is the following detail: "On Friday, Israeli forces fatally shot a Palestinian man who approached the border fence separating Gaza from Israel."

As it turns out, the Friday in question occurred four days prior to the Tuesday sniper fire and military assault. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.

Fighting terror with terror

Al Jazeera

On December 12, the New York Times reported that "what appeared to be the second American drone strike in the past week" had killed at least 11 people in Yemen, as they drove home from a wedding. The article offered additional noncommittal details such as that "[m]ost of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being militants linked to Al Qaeda."

Reuters supplied a different version of the incident, citing 15 fatalities and a claim from local security officials that a party of wedding attendees had been "mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy".

The ease of confusing wedding guests with terrorists has, of course, been demonstrated time and again in the war on terror, as evidenced by mainstream media headlines over the years such as "US bomb blunder kills 30 at Afghan wedding". Funeral attendees have also been popular targets, a practice discussed in Glenn Greenwald's 2012 dispatch for Salon: "US again bombs mourners." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.

On Israel's collective amnesia: 'Could we kill an Arab?'

Al Jazeera

A few years ago, the Israeli Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs unveiled an English-language website with the aim of repairing Israel's image, which was said to be under unfair attack abroad.

A Jerusalem Post article marking the debut of the (now defunct) site noted that it "provide[d] hasbara material related to current events, tips for the 'novice ambassador', myths and facts about Israel and the Arab world, and lists of Israel's most prominent achievements in science, medicine and agriculture".

Among alleged image-improving factoids listed by the ministry was that "[a]n Israeli invention for an electric hair removal device makes women happy all over the world." The catalogue of "myths" included that the West Bank settlements are an obstacle to peace - a notion debunked on the website as follows: "The Palestinian Authority sees the roots of the conflict as being the '1948 settlements', whereas the facts show that the settlements were founded after the 1967 war."

Via this attempted sleight of hand, the ministry endeavoured to dismiss the problematic issue of 1948 by triumphantly "proving" that the post-1967 settlements were indeed established after and not before 1967 -  something that no one argues with anyway.

The real myth, of course, is the one propagated by Israel, whose refusal to atone for, or even acknowledge, that the crimes upon which the nation is founded constitutes the principal obstacle to peace. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.

Israel's other silent war

Al Jazeera

A recent Jerusalem Post op-ed on "South Africa's obsession with Israel" resurrects complaints regarding the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which during its 2011 session in Cape Town concludedthat "Israel's rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid."

The op-ed author reasons that, "[i]f… supporters of the tribunal were honestly concerned with the lives of Palestinians, why then was there not a single word mentioned about the abuse of Palestinians by Arab regimes such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait, who keep them stateless, refuse them access to higher education and do not allow them the vote?"

This critique conveniently ignores the fact that Palestinian statelessness is a direct result of the establishment of Israel, whose initial crime of ethnic cleansing granted Arab regimes the opportunity to engage in such abuses. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.