Biden’s anti-migrant ‘surge’

 Al Jazeera English

In mid-March, Reuters reported that Mexico would “restrict movement on its southern border with Guatemala to help contain the spread of COVID-19”. The same article noted that the Joe Biden administration in the United States would be simultaneously sorting the details of a plan to loan Mexico coronavirus vaccines.

According to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, the simultaneity had nothing to do with a quid pro quo to stanch so-called “illegal immigration” and was instead the result of “multiple layers” of conversations between the US and Mexico.

But there is no time like a pandemic to intensify the crackdown on poor, US-bound migrants. I have been in Mexico since the onset of the health crisis last year, and no effort has been made to “restrict movement” of incoming tourists and other humans of superior value who have arrived by plane – many of them from coronavirus hotspots such as the US itself.

Quid pro quo or not, Mexico’s southern border reinforcement apparently did not provide the gringos with sufficient immunity from the migrant threat. On April 12, the Associated Press remarked that the month of March had seen a “record number of unaccompanied children” endeavouring to cross into the US, as well as the highest number of Border Patrol “encounters” with migrants on the US-Mexico border since March of 2001. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel and Colombia: The ever more special relationship

 Middle East Eye

Last August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Colombian President Ivan Duque held a joint videoconference to launch a new free trade agreement between their countries.

The corresponding media release from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the agreement would “create opportunities for the Israeli economy in various fields including agriculture, technology and medicine”.

Duque also committed to opening an “innovation office” in occupied Jerusalem, which was apparently Colombia’s interim solution for kissing the Israeli rear end without irreparably defying Palestinians and international law by suddenly moving the Colombian embassy to Israel’s self-appointed capital.

The media release quoted Netanyahu as enthusing that the “platform of cooperation” between Israel and Colombia would “bring our partnership, our friendship, our brotherhood … to new political and economic levels”. The prime minister went on to applaud his counterpart: “Ivan, your leadership in the fight against terrorism sets an example for the rest of Latin America.”

Of course, given that Netanyahu’s version of fighting terrorism includes things like slaughtering Palestinians left and right, it’s not difficult to guess at what Duque’s “counterterrorism” credentials might entail. Since the right-wing leader took power in 2018, a surge in massacres has taken place in Colombia - many implicating the government. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

COVID-19: The patriarchal pandemic

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic here in Mexico last year, femicides and calls to domestic violence hotlines soared. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) – who had previously expressed annoyance that the femicide issue should distract from a very important project to raffle the presidential plane – then took it upon himself to claim that 90 percent of emergency hotline calls were false.

The AMLO government went on to release a public service video containing ludicrous advice on how to ostensibly prevent violence in the home, such as by taking a deep breath and counting to 10.

Of course, for many women in Mexico and around the world, the pandemic’s stay-at-home measures have produced a situation in which they effectively cannot breathe – much less deeply.

From Argentina to Malaysia and Sudan to the United Kingdom to the United States, there has been a surge in reports of violence against women. To be sure, there are more opportunities for domestic violence when people are confined to domestic space.

And yet the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in other ways, as well. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Covid-19: On Israel's vaccination 'miracle'

 Middle East Eye

On 8 March, ABC News ran the headline: “Israel celebrates 5 millionth coronavirus vaccination” - a milestone in the country’s race to prove its global superiority by vaccinating its nine million people faster than anybody else.

It helps, of course, that Israel was able to strike a data-sharing deal with Pfizer-BioNTech, according to which all Israeli vaccine needs have swiftly been met in exchange for a gargantuan sum and rampant violations of medical privacy.

But this sort of winner-takes-all logic of corona-capitalism means that there are lots of losers. News consumers who read beyond headlines will discover in the second paragraph of the ABC article that, by numerical coincidence, there are also five million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza - who, as usual, have nothing to be celebrating.

In a case of massive criminal negligence, Israel has refused to vaccinate Palestinians in the occupied territories, despite being obligated to do so under the Geneva Conventions. After donating a mere 2,000 doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, Israel has now charitably agreed to vaccinate Palestinian labourers who work - surprise surprise! - in Israel and illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The negligence is even more criminal in the context of Israel’s ongoing crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has long thwarted the import of critical medical equipment and driven the coastal enclave’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Even before the onset of the pandemic, Gaza was effectively unable to breathe. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Pandemic reflections on a year of being still

 Al Jazeera English

On March 10, 2020, I arrived in the Mexican state of Oaxaca for what was meant to be a two-week stay. I had just spent three months in San Salvador, which was the longest I had remained in one place over a decade after abandoning the United States in 2003 in favour of a life of manic itinerancy.

In the months preceding El Salvador, for example, I had gone from Turkey to Italy to Croatia-Bosnia-Croatia-Bosnia-Croatia-Bosnia to Turkey-Albania-Greece-Spain-Georgia-Armenia-Spain.

When the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to the mad dash, I was in the Oaxacan coastal village of Zipolite. My world promptly shrank to a matter of kilometres. Checkpoints were installed around the village and I was issued an ID that enabled me to travel once a week to a nearby larger town to get groceries.

One of the checkpoints was placed directly in front of the apartment I had rented, and entailed an ever-present assortment of volunteers, policemen, and soldiers. The sense of claustrophobia was only enhanced by the fact that I had to step over a rope every time I went outside – and that I was not permitted to enter my house without a facemask, despite my desperate appeals to logic.

Of course, it was rather horrifyingly insensitive to whine about being stuck at the beach while the rest of humanity confronted the apocalypse. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

My Year of Sedentary Existence

 Jacobin

Halfway through Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis’s narrator receives a letter from “a mountain somewhere in Tanganyika,” sent by an old schoolmate named Karayannis. Formerly a professor of theology, Karayannis had absconded to Africa after hooking up with a female student. Sitting alone on a stone in Crete, the narrator reads the letter and reflects: “Once again I felt flashing inside me the urge to leave, not owing to any need — since I am fine on this seashore where I comfortably fit in and lack nothing — but owing to my compelling desire to see and touch as much sea and land as possible before I die.”

At the start of the quarantine, I had decided to reread Zorba in an unimaginative tribute to the fact that I was supposed to have traveled to Greece in May. The golden sand and crashing waves of Zipolite served as the backdrop for my reading-slash-mental-boomeranging between other lands and seas, even as I lacked nothing on this seashore aside from immunity to periodic eviction by Mexican soldiers and police. In my case, the seeing and touching of everything was also a convenient way to postpone sorting my shit out or committing to a single identity, as the constant motion enabled a suspension of conventional reality and the illusion, at least, of an elongation of time, into which I endeavored to cram as much land and sea as possible between myself and mortality.

Since the onset of my travels in 2003, I had become more comfortable with the idea of one day ceasing to exist, a prospect that had disproportionately preoccupied my childhood in Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas — to the extent that I would remain awake at night calculating the number of years/hours/minutes I might reasonably have left based on current American life expectancy. In the evenings, I could be found lying in rigid petrification on the living room rug, imagining myself inside a coffin while my parents watched the newscast. It’s possible that I simply associated death with failure in the prevailing context of cutthroat capitalism; after all, I could not be the best, most successful student and person ever if I was dead. At any rate, the peripatetic urges that were to consume me later in life would provide a welcome distraction from morbid fixation. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Covid-19: From a beach in Mexico, nomadic dreams of return

 Middle East Eye

Many years ago at a Chinese restaurant in some city or another, I acquired a fortune cookie containing a fortune inscribed with the verb "to return". At the time, I was in the midst of a 17-year bout of mad itinerancy that had commenced in 2003, when I had abandoned the United States in favour of darting between countries and fleeing like the plague the notion that I might ever subscribe to a sedentary existence.

The fortune would eventually end up among the heap of belongings I deposited at a friend’s house in the southwestern Turkish city of Fethiye, which, appropriately, would become one of my regular stops as I transited the globe. Sorting through my possessions on each return trip, I’d come across the slip of paper, which provided the requisite amount of consistency to offset my continuous motion.

In 2020, the coronavirus plague put a stop to my returns - and to movement in general. I had travelled in March to the coastal village of Zipolite in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where I was meant to spend 12 days before dashing off again. Nearly a year later, I’m still here. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

In Our Corona-Capitalist Dystopia, You Can Have Multiple Star Wars Helmets, But No Health Care

 Jacobin

Chatting recently with a Lebanese-Palestinian friend in Beirut, I confessed to him some of my online pandemic purchases made from the Oaxacan coastal village of Zipolite, where I’ve been since the start of Mexico’s not-so-quarantine last March.

I have, for example, acquired no fewer than three pairs of high heels, despite the fact that there is nowhere to wear high heels in Zipolite — and that I don’t wear high heels in the first place. I now own two fanny packs — one neon blue and the other rainbow — an accessory I have not used since I was six. And I’ve bought five yerba mate gourds, even though one has sufficed for the past fifteen years.

My friend informed me that he himself had just returned from the supermarket — which had been closed for various weeks in accordance with Lebanon’s lockdown — only to review with horror the contents of his shopping bag: bulk quantities of Philadelphia cream cheese, Oscar Mayer salami, and other subpar food that, he explained, he didn’t even eat.

A survey of other acquaintances produced accounts of similarly questionable quarantine investments. There was the friend who had stockpiled sweaters despite being stuck in Hawaii, and the friend who had stockpiled bras despite an aversion to using them. There were tales of Ninja Turtles boxers, sea-foam green sequin turtlenecks, and late-night Amazon binges resulting in the delivery of multiple Star Wars helmets. And there was the friend in Philadelphia who commenced an obsessive procurement of what she described as “vaguely Mormon linen dresses that will transform this dystopian nightmare (in which all the pleasures of urban life are stripped away) into something pastoral and picturesque.” READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Nobel Peace Prize 2021: The case against Jared Kushner

 Al Jazeera English

Jared Kushner, former White House adviser and prized son-in-law of Twitter ban victim and ex-US President Donald Trump, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz.

The nomination is based on Kushner’s role in negotiating last year the “Abraham Accords”, the normalisation deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Of course, of all the people to be running around making Nobel Peace Prize nominations, Dershowitz’s credentials are rather dubious. His track record includes advocating for the legalisation of torture and psychopathically arguing in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of a “continuum of civilianality” – according to which it is OK for Israel to kill Arab civilians because, well, many of them are just not that civilian-like.

It is not difficult to see why celebrity lawyer Dershowitz, who also defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, would celebrate the “peace” efforts of nepotism’s favourite poster boy. After all, Kushner’s approach to Middle East peace is to definitively dispossess the Palestinians and thereby finalise Israel’s project of territorial domination based on ethnic cleansing and apartheid.

The thrust of Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan – unveiled in 2019 as part of Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” – was to inflict on the Palestinians “private-sector growth”, “foreign direct investment”, “free trade agreements”, and all those other neoliberal catch-phrases that magically endow corporate tyranny and mass economic suffering with a veneer of necessary and exciting progress.

Never mind that it is impossible to prosper when you are being bombed on a regular basis by Israel, whose policies of slaughter and other forms of human rights obliteration are never seen by the likes of Kushner and Dershowitz as an impediment either to peace or peace prizes. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Jumping on the Hezbollah ‘Narcoterrorism’ Bandwagon

 FAIR

Italy announced last July 1 the seizure of 84 million counterfeit pills of the amphetamine Captagon, widely used by combatants in the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. The pills, seized in the southern Italian port of Salerno and said to be worth 1 billion euros, were immediately attributed to ISIS, one of the primary parties to the Syrian conflict.

But the narrative quickly did an about-face, and blame was reassigned to ISIS’s mortal enemies: the Syrian government and—perhaps more importantly—Hezbollah, the Syrian government-allied Lebanese political party and militant organization that has long been a thorn in the side of the US empire and its integral Israeli appendage.

On August 4, coincidentally the same day that the Beirut port explosion devastated Lebanon’s capital city, the Washington Post ran a dispatch by Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, headlined “Hezbollah Operatives Seen Behind Spike in Drug Trafficking, Analysts Say.” While the authors concede that “whether Hezbollah was directly involved in the Italian shipment is not yet known,” the ultimate takeaway is that “investigators say the episode fits a pattern of recent drug cases in the Middle East and Europe linked to the powerful Lebanese militia.” The idea that “Hezbollah operatives began manufacturing [Captagon] more than a decade ago” is presented as fact without need for evidence. 

As is par for the course for such articles, the “analysts” are largely unnamed, consisting of the usual assortment of anonymous “intelligence officials” and the like. Among the few named officials are John Fernández, head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center—whose briefing on Hezbollah at the fervently pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is quoted—and Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury official and FBI analyst now ensconced at WINEP, where he is perennially available to link Hezbollah to any and every narco-terrorist plot on the planet.

In their piece, Warrick and Mekhennet plug Levitt’s latest pride and joy, an interactive map that purports to implicate Hezbollah operatives in “drug smuggling, money laundering and other criminal enterprises in dozens of countries around the world, while also charting terrorist attacks financed by such illicit proceeds.” A quick perusal reveals that key global enterprises have unfortunately been overlooked, such as the “Hezbollah pig farm in Liberia” that was dutifully exposed in 2018 by US State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan A. Sales. Other essential components of the fearmongering arsenal do, however, appear in Levitt’s database, including Hezbollah’s alleged narco-ties to Venezuela—a country that must be demonized at all cost on account of its refusal to subscribe to US-prescribed systems of right-wing oppression—as well to as the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), myriad drug cartels and other preferred imperial bogeymen. READ MORE AT FAIR.