Shakira, 4, was disfigured in one of Obama’s drone attacks.
On May 29, The New York Times published an extraordinarily in-depth look at the intimate role President Obama has played in authorizing US drone attacks overseas, particularly in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. It is chilling to read the cold, macabre ease with which the President and his staff decide who will live or die. The fate of people living thousands of miles away is decided by a group of Americans, elected and unelected, who don’t speak their language, don’t know their culture, don’t understand their motives or values. While purporting to represent the world’s greatest democracy, US leaders are putting people on a hit list who are as young as 17, people who are given no chance to surrender, and certainly no chance to be tried in a court of law.
Who is furnishing the President and his aides with this list of terrorist suspects to choose from, like baseball cards? The kind of intelligence used to put people on drone hit lists is the same kind of intelligence that put people in Guantanamo. Remember how the American public was assured that the prisoners locked up in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst,” only to find out that hundreds were innocent people who had been sold to the US military by bounty hunters?
A surprise peak of Madonna concert ticket sales comes from a small territory in the Middle East known as “The Dictatorship Formerly Known as Palestine”. A war-torn land, which’s people have obviously suffered enough. Thus, in a desperate attempt to escape the hardships of every day shopping, they turn to the Material Girl’s hard hitting, politically provocative show. With international hits like “Girl Gone Wild” (dedicated to Palestinian activist Rana Nazzal Hamadeh who courageously mounted the notorious “Skunk” truck) and that song of hope and liberation “Turn Up The Radio”, Madonna always has world peace on her mind.
Due to the high ticket sales, super-mega-star Madonna has treated the Middle East with what its been thirsting for. Nope, it’s not water; It’s a second concert, dubbed “Dirty Laundry”. Once again, calling attention to the colonial state of Israel’s policies of apartheid against the Palestinian people, Madonna shines with yet another brilliant PR move. Outdoing her own diplomatic efforts of the 2009 concert in Israel and far surpassing Leonard Cohen’s whitewashing of concert proceeds with NGOs in desperate need of cash, Madonna chose to buy out the already sold-out Peace Industry NGOs with more slogans of peace and free tickets.
Madonna’s diplomatic efforts of the 2009 concert in Israel, after the crisis of The Gaza Massacres.
Arriving a week early for rehearsals, we met up with the pop diva for a sun bathing session on the shores of the White City, and she carried this message of peace on earth:
Music is so universal and if there’s any chance that through my performance I can bring further attention and enlightenment to honor the peace efforts in the Middle East and help people come together, it would be an honor for me. It is my way of thanking those who are making so much effort toward bringing peace to the Middle East.
Madonna’s humble gratitude doesn’t go unanswered and already pro-peace-Israel’s biggest propaganda outlets are abuzz with the latest elevating of hardships, due to the cultural siege it’s been suffering:
The fact that she chose Israel to begin her world tour and will be arriving a week early to hold rehearsals has been seen as a boost for the country, which has witnessed some performers canceling shows and others opting not to appear here at all.
But gratitude must also be extended to those tireless Non-Governmental-At-All activists at the Creative Community for Peace Laundromat who brought Conan O’Brien along to add that missing air of glitter quality. And producer (and dry-cleaner extraordinaire by day and “cultural terrorism” fighter by night) Shuki Weiss, who was willing to sell the “Dirty Laundry” tickets at a reduced price and even provide free tickets for white-as-snow government celebrities:
From Madonna’s 2009 concert, “Looking Swank After Cast Lead” (from right: Shimon “Pass Me the Napalm” Peres, Benjamin “Holcausting Me a Fortune” Netanyahu, Tzipi “Hamas Must Be Toppled by Doves” Livni)
The artist’s shrewd political maneuver has indeed brought the much needed unity to the inflamed region, as a joint statement was issued by President of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader in the Gaza strip, Khaled Mashal:
We, Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Mashal, the leaders of the new unity government of the Palestinian people would like to bestow Madonna with an honorary Palestinian citizenship on this wondrous occasion of her bridge-building concert (and once we get our land back), but we are stuck at the checkpoint and being shot at in the “Death Zone” respectively.
Honduras has belatedly appeared on the radar of the U.S. media over the past couple of weeks. A joint U.S.-Honduras drug raid on Friday, May 11, reportedly killed civilians—including two pregnant women—near Ahuas, a town in the Mosquitia region of Honduras. According to press coverage based on accounts by U.S. officials, four State Department helicopters—piloted by Guatemalan military officers and outside contractors—carried a strike force of Honduran security officers from a U.S.-built base to the Patuca River. They were accompanied by what The New York Times called a “commando-style squad” of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, and acted on Colombian and U.S. intelligence. U.S. and Honduran officials toldThe Times the forces seized 1,000 pounds of cocaine from a boat before being attacked by another boat of drug traffickers; Honduran personnel, then on the ground, and with support from “the door gunner of at least one of the helicopters,” engaged in a late-night firefight with the traffickers, killing two of them. The State Department and the DEA insist that only Hondurans participated in the shootout.
Both the local mayor and congressional representative disputed this account, asserting in the Honduran newspaper El Tiempothree days after the raid that four people were killed—Emerson Martínez, Chalo Brock Wood, Candelaria Tratt Nelson, and Juana Banegas—and that they were ordinary citizens. In a later interview with TIME, the local leaders said the civilian boat was “ferrying passengers,” and “was passing from the opposite direction and got caught in the nighttime crossfire.” Close to a week after initial reports incorrectly described the mission as having been carried out solely by Honduran forces, and days after the local authorities accused the DEA of involvement, official U.S. spokespersons finally admitted to the DEA’s “advisory role” in the brutal raid.
This piece was published at NACLA. See also Belén Fernández’s short profile of Noriega here.
On May 2, CNN executive producer Arthur Brice published what was purported to be a news article on Venezuela. Instead, Brice’s 4,300-word screed, titled “Chavez Health Problems Plunge Venezuela’s Future Into Doubt,” is little more than a platform for the bizarre theories of Roger Noriega, an ultra-rightwing lobbyist and one-time diplomat under George W. Bush, who Brice references over two dozen times throughout his article.
As a political commentator, Noriega pontificates with total brazenness. He appeared as the chief pundit in Brice’s CNN piece six months after announcing—based on what he said was the belief of Chávez’s own medical team—that the Venezuelan president was “not likely to survive more than six months.” Noriega is not fazed by facts. He promotes his fantastical claims in many major news outlets, often based on anonymous sources. Take, for example, his 2010 Foreign Policy article, “Chávez’s Secret Nuclear Program,” whose subtitle reads: “It’s not clear what Venezuela’s hiding, but it’s definitely hiding something—and the fact that Iran is involved suggests that it’s up to no good.” (State Department officials dismissed this suspicion with “scorn.”)
CNN’s interviews with Noriega and the other mostly rightwing analysts likely led to this demonstrably false claim at the beginning of Brice’s May 2 article: “Diosdado Cabello, a longtime Chavez cohort . . . amassed tremendous power in January when Chavez named him president of the National Assembly.” In fact, even El Universal, a daily Venezuelan newspaper long-aligned with the opposition, conceded in a January 5 report that Cabello was elected as the new president of the National Assembly, even if “only with the votes” of the majority United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Ewan Robertson of Venezuelanalysis.com found that 98 deputies of the pro-government bloc supported Cabello, while the 67-member opposition bloc opposed him. Such mundane electoral processes have guided much of Venezuela’s political dynamics over the past decade.
Author of The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg is arguably the leading scholar on the Holocaust. Here he gives a short lecture, asking the question, “who did it?”
What prompted the popular writer to go back to his Cambridge roots and rehash this very Humanities 101 debate? Why the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement of course!
Tom Rob Smith at the Jerusalem Writers Festival not discussing the ways in which it whitewashes apartheid, and is sponsored by an organization which is responsible for ongoing ethnic cleansing, only minutes away from the premises. (source: The Jerusalem Writers Festival Facebook page)
Gore Vidal sat down with Riz Khan to discuss Italo Calvino, whom Vidal describes as “the only great writer of my time”. Vidal’s essay on Calvino is available here.
A shaved version of this review appeared in the Guardian.
In the 1980s an artist friend of mine made a poster for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, a militia later allied with the Taliban. The poster depicted a fully-bearded Afghan mujahid clutching Quran and Kalashnikov and standing atop a slaughtered Russian bear. It was sent as a postcard to British journalists and politicians, without controversy.
In the same period I remember reading stories in the mainstream press about the Mujahideen’s poetic love of flowers and song. After the Russian rout, these Mujahideen committed excesses so extreme that it took Taliban puritanism to re-establish order. Then the Taliban committed their own excesses, of a different sort, and after 9/11 the West waged war on them for metonymic reasons. Nobody now celebrates the gentle, flowery qualities of these men who have burnt schools and lynched television sets.
“Poetry of the Taliban”, therefore, is a brave and very useful project. It offers the reader a perspective on the conflict through the Other’s eyes. It offers the human element, and as such is worth more than a library-full of cold analysis.
There are poems of love, battle, transience, grief, enthusiasm, material deprivation and mystical astonishment. The voices are diverse and often surprising. Faisal Devji’s preface points out that the poetry displayed here is not the official product of the Cultural Committee of the Islamic Emirate, not centrally-organised propaganda, but the efforts of men (and a woman) who fight for a variety of reasons, tribal, ethnic or nationalist, and particularly out of gut resistance to foreign occupiers, wherever they come from.
This post was published at the excellent Jacobin Magazine blog.
Are we done yet? Do we have to endure another full day of self-congratulation at Obama’s personal endorsement of same-sex marriage? His announcement was heralded with as much praise as last summer’s legalization of gay marriage in New York. And that was, you know, actual legislation.
This is hardly surprising given the fact that marriage equality is designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services. While the passage of gay marriage enjoyed the support of prominent campaign donors, it was directly preceded by cuts to homeless shelters for queer youth. It’s a campaign season bait-and-switch — winning votes without making real concessions.
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