Feb. 6, 2024 ❧ Islamophobia in the media, Anti-fox hunting action, and Maryland workers vs. the tipped minimum wage
Plus the history of presidential doodles, nukes in the UK, East Palestine one year later, Sinn Féin takes power, and a vampiric parrot
You cannot eat the news, but you sure can read it!
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
RAMPANT ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE U.S. MEDIA
Ever since the October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign against Gaza in retaliation, the U.S. news media has been spreading Islamophobic narratives and bias at a rate we haven’t seen since 9/11. This past week, the major newspapers and TV networks hit a new low, with three especially nasty cases.
For the first, we turn to the Wall Street Journal, which ran an op-ed on February 2 calling Dearborn, Michigan “America’s Jihad Capital.” Given the inflammatory title, you might think the author—one Steven Stalinsky—had uncovered evidence that some kind of political violence or “holy war,” as the word “jihad” is often interpreted in the West, was going on in Dearborn. But that’s not the case. Instead, Stalinsky spent 800 words clutching his pearls about the fact that—shockingly enough—some Muslims in Michigan don’t like Israel very much. The editorial is a masterpiece of dishonesty and Islamophobic fearmongering. It cherrypicks isolated expressions of anger—apparently one imam said that Israel’s actions have filled his congregation with “fire in our hearts that will burn that state”—and pretends they’re representative of the Muslim community as a whole, spinning them as evidence of “local enthusiasm for jihad.” It conflates simple political statements, such as “America is a terrorist state”—which is straightforwardly true, if we apply the dictionary definition of “terrorism” consistently—with “open support for Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal has been on a roll lately, using the headline “Chicago Votes for Hamas” when that city called for a ceasefire in Gaza last week, but Stalinsky’s rhetoric was irresponsible even by their standards. Since the article was published, the Detroit Free Press reports that “swarms of online hate” have been directed toward Dearborn’s Muslim community, leading Mayor Abdullah Hamoud to ramp up security around mosques and other places of worship. It’s a predictable consequence of publishing what amounts to a racist incitement, and any editor with even the slightest professional competence would have known better.
Meanwhile, a handful of whistleblowers at CNN have confirmed what was already fairly obvious: that the network has a systematic anti-Palestinian bias in its coverage. Summing up the testimonies of six anonymous staffers, The Guardian reports that CNN has “tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives” at an institutional level, while “Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast.” Journalistic neutrality, this is not. In particular, CNN journalists say they’ve been instructed to include the words “Hamas-controlled” any time they cite statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health, implicitly casting doubt on the legitimacy of civilian death tolls from the region, even though the Ministry’s figures have held up to scrutiny from numerous outside observers, including Israel itself. (As if Israeli bombs were flattening bakeries and apartment blocks without killing anyone!) They also report that memos have been circulated around the newsroom, instructing them to always emphasize Hamas as the “cause of this current conflict,” ignoring the decades of Israeli occupation and violence in Palestine before October 7th. At the same time, prominent anchors like Anderson Cooper have allowed current and former Israeli officials, like ex-Mossad leader Rami Igra, to say blatantly inflammatory things like “the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term,” without pushback during interviews. At this point, unless dramatic changes are made, there’s little choice but to regard CNN’s Gaza coverage as ethically compromised and unreliable, and treat it accordingly.
Finally, we’ve saved the worst for last. In a column called “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” notorious New York Times writer and Iraq War booster Thomas Friedman has decided it’s a good idea to compare a variety of Muslim and Arab people to parasitic insects. The column is so breathtakingly racist, it seems like something out of a Victorian newspaper—but don’t take our word for it, read Friedman in his own words:
Iran is to geopolitics what a recently discovered species of parasitoid wasp is to nature. What does this parasitoid wasp do? According to Science Daily, the wasp “injects its eggs into live caterpillars, and the baby wasp larvae slowly eat the caterpillar from the inside out, bursting out once they have eaten their fill.”
Is there a better description of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq today? They are the caterpillars. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is the wasp. The Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Kataib Hezbollah are the eggs that hatch inside the host — Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq — and eat it from the inside out.
We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle.
What can you even say to something like this? It’s well-known that comparing your political enemies to rats and insects is a dehumanizing tactic, which often serves as a prelude to mass slaughter. The late Edward Said had Friedman dead to rights in 1989, when he described his writing as a “threadbare repertoire of often racist cliches.” Nothing’s changed. If anything, the New York Times has gotten worse, seemingly not bothering to edit the excretions of its tenured staff whatsoever. Just like in Dearborn, there are real-world consequences. Friedman’s argument that “setting fire to the whole jungle” is the only way to kill the Iranian “wasp” is an argument for unrestrained war in the Middle East, and unfortunately many political leaders still read the New York Times. This is why it’s so vital to build independent new media outlets, before the existing ones kill us all.
FIGHTING BACK
SABOTEURS FIGHT TO END FOX HUNTING
For more than 60 years, activists in the United Kingdom have been waging a secret war against animal cruelty—and now, a new report suggests they’re finally on the verge of winning. The struggle in question is against fox hunting, a blood sport that’s been favored by the British upper classes for generations. Even among the world’s hunting sports, fox hunting is barbaric, inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on both the foxes themselves—who are killed purely for the sadistic enjoyment of the hunters—and the packs of hounds and terriers used to chase them, who are often seriously injured in the process. Recognizing the grotesque nature of this so-called “sport,” a handful of people in South Devonshire started the Hunt Saboteurs’ Association in 1963 and set about trying to end it.
Over the years, the Hunt Saboteurs’ Association has expanded dramatically, and now has affiliated groups in almost every corner of the British Isles. The saboteurs have developed a variety of tactics to save animals’ lives, ranging from blowing horns and whistles to confuse hunting dogs, spraying smelly substances like citronella to cover foxes’ trails, and wiring gates shut to block a hunt’s path. In more recent years, they’ve started using remote-controlled drones to keep track of the hunters. “Sabbing,” as it’s known, can be a dangerous occupation; on several occasions, saboteurs have been beaten with riding crops and other weapons by angry hunters, and as recently as 2023 a member of the Northants Hunt Saboteurs was almost killed after being trampled by a horse. Still, the activists press on.
The British Parliament handed fox hunters a defeat in 2004, when it passed the landmark Hunting Act. In theory, this legislation bans hunting most mammals—including foxes, deer, and hares—with packs of dogs. But as critics have been quick to point out, it contains loopholes about “trail” hunting, allowing many hunters to claim they’re merely sniffing out an unidentified animal or using a fake chemical fox scent to carry out a simulated hunt, while they really continue killing foxes. As John Lilburne writes for the U.K. socialist newspaper The Morning Star, “The entrenched privilege of the landowning set didn’t disappear overnight… what did mysteriously vanish were the police resources devoted to fox hunting, as, oddly, it stopped being a priority.” With the police missing in action, it’s fallen to saboteurs to actually shut down illegal hunts. Still, the Hunting Act shifted the balance of power, putting hunters on the back foot—and as Lilburne explains, the sport has seen a serious decline ever since:
Fox hunts are closing and amalgamating at an unprecedented rate. Those who do manage to get out hunting are running short of social climbers willing to pay for the privilege. This has led to an extraordinarily high turnover of hunt staff (the people who do the actual hunting) with many leaving the sinking ship. A recent expose of fox hunting on Channel 4 news saw a senior police officer say: “One side is trying to prevent something illegal, the other side is intent on perpetuating illegal activity.” In light of the history of this conflict, that is an extraordinary turnabout.
In other words, it appears the saboteurs are finally winning. In the public eye, their actions are now seen as more legitimate than the hunts themselves, which are becoming increasingly unpopular. In the foreseeable future, this form of brutality against animals may see its last day—and not a moment too soon.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Congress on Sunday unveiled a new bipartisan border deal which has the support of President Biden. The bill would “severely weaken asylum protections, expand migrant detention capacity, and give the president the authority to effectively shut down U.S.-Mexico border crossings under certain conditions—power that President Joe Biden vowed to use immediately if the bill reaches his desk,” says Jake Johnson in Common Dreams. The bill grants the president the ability to deport asylum seekers, including those who go through the process entirely legally, without due process if the number of encounters exceeds 4,000 per day on seven consecutive days. It requires them to do so if border crossings reach more than 5,000 per day on seven consecutive days. A longstanding Democratic position on immigration has been that any new restrictions on crossings needed to come as part of a deal that included a “pathway to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants who are already in the country. But this was never even on the table in these negotiations. Instead, Democrats traded away harsh new restrictions for billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine and Israel. With his polling numbers in the toilet, particularly on the issue of immigration, Biden has abandoned any attempt to pass border policy that keeps in mind the humanity of those seeking asylum and the millions of decent, law-abiding undocumented people in the United States, including many children, who face the risk of deportation. Trump has pledged to enact “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and his advisers have indicated plans to construct a vast network of internment camps to house millions of them if he becomes president again. Democrats have either forgotten or do not care, that any powers they grant the president to round up immigrants could end up being wielded by a man who recently accused them of “poisoning the blood of our country.” Ironically, the one thing stopping this bill from passing may be Republicans themselves, who are openly describing their goal of making the border as chaotic as possible in the hope that it will hurt Biden’s re-election chances.
ANALYZING DOODLES BY US PRESIDENTS
The Washington Post has an interactive article overviewing the history of the things US presidents throughout history have drawn. “Like many people trapped in endless meetings,” the piece reads, “U.S. presidents tend to doodle. Their sketches and scribbles on documents such as memos and White House stationery have long been fodder for analysts seeking deeper meaning.” The piece pulls these doodles from the highly amusing book Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles and Scrawls From the Oval Office by the creators of Cabinet magazine.
The piece contains some enjoyable commentary from some accomplished cartoonists. Darrin Bell writes that Rutherford B. Hayes’ profile drawing of his niece simultaneously looks like a “mushroom cloud” and that Reagan’s drawings of a horse and of himself as a cowboy demonstrate him to be someone who “sees the world in terms of stereotypes.”
Perhaps the most unnerving drawings come courtesy of Lyndon Johnson. He has drawn what, to the best of our judgment, appear to be a sentient desk lamp with three faces and ears, the devil breathing fire at a robot, and a goateed man-horse hybrid with an ominous triangular contraption on its head (Perhaps these are the creatures who urged him to prosecute the Vietnam War?). They look less like the mental output of a US president and more like that of a misunderstood 12-year-old who is in detention a lot (as does Warren G. Harding’s drawing of a hand with the fingers lopped off). Similarly unnerving are Richard Nixon’s abstract drawings of portals to dimensions only he can access. And then, there’s Eisenhower’s strapping self-portrait and his doodles of some pretty neat-looking knives. New Yorker cartoonist Barry Blitt speculates that Ike was a secret goth.
But perhaps our favorite doodle, from Gilded Age-era President Benjamin Harrison, was not included in The Post’s article. You have to dig into the Presidential Doodles book to find it, but we have included it here.
It depicts what the writers of Cabinet describe as “a jack-o-lantern style face and an ostrich-like bird,” adding that it “suggests a zany mischievous streak in Harrison, as well as a capacity for conveying a surprising degree of human emotion: shock in the popping eyes, joy in the razor-comb teeth.” This little guy is simply elated about his long bird. The writers of Current Affairs wholeheartedly agree with the writers of Cabinet that this “surely ranks as one of the greatest doodles in presidential history.”
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Service workers in Maryland are rallying against the tipped minimum wage. Last Thursday, workers with the One Fair Wage initiative gathered in the state capital of Annapolis to demand their legislators pass a bill to gradually abolish the state’s tipped minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage for tipped workers in Maryland is just $3.63, and although employers are legally required to make up the difference if anyone ends up making less than the state minimum wage of $15 an hour, the Economic Policy Institute notes that “enforcement of this requirement is fraught with problems, and evidence suggests that tipped workers are subject to high rates of wage theft” across the country. Even worse, the tipped minimum wage is directly linked to sexual harassment in the workplace, as workers who depend on pleasing customers for their income are often forced to put up with unwanted advances. As Alex Press writes for Jacobin, “76 percent of tipped workers [experience] harassment, compared to 52 percent of non-tipped workers.” (It should go without saying, of course, that the number should be zero!) Opponents of abolishing the tipped wage, like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, have argued that making employers pay more would cause a spike in menu prices, or even a wave of job losses. But several areas in the United States, including Chicago and the entire District of Columbia, have already moved to eliminate the tipped minimum and pay restaurant workers a fair wage—and so far, no such disaster has ensued. Let’s make that all 50 states, shall we?
❧ During 2023, a year that was the hottest on record in large part due to fossil fuel consumption, oil companies ExxonMobil and Chevron paid out record amounts to shareholders, according to Common Dreams. In a statement, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth bragged that the company “produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company's history,” which points to a major failing of the Biden administration to fulfill its promise to rein in fossil fuel usage. These companies have pledged to be part of the solution to climate change but paid far more to their shareholders than they did to ameliorate the warming they are helping to cause. Both companies are planning mergers this year — once those go through, their greenhouse gas outputs will be larger than those of Australia, Brazil, and Spain combined. According to a report by the environmental group Global Witness, the amount of money these companies brought in last year, $59 billion, would be enough to pay for nearly two-thirds of the damages from last year’s worst weather disasters. Global Witness strategy lead Alice Harrison said in a statement:
“While millions of Americans suffered in extreme weather events in 2023, Exxon and Chevron raked in huge profits from the fossil fuels driving those disasters. They're now choosing to reward their shareholders instead of investing in clean energy in a brazen wealth transfer from energy consumers to Big Oil shareholders.”
⚜ LONG READS: We are now a year removed from the train derailment that engulfed East Palestine, Ohio, spilling more than a million pounds of toxic vinyl chloride into the surrounding area's air and water. But despite the disaster, the production of both vinyl chloride and the number of train accidents has increased in the year since, while regulatory efforts have fallen flat. In The Intercept, Schuyler Mitchell writes:
Major petrochemical companies are expanding their operations — and the vinyl industry is spending more money than ever before to lobby lawmakers on its talking points….For decades, environmental advocates have sounded the alarm over PVC, calling it the “poison plastic” In addition to vinyl chloride, which is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, PVC contains harmful additives like phthalates and flame retardants…
The petrochemical industry is ramping up efforts to undermine the EPA: In 2023, the Vinyl Institute sued the agency over an order it issued under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. The EPA designated 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a potentially carcinogenic chemical used to create vinyl chloride, as a “high priority” for risk evaluation and instructed companies to perform new toxicity tests on birds — something the Vinyl Institute has called“unnecessary,” “unjustified,” and “improper.” That hasn’t stopped the EPA from putting vinyl chloride itself in its crosshairs. On December 14, the agency announced it had added the chemical to its list of priorities for formal review under the TSCA, a step that could potentially lead to an eventual vinyl chloride ban
In The New York Times, meanwhile, Peter Eavis reports that as efforts to improve railway safety measures failed, the number of accidents increased over the past year:
The rail industry pledged to work to become safer, and members of Congress vowed to pass legislation to prevent similar disasters.
No bill was passed. And accidents went up.
Derailments rose at the top five freight railroads in 2023, according to regulatory reports for the first 10 months of the year, the most recent period for which data exists for all five companies.
And there was a steep increase in the mechanical problem — an overheated wheel bearing — that regulators think caused the derailment of the 1.75-mile-long train in East Palestine.
Norfolk Southern, the operator of the train and the owner of the track that runs through the town, was the only railroad among the five to report a decline in accidents in the period.
In response to the accident, members of Congress in March introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at making railroads safer. But crucial parts of the legislation — including a requirement that railroads use more detectors to identify overheated wheel bearings — have faced resistance from rail lobbyists, who contend that they would inhibit the ability of railroads to introduce new practices and technologies to reduce accidents. The bill has yet to be put up for a full vote in the Senate.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Sinn Féin has taken power in Northern Ireland. Last Friday, Michelle O’Neill became the first member of the Irish nationalist party to serve as First Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly, after decades of leaders who favored remaining within the United Kingdom. As Rory Carroll writes for The Guardian, O’Neill “tacitly disputes Northern Ireland’s legitimacy by referring to it as the ‘north of Ireland,’” leading to speculation that Sinn Féin could push for a referendum on reuniting the six counties that make up the region with Ireland proper. So far, O’Neill has said only that a referendum is possible “within the next ten years,” so Star Trek’s famous prediction of an “Irish reunification of 2024” may be a little off. But as the United Kingdom becomes increasingly dysfunctional in its 14th straight year of Conservative government, reunification in some form is certainly a strong possibility.
PAST AFFAIRS
From our November/December 2023 issue, Ciara Moloney explores “What Peace in Northern Ireland Teaches us About ‘Endless’ Conflicts”:
Here’s something miraculous: in Northern Ireland, right now, there is peace. There are still ever-present tensions and setbacks and political gridlock, and occasional, horrible flashes of violence, like the murder of journalist Lyra McKee in 2019. But there is a peace, however imperfect—a peace that, not too long ago, would have seemed unimaginable. As unimaginable as peace in the Middle East.
No conflicts are perfectly analogous to one another, but there are, surely, insights to glean here—lessons about how paramilitary and state violence interact, about the role of the international community, about how to build a peace process.
❧ Ethiopia is becoming the first country in the world to ban gasoline-powered cars. According to a recent report in the trade journal Electrek, the country’s Minister for Transport and Logistics has announced that “a decision has been made, that automobiles cannot enter Ethiopia unless they are electric ones.” Since domestic manufacture there is still limited, producing only around 8,000 vehicles a year, this would effectively shut down the market for internal combustion cars. Details are still scarce in the English-language press, but if the ban is enforced this year, it would put Ethiopia ahead of even Norway, which previously had the world’s most ambitious plan to end the sale of gas-powered cars in 2025. Writing in Borkena, local journalists suggest the new policy is something of an emergency measure, made in response to “Ethiopia’s inability to afford to import gasoline due to limited foreign exchange resources.” Whatever the reason, it’s a welcome development, since auto emissions are a significant factor in carbon pollution and climate change worldwide—a crisis that has hit African countries like Ethiopia particularly hard, causing deadly droughts, floods, and heat waves in recent years. The rest of the world could do a lot worse than to follow Ethiopia’s example, and cut back significantly on the sale of traditional cars, if not ban them outright.
❧ The US is planning to station nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom for the first time in 15 years to combat Russia, according to a report from The Guardian. The US has not had nuclear weapons deployed in the UK since 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. Though it is NATO policy not to confirm or deny the presence of nuclear weapons at a given location, The Telegraph reports that “Procurement contracts for a new facility at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk confirm that the US intends to place nuclear warheads three times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb at the air base.” The move comes shortly after the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its “Doomsday Clock” to “90 seconds to midnight,” signifying “a continuing and unprecedented level of risk.” While moving the Doomsday Clock is a symbolic warning more than any sort of hard metric, we should nevertheless heed its warning. If nuclear war did occur, the consequences would be unfathomable. One 2019 simulation from Princeton‘s Science and Global Security program estimated that given the existing nuclear capability of each nation, the outbreak of war between the US and Russia could result in as many as 90 million casualties within the first few hours.
𐡸 INTERVIEW: The U.S. government and media often describe Yemen’s Ansar Allah militant group, also known as the Houthis as an “Iran-backed” organization. As a result of the Houthis’ attacks on shipping vessels in the Red Sea, Biden is being urged to launch a direct attack against Iran, which has the potential to spiral into an unprecedented war. In an interview with Democracy Now! Helen Lackner, a scholar of Yemeni history, explains why the idea that Iran controls the Houthis’ actions is a misunderstanding: “The Houthis are not Iranian proxies … They make their own decisions.”
BIRD FACT OF THE WEEK
The “Dracula parrot” is the gothic Count of the avian world!
Properly speaking, these birds are called “Pesquet’s parrots,” or Psittrichas fulgidus—but looking at their elegant black-and-red plumage, it’s easy to see how they got the nickname “Dracula parrots.” Not to worry, though—unlike vampire bats, Dracula parrots don’t actually drink blood. Instead, the BBC’s Discover Wildlife describes the species as “a frugivore, and a very fussy one, feeding on just a few particular species of fig.” They don’t have facial feathers to avoid getting them matted with fig juice, which lends them some of their ominous appearance.
Unfortunately, the Dracula parrot’s unique color scheme has led to high demand for their feathers, especially for use in ceremonial headdresses in their native Papua New Guinea. By some estimates, there are fewer than 21,000 breeding pairs in existence today—and of that number, approximately 3,200 individual parrots are killed for their feathers every year. The Wildlife Conservation Society of Papua New Guinea is currently working to save the species, mainly by preserving the existing headdresses so new ones don’t have to be made. They also have a donation page, if you’d like to help out!
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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