Global

Zakaria Zubeidi is one of six Palestinian prisoners who, on September 6, tunneled their way out of Gilboa, a notorious, high-security Israeli prison. Zubeidi was recaptured a few days later. The large bruises on Zubeidi’s face told a harrowing story, that of a daring escape and of a violent arrest. However, the story does not begin, nor end, there. 

Scenes of thousands of Afghans flooding the Kabul International Airport to flee the country as Taliban fighters were quickly consolidating their control over the capital, raised many questions, leading amongst them: who are these people and why are they running away? 

In the US and other Western media, answers were readily available: they were mostly ‘translators’, Afghans who ‘collaborated’ with the US and other NATO countries; ‘activists’ who were escaping from the brutality awaiting them once the Americans and their allies left the country, and so on.

Suddenly there’s major concern across the country — from the mainstream media to every last rock-ribbed Republican — for the rights of Afghan women and girls to be able to work, to go to school.

Oh my God, we’ve given Afghanistan back to the Taliban! Even George W. Bush found his way back into the news cycle: “I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad and sad.”

America, America, the global do-gooder, bringer of civilized values to the Middle East. This is why we’ve hemorrhaged trillions of dollars over the past two decades engaging evil itself. This is why hundreds of thousands of people had to die, millions had to be displaced. We were defending the rights of . . . people we could care less about.

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has motivated some critics of the standard narrative to explore alternative explanations for what took place on that fatal day. To be sure, there has been considerable focus through the years on exactly what happened, analyzing the technical aspects of what made the twin towers and nearby Building 7, which is where the CIA Station was located, fall while also speculating over what actually occurred at the Pentagon and at Shanksville Pennsylvania.

​You don’t have to be a horror fan to enjoy Thomas Hamilton’s documentary Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster (I’m not and I did). The 90-minute nonfiction biopic has all of the conventional hallmarks of a well-made movie history doc. Of course, there are copious clips ranging from Karloff’s classics, including in the role the British actor was best known for, as Frankenstein’s monster in various versions of the film franchise adapting the character from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s chilling 1818 novel, starting in 1931. There are scenes from Karloff’s other famous films, including 1932’s The Mummy, The Old Dark House and The Mask of Fu Manchu, plus glimpses from more obscure flicks, including from his silent screen days. His subsequent many TV outings – wherein he often good-naturedly mocked his monstrous persona – are also covered.

This summer the Fountain Theatre has been presenting – as it has annually done since 2003 – Forever Flamenco on its Outdoor Stage. In July, August and ending Sept. 24-26, the three-night weekend events have offered lucky Angelenos a rare taste of this unique Andalusian art form. The dance, music and singing are derived from its 18th century “originators, the gypsies… [who] sang songs of oppression, lament, and bitter romance, a kind of blues that by the 19th century began to catch on among all the other downtrodden inhabitants of Andalucia,” according to Cadogan Guides’ Southern Spain, Andalucia & Gibraltar by Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls. (NOTE: The term “gypsy” is now regarded as pejorative and the word “Roma” is considered to be culturally sensitive.)

The guidebook authors add that “the half-tonal notes and lyrics of futility of the cante jondo, or deep song, the purest flamenco seem to go straight back to the Arab troubadours [not to be confused with those other Troubies currently rocking that other open-air theater at Malibu in Lizastrata at the Getty Villa] of al-Andalus.”

25 years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists “behind an iron wall” of defense.

Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively. However, future Zionist leaders, who embraced Jabotinsky’s teachings, eventually turned the principle of the iron wall into a tangible reality. Consequently, Israel and Palestine are now disfigured with endless barricades of walls, made of concrete and iron, which zigzag in and around a land that was meant to represent inclusion, spiritual harmony and co-existence. 

A recent New York Times op-ed was perhaps the strangest, most awkward and tentative defense of the military-industrial complex — excuse me, the experiment in democracy called America — I’ve ever encountered, and begs to be addressed.

The writer, Andrew Exum, was an Army Ranger who had deployments in the early 2000s to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and a decade later served for several years as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.

Critics of the foreign and national security policies of the Joe Biden regime were quick to note that the American soldiers being pulled out of Afghanistan were no doubt a resource that will be committed to a new adventure somewhere else. There was considerable speculation that the new model army, fully vaccinated, glorious in all its gender and racial diversity and purged of extremists in the ranks, might be destined to put down potentially rebellious supremacists in unenlightened parts of the United States. But even given an increasingly totalitarian White House, that civil war type option must have seemed a bridge too far for an administration plagued by plummeting approval ratings, so the old hands in Washington apparently turned to what has always been a winner: pick a suitable foreign enemy and stick it to him.