TWTW: The World This Week / Episode #60
Israel, Palestine—globally…Jim Jordan & Trumpists rising…Elections with consequences: Poland, Ecuador, NZ, Slovakia…a long arm of China’s justice...& Iran cartoonist Mana on a Nobel laureate in prison
This weekly feature for Andelman Unleashed, continues on its mission to explore how the media of other nations are reporting and commenting on the United States, and how they are viewing the rest of the world. Reporting today from Paris and beginning, not with America, but with another region torn by political and diplomatic hatreds and now violence.
How others see the Middle East
Breaking news:
Le Monde reports at noon on Sunday (CET): “the Iranian foreign minister met the United Nations envoy to the Middle East in Beirut. He warned that his country had "‘red lines,’ and that it would be forced to react in the event of an Israeli ground operation in Gaza.”
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There have been few, well in reality no, major media outlets—certainly none in any of the scores of newspapers, magazines, websites, or television outlets that Unleashed consults regularly in preparation for each week’s TWTW—that have failed to chronicle most closely, if not often tendentiously, the events of the past week in Israel and Palestine.
As the great Brazilian cartoonist Thago envisioned the puzzle landscape that the Holy Land has become amid gunfire and brimstone….
Thiago Lucas / Cartooning for Peace
As the French daily Le Monde put it: “Israel, hit in the heart.”
On that same front page of Le Monde, Cuban cartoonist Ramsés illustrated the heartbreak of the world, a wounded heart, dripping blood from the Jewish star that is the centerpiece of the Israeli flag.
Around the world, events in the Holy Land somehow spoke to people, profoundly. And the sympathy, all but universally, was on the side of Israel…at least for the moment. But within days, the sympathy began to turn as the government of Bibi Netanyahu appeared to seek what for many began to look like simple revenge. Le Monde noted that French Jews were becoming fearful any response could lead to “a rise in anti-Semitic acts.”
In Singapore, readers awoke to the news of a brutal siege….
In New Delhi, The Hindu (“India’s national newspaper since 1878) emblazoned its front page with fears of a panic triggered by Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza:
While the great Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung warned its readers on p.1: Much blood will be shed.”
Not surprisingly, the Kremlin-controlled daily Pravda (“Truth”) proclaimed gleefully, “Israel admits failure of mission to prevent Hamas attack.”
How others see America
As I wrote in my CNN column this past week, the real impression of America and its value is less for any of its democratic ideals which with the utter paralysis of at least one branch of its government, held hostage by radical ideologies but rather as the premier arsenal for the world—a position it is increasingly less capable of fulfilling as the demands multiply.
And so, I began:
To put it simply, the United States cannot readily support two major wars while preparing for the possibility of a third. That’s a hard, indeed ineluctable reality — one that is becoming increasingly and painfully evident by the hour. America’s military industrial base is already stretched by the ongoing war in Ukraine that Russia appears prepared to carry on to an indefinite future. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is now 20 months old and counting, questions were being raised about whether America was overextended as a superpower.
Now Israel is at war, a close ally that the Biden administration has pledged to support. And the scope of that conflict could grow: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has imposed a blockade in Gaza and has threatened an invasion, which could in turn draw a reaction from Iran or lead to any one of a host of other nations to get involved.
Also looming ominously is a potential challenge by China for control of Taiwan— which all too often appears to teeter on the brink of conflict.
And then my conclusion:
At some point, there may need to be a moment of reckoning. Over time, this may well mean that the nations the US has been aiding may themselves have to make unenviable choices — decisions that seem unthinkable now to them certainly and to us, but which may in the end prove inevitable.
Will Ukraine ultimately have to face the prospect of losing Crimea? Will Israel have to make a modicum of concessions to demonstrate to Palestinians there is an alternative to perpetual conflict? The illusion that the US will always come to the rescue and provide military weaponry to prop up a democracy in need may be comforting — but it may also one day clash with some hard realities.
Perhaps rather than continuing to be seen as an arsenal to the democratic world, America eventually may need to be a better, more adroit partner in helping each nation we befriend find its own path to a more lasting and sustainable peace.
Then there’s paralysis
The paralysis in America’s Congress has hardly made similar front-page news around the world, but it also has not gone unremarked. “The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, one of the leading Republican Trumpists, was named his party's candidate for the presidency of the House of Representatives on Friday in an internal vote, leaders announced of his training,” the French magazine L’Obs (formerly Le Nouvel Observateur) reported.
“The House, controlled by the Republicans unlike the Senate with a Democratic majority,” L’Obs continued, “has been almost paralyzed since the surprise dismissal on October 3 of its ‘speaker’ Kevin McCarthy, who exposed the gaping fractures of the party, one year before the presidential election of 2024.”
How others see the World
Elections everywhere….Poland, Ecuador, New Zealand in the balance
Look for a full treatment of elections that are taking place this weekend on three continents—our reports and commentary coming Monday on Andelman Unleashed when full results will be known. But suffice it to say, the stakes are enormous in Poland, where voters are going to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament and by extension a prime minister. The principal contest is between the right-wing ruling Law and Justice Party seeking an unprecedented third term, led by Jarosłav Kaczyński, and a moderate pro-European Union coalition led by Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council. Polls suggest a vote too close to call.
Then there’s Ecuador, torn by bloody drug gang-related warfare, where voters desperate for change will be choosing in a second round between Daniel Noboa and Luisa González after a front-runner, Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated early in the campaign, followed by the assassination of seven individuals charged in his shooting.
There’s also New Zealand, which made a surprising right-wing pivot on Saturday, electing former airline executive Christopher Luxon over incumbent Chris Hipkins seven months after the immensely popular prime minister Jacinda Ardern suddenly and shockingly resigned.
Finally, in Slovakia, where Andelman Unleashed chronicled two weeks ago the unexpected win by center-right Robert Fico, the victor appeared this week to have cobbled together a coalition, as feared in much of Europe, with the far-right, pro-Russia, ultra-nationalist Slovak National Party. It’s still up to President Zuzana Caputova whether, or when, to approve of the coalition and swear in the new government with Fico as prime minister.
And then there’s the long arm of Chinese ‘justice’
“A group of 100 international NGOs are mobilizing for the immediate release of a famous Chinese lawyer, Lu Siwei, a human rights specialist who was arrested in Laos and transported to China,” RFI (Radio France International) reported. Siwei was a lawyer appointed by families of a Hong Kong activist group. He was traveling by train across Laos to Thailand where planned to join family in the United States.
But Amnesty International reported “he is now being held at a detention facility in Sichuan, southwestern China…. a heartbreaking outcome for his family, whom he had attempted to join in the United States. Now, instead of being with his wife and young daughter, he is at grave risk of torture and ill-treatment.” His forcible repatriation, Amnesty continued was “in flagrant violation of [Laos’] obligations under international law.”
Finally, there’s Mana ….
The courageous Iranian cartoonist Mana has captured perfectly and simply the terrifying choice Narges Mohammadi has made, as the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee noted in presenting her with the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize:
For her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes….and [she] is still in prison.
Our cartoonist, Mana Neyestani, born in Tehran, Iran in 1973, trained as an architect in Tehran University, began his career in 1990 as a cartoonist and illustrator for many cultural, political, literary, and economic magazines. With the rise of Iranian reformist newspapers in 1999, he became an editorial cartoonist. In 2006, he published a children’s cartoon in a weekly magazine called Iran Jome.
The image showed a 10-year-old boy named Soheil trying to have a conversation with a cockroach in a nonsensical cockroach language. The insect didn’t understand the boy and responded, “Namana?” — which means, “What?” It landed Neyestani in the same prison as Narges Mohammadi—Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, the touchstone of repression and torture. Released after three months, Mana was forced into exile. He now lives in Paris, as a member of ICORN (the International Cities of Refuge Network) and a member of the inestimable Cartooning for Peace collective.
Here's how Mana sees himself:
And then there's SubStack….
For all of my followers who are contemplating entering the magical world of SubStack themselves, or are simply interested in pulling back the curtain on our creative energies, do watch my zoom presentation for the Society of Professional Journalists including a PowerPoint slideshow. Simply click here….