What Happened Today: August 2, 2022
U.S. drone strike kills al-Qaeda leader; U.S. resident and journalist faces Iranian execution; Happy birthday, Jerry
The Big Story
Speaking from the White House on Monday, President Biden announced that the 71-year-old leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist movement, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed in a drone strike in the house where he was staying in the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday. Serving as a senior “mastermind behind the attacks against Americans” for decades, said Biden, Zawahiri was an architect in a 2000 terror attack that killed 17 U.S. military members in Yemen, as well as in the September 11, 2001, attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 victims. Following the killing of Osama Bin Laden by a U.S. special operations team in 2011, Zawahiri took over leadership of al-Qaeda. While the Biden administration earned praise from both political parties for the successful targeting of the jihadist commander, Zawahiri’s location in the heart of Kabul renewed questions about how permissive Afghanistan had become of terrorist organizations since the chaotic withdrawal of American troops in 2021 ended with the Taliban back in power.
Though the Taliban had previously agreed to police Afghanistan to ensure it would not become a breeding ground for terrorist activity following the withdrawal of American forces, Zawahiri’s presence with his immediate family in a residence in downtown Kabul supports recent United Nations reports that the Taliban had maintained close ties with the terror-movement leadership. President Biden, for his part, said the strike validated the move to take U.S. forces out of the country while using “over the horizon” drone attacks to manage its counterterrorism operation in Afghanistan. Following the strike, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said in a statement that the drone strike violated “international principles.” According to a Biden administration official speaking to reporters on background before the president’s address on Monday, several senior Taliban officials were “aware of Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul.”
In the Back Pages: Motherhood as Martyrdom
The Rest
→ Reported by Mariam Memarsadeghi in today’s edition of Tablet, “a longtime resident of California and dissident journalist, Jamshid (Jimmy) Sharmahd, may be executed for a crime the regime itself has admitted he did not commit.” For some years, Sharmahd had been an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime’s myriad human rights violations, and he was captured in July 2000 by Iranian agents while on layover in Dubai. He’s spent more than 730 days in solitary confinement while enduring what his family suspects to be torture, as his health had rapidly deteriorated in between his appearances at seven show trial hearings. “According to his daughter Gazelle Sharmahd, the execution is imminent,” Memarsadeghi writes, but the Biden administration has applied little pressure to free Sharmahd, or other hostages, because of its desire to push Iran to resume the stalled Iran nuclear agreement.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/iran-murder-american-journalist
→ With the first courtroom showdown looming between Twitter and Elon Musk, Twitter fired off a bevy of subpoenas on Tuesday, going after not only investment and equity firms involved in financing Musk’s offer but also the investors Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, as well as others in Musk’s personal orbit. The five-day trial is set now for Oct. 17 in the Wilmington Chancery Court in Delaware and promises to be a blockbuster affair, with personal communications and private documents obtained by Twitter likely to be used as key evidence.
→ Tweet of the Day:
This side-by-side analysis of the COVID-19 policies for school children in Norway versus the United States shows one easily digestible guide alongside Illinois’ incomprehensible chart, which is packed with more text than a pillbox. However, buried within all that impossible-to-read text from Illinois is one key bit of information: Children who test positive for COVID-19 should “isolate for at least 5 calendar days” before returning to school. The tweet’s author, an infectious diseases scientist with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, puts the policy differences plainly: “Norway: stay home when sick. US: PANIC AND DO ALL THE INEFFECTIVE THINGS WE'VE BEEN DOING FOR 2 YEARS!!!” Read the thread below:
→ At 10 p.m. this past Monday evening, New York City Mayor Eric Adams unleashed the full and awesome power of the city’s 2,000 traffic cameras, which will now be operating 24/7. In accordance with state law, the cameras had only been running from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays, even though 31% of accidents happened during the hours when the cameras were off. “The city that never sleeps deserves a camera system that won’t take a nap,” Adams said as he launched the new program. The change, which was passed by the state’s legislature in June, is part of Adams’ push to tame New York City’s unruly roads, as 2022 is shaping up to be a record-breaking year for traffic deaths, up 20% this year to date compared to 2019, the last pre-pandemic year and therefore a period with comparable traffic patterns.
→ Video of the Day:
Incredible drone footage of an erupting Icelandic volcano, captured by Bjorn Steinbekk, is rightfully doing the rounds online. See it below:
→ An ongoing congressional investigation into the federal prison system has found damning evidence of neglect, corruption, abuse, and criminal behavior across the Federal Bureau of Prisons, from local guards in rural jails up to “well-informed and willfully inactive leaders” in D.C., as The Intercept put it. Though the failures are national, the bipartisan subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has been focusing its attention on one facility in Georgia—the state of the subcommittee chair, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA)—and arguing that the Atlanta prison’s health issues, smuggling rings, violence, and suicides typify an American crisis. “The investigation has revealed that gross misconduct persisted at this prison for at least nine years, and that much of the damning information revealing misconduct, abuse, and corruption was known to [Bureau of Prisons] and accessible to BOP leadership during that period,” Ossoff said during a July hearing.
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2022/07/26/atlanta-prison-suicide-senate-investigation/
→ José Rubén Zamora, an award-winning Guatemalan journalist and the president of El Periódico, a daily newspaper he founded in 1996, was arrested over the weekend—a worrisome sign that Guatemala’s crackdown on the press is worsening. Zamora was arrested in his home, and the offices of El Periódico were raided by government officials. He and his newspaper have insisted on covering the corruption and graft surrounding the country’s president and administration—corruption that recently led the U.S. State Department to level sanctions against Guatemala’s attorney general, María Consuelo Porras. “During her tenure, Porras repeatedly obstructed and undermined anti-corruption investigations in Guatemala to protect her political allies and gain undue political favor,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in May.
→ Map of the Day:
Maps of Attica Correctional Facility are being cut out of Blood in the Water, the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the 1971 Attica uprising written by Heather Ann Thompson. The map removal comes after the State of New York reversed its ban of the award-winning book last week, which had been barred from the state’s 48 prisons until Thompson sued to have that ban lifted on First Amendment grounds. Now inmates can order the book, but their copies will have the map of the prison cut out for “security reasons.” The Attica prison revolt, a four-day standoff between inmates and law enforcement officials, led to the deaths of 43 people and was the deadliest prison riot in U.S. history.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/nyregion/attica-book-ban-blood-in-the-water.html
→ The cottage industry that exists to preserve and memorialize the world’s atrocities in archives and museums—a vital and discomfiting institution of modernity—is now expanding to include the United States’ school shootings. The city of Littleton, Colorado, is looking to hire an archivist “to work on creating an archive on a specific collection of documents related to the Columbine High School massacre.” The job would require an experienced archivist to sort through the roughly 50 linear feet of documents connected to the 1999 school shooting, which claimed the lives of 15 people, including the two shooters, and in many ways inaugurated our current era of mass school shootings. The Columbine massacre was the second-worst mass shooting of the entire 20th century; it would not rank in the top 10 worst shootings of the 21st.
→ Jerry Garcia would have turned 80 yesterday. His octogenarian milestone brought to the surface of the internet this remembrance of Garcia from Bob Dylan, who was close to the Grateful Dead leader. Dylan was the original writer on several songs that Garcia performed with the Dead and his own band (like this 1978 Jerry Garcia Band rendition of “Simple Twist of Fate”).
There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great: much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There are a lot of spaces and advances between the Carter family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.
Hear More:
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Why Am I Banned in Ukraine? So asks and answers geostrategist Edward Luttwak, who explains why he supports plebiscites in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/banned-ukraine-edward-luttwak-donetsk-luhansk
The First Glimmer of Healing Amy Freeman writes how a graveside ritual helped her work through her grief over her father’s death.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/glimmer-of-healing-burial-grief
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Motherhood as Martyrdom
A generation of female Prufrocks fret whether they dare disturb the universe by eating a peach
Today’s Back Pages comes from Tablet’s religion correspondent Maggie Phillips.
There is an archetype in ancient myth of couples working together to defeat a monster. Ariadne helps Theseus through the Labyrinth on his quest to dispatch the Minotaur. The princess gives Saint George her belt to tie up the dragon. In yet another dragon myth, Medea helps Jason enchant the Colchian dragon in order to secure the Golden Fleece. Of course, that tale ends with a resentful Medea killing the children she’s had by Jason after he decides it’s more politically advantageous to marry someone else. Ariadne eventually found herself left behind as well, once Theseus realized he had other places to go and things to do. These stories suggest that however powerful their initial bond, couples cannot survive for long without some larger mission to provide them with a unity of purpose.
What, then, are we to make of the modern archetype of coupledom embedded in the fable of the peach that set Twitter abuzz over the weekend? It began with a comic posted by the Instagram account @momlife_comics that depicts generic man and woman figures each staring at a single peach beneath the caption “One of the [many] differences between me & my husband.” On the left, the mother thinks that she will save the last peach for her children, while on the right the father decides to use the peach in his daily smoothie. While the scenario was not uncommon for the kind of content posted by the momlife_comics account, which typically features stylized, faceless cartoons detailing the mundane tribulations of modern upper-middle-class parenting, something about it touched a nerve.
The peach discourse has its detractors, including fellow Scroll contributor Katherine Dee, who tweeted yesterday, “I know it’s fun to pontificate about how broken the Millennial Mommy is, but I don’t think it’s that deep.” But I, for one, come neither to bury nor to praise @momlife_comics, or its creator, Mary Catherine Starr. As a Millennial Mommy myself, I’m more interested in the audience she attracts.
While the Twitter cognoscenti were busy analyzing the comic’s gender dynamics according to the latest ideological fashions, on Instagram, among the account’s audience, the reception was quite different. The Instagram comments on the peach comic offer variations of “Haha relatable!”; “The fact that he uses it for a special treat irks me the most”; “Sometimes it’s like you’re secretly living my very same life”; and “Are you secretly married to my husband?”
“[momlife, marriage, + overwhelm],” reads Starr’s Instagram bio. Just underneath it appears a collection of photos entitled “Eat the Peach.” After the original comic resonated, Starr asked her followers to send her evidence of small indulgences they’ve allowed themselves, and they obliged. “Eat the Peach” is a slideshow of moms who have sent her photos of the little treats they’ve snuck for themselves: “I cut one up FOR MYSELF,” one woman says of a bowl of nectarine slices. “I drank the juice!” “Eating the berries today!” “Ate some of the chocolate reserved for the boys.”
Each submission is a mild yawp in defiance of … what, it’s not clear. What external force, exactly, is turning these women into a generation of female Prufrocks who fret whether they dare disturb the universe by eating a peach?
In most cases, these submissions offer a performative martyrdom that is common on Mom Instagram. There’s no real joy or higher purpose to parenting in the content these accounts post, at least beyond vague notions of “raising good humans,” teaching children to “be kind,” or sometimes just “survive.” Collectively they depict a kind of family life as a series of rote tasks carried out by downtrodden zombies: parents going through the motions, reverting to atavistic cultural gender roles like the aloof slob and put-upon, self-sacrificing housewife.
Read the rest here.