Everythinggate

Indonesia has recently become accustomed to a national spectacle: scandals playing out like a never-ending soap opera. Public outrage over sea walls, nickel mines, the cooking oil mafia, BTS corruption, and officials whose wealth grows faster than rice in the rainy season is still fresh in memory. One drama hasn’t even subsided before a new episode arrives, like a leaking train carriage spilling mud. We rage for three days, create memes for two, then forget by the sixth. The nation has become a political coffee shop: everyone complains while puffing smoke, yet still orders the same concoction from the same kitchen. Enter Belén Fernández’s latest Al Jazeera piece, a slap dipped in devil’s chilli – the sting isn’t on the cheek, but in the conscience. She describes the world entering an “Everythinggate” phase: where everything has become a scandal, rendering scandals themselves devoid of shock value. Imagine a fire alarm ringing every minute. Eventually, people don’t flee – they sleep with pillows stuffed in their ears. Belén Fernández is no ordinary writer. An Al Jazeera columnist long covering Latin American imperialism, the Middle East, and global geopolitical rot. She’s not the type to stand back photographing smoke from afar. She enters the kitchen where stoves explode and asks who poured the petrol. Her piece, titled ‘The US, Israel and the normalisation of scandal’, opens with the ‘Hondurasgate’ case – leaked audio revealing alleged US and Israeli operations in Latin America. One example involves former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, a convicted drug trafficker allegedly freed for new geopolitical projects by Washington and Tel Aviv. Scandals like this once shook the world like political earthquakes. Now? The world yawns while scrolling TikTok, occasionally pausing to like a cat-dancing video. This is the tragedy. We live in an era where political crimes no longer sneak in like chicken thieves fearing the night watchman’s gong. They arrive on red carpets, press conferences, TV spotlights, sometimes accompanied by nationalistic marching bands. Donald Trump, for instance, is depicted as a blend of president, reality TV star, midnight Viagra salesman, and a meme account admin with no brakes. Trump allegedly kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on “narco-terrorism” charges. Netanyahu then praised the operation like a football commentator witnessing a scissor kick. The world? Busy discussing Met Gala outfits. Then came Iran tensions, threats to annihilate the mullahs’ nation. Ship bombings, Cuban embargoes, and Gaza transformed into a modern death laboratory with 73,000 casualties. Al Jazeera Arabic’s investigation revealed something that sounded like a cheap apocalypse film scene – but tragically real: thousands of Palestinians in Gaza “vanished” due to US-made thermobaric bombs used by Israel. Bodies evaporate like water droplets hitting a steel furnace. Flesh turns to smoke. Cities to dust. Death no longer leaves corpses to mourn. Cities crumble like biscuits under army boots. Bodies evaporate under bomb rain, while the international community busies itself with meetings like a seminar committee missing a projector. And global irony continues like a drunken clown forcing the world to laugh. While Lebanon claims a “ceasefire”, Israel grinds the south like a rock crusher. In America, televangelist Paula White-Cain – Trump’s spiritual adviser – urges followers to donate 10% of their income to help “Israel, the victim”.