Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A long read Inside Syria's Death Machine See also Syria:  The Hunger Wars

A young boy studying his lessons sitting on a mausoleum in Cairo's city of the dead where he live with his family and thousands of poor families, Egypt. طفل يذاكر دروسه جالساً على ضريح احد الموتى في مقابر البساتين بالقاهرة حيث يعيش مع اسرته و الالاف من الأسر الفقيرة, مصر Photo by mostafa_bassim #egypt   #everydayegypt

07 January 2015 - 07 January 2016 Charlie Hebdo is Sadism, not Satire Shlomo Sand: 'I am not Charlie' See also The Red Flag and the Tricolore Le Rouge et le Tricolore

To understand the sheer scale of the Syrian refugee situation, here's a picture of a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.

"To Cut Diplomatic Ties, Press 9"

"War  is a “terrible” thing? Yes. But it is a terribly  profitable  thing." — Lenin (April 1915) Sale of U.S. Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States

A short-term solution, I should say. How to Deal with the Sexual Assaults in Cologn and Hamburg

Old Arabic Texts Describe Dirty Vikings

Embracing Crisis in the Gulf (A background article) "To the extent that the United States endorses the status quo, it is complicit not only in the Gulf regimes’ efforts to quash citizen protest, but also in the redesign of Gulf security architecture by which crisis becomes the norm." See also The New Saudi Borgias

The London Clearances Commodifying Working Class Culture

Modern-Day Slavery Vulnerable Migrants in the Gulf The Long and Dangerous Road to Slavery China's Missing Children Brazil's Slaves Face Death Threats and Debt Trapped and Trafficked in the UK

عزف على العود

Who Said Gaddafi Had to Go? An in-depth analysis of what happened then.  See also the comments and the reply.

" Using both the published and unpublished  London Notebooks , Pradella, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London, reconstructs Marx’s critique of globalization to show the remarkably consistent development of his political and economic views. Pradella also problematizes a widespread view, shared most notably by David Harvey and Samir Amin, that Marx’s  Capital  only deals with self-enclosed national economies, leaving it unable to analyze the uneven development of capitalism and prone to “Eurocentrism” (2–3). She claims that, on the contrary, the laws of capitalist development elaborated by Marx systematically include an analysis of imperialism and colonialism. Pradella not only helps contextualize Marx’s critique of political economy in the discursive constellations of his time, but also prepares her own theoretical basis for a critique of globalized capitalism today."

Even a liberal says it: Israeli Policy is Apartheid See also The Two Apartheids

Sicarii, the Jews Who Killed the Occupiers Using Knives 

Injustice for All? We can hate the Oregon gunmen’s worldview without wishing state violence on them.

Executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Yes, both Iran and the Saudi Kingdom are barbaric and we know that. The difference, however, between their barbarism and the barbarism of the US, the British, the French, etc. is that Western modern babarism is carried out "democratically": there are meetings, debates and voting before deciding on the actions (invasions, occupations, air-strikes...), which, by the way, directly and indirectly, kill, maim, displace, etc far more people. One figure comes to mind: half a million Iraqi children killed by sanctions .  When they do it, it is barbarism and terrorism. When we do it, it is protecting "our way of life" because they are against freedom" and "democracy". Some people are exempt from being called barbaric and terrorists because they are our friends, they buy weapons from us, we helped them establish their Kingdom, they put money in our banks, they keep pumping enough oil which help us maintain "our

My comment: A very good dissection by some "progressive" liberals ends with remedies which have been already proven pernicious. We can take one example of the remedies proposed: the micro-projects and the business establishment that "must undertake a conversation about its own responsibilities, in such fields as philanthropy, social impact entrepreneurship, job creation, and private equity for small and medium-sized enterprises..."  The West and the Arab World, Between Ennui and Ecstasy

It has been 5 years since the start of the Tunisian uprising.  What Happened to "the Arab Spring"? See also Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East and A Brief History of ISIS

" More than is often realized, the Civil War was fought not over the morality of slavery or the abstract sanctity of the American Union, but over what kind of economy the nation should have. It is difficult to grasp the degree to which the United States, on the eve of the Civil War, had truly evolved into what Lincoln called, quoting scripture, a “house divided”: virtually two separate nations based on very different economic structures. More than anything else, the secession crisis and the Civil War became a clash over expanding the economic and social system of either section. The question became: which economy and society would define the future of America as it migrated westward, that of the North or that of the South?" We Have Lincoln Wrong

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis

Iraq, Libya and Syria: A Summary America, America (a poem)

Syria:  The Hunger Wars

The Death of Universities (in Britain) “I think he’s a crypto-fascist,” says Moorcock, laughing. “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there. We go there  and back , to where we started. There’s no escape, nothing will ever change and nobody will ever break out of this well-­ordered world.” How does he feel about the triumph of Tolkienism and, subsequently, the political sword-and-sorcery epic  Game of Thrones , in making fantasy arguably bigger than it has ever been?" Michael Moorcock: “I think Tolkien was a crypto-fascist”

"The liberal peace model rewards violence."  Syria: An Inverview with Samer Abboud Read also Why the Syrian Army Remains Loyal

Karen Armstrong: " As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion . . . Experts in political violence or terrorism insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the 20th century on to the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness." "A religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence that compels people to act in a uniform way,” Armstrong writes. “It is a template that can be modified and altere

A Forgotten Genocide The Places in Between

An Egyptian woman washes clothes next to a mausoleums in Cairo's city of the dead where she lives with her family. Photo by @mostafa_bassim  Via Everyday Egypt

Uneven and Combined

A soft liberal take by the Guardian Middle East Still Rocking from First World War Pacts Made 100 Years Ago

I Hate New Year's Day Girouettes françaises