Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain, the BBC today: Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said there was evidence IS was "trying to build bigger attacks" globally, and the UK was among its targets. He said IS had expanded its ambitions from smaller-scale targets to attacks on "Western lifestyle". IS is trying to get supporters who have received military training in Syria into northern Europe to stage attacks, he added. Mr Rowley said psychologists were being deployed to work with counter-terrorism units because of increasing concern that people with mental health problems were being radicalised. My comment : I find this as utter incompetence and poor analysis by the so-called Intelligence Services. I have never been in Syria and I don't have any mental health problem yet I am radicalized. 

Forget Sykes-Pikot. It's the t reaty of Sèvres That Explains the Modern Middle East " There’s no doubt that Europeans were happy to create borders that conformed to their own interests whenever they could get away with it. But the failure of Sèvres proves that that sometimes they couldn’t. When European statesmen tried to redraw the map of Anatolia, their efforts were forcefully defeated. In the Middle East, by contrast, Europeans succeeded in  imposing borders  because they had the military power to prevail over the people resisting them. Had the Syrian nationalist  Yusuf al-‘Azma , another mustachioed Ottoman army officer, replicated Ataturk’s military success and defeated the French at the  Battle of Maysalun , European plans for the Levant would have gone the way of Sèvres. Would different borders have made the Middle East more stable, or perhaps less prone to sectarian violence?   Not necessarily.   But looking at history through the lens of the Sèvres treaty sugges

How the Workers Became Muslims (a book) “In this beautifully written and brilliantly argued book, Ferruh Yilmaz shows how moral panics and political mobilizations against Muslim ‘difference’ function in western nations to obscure pervasive oppressions of race and class. Drawing deftly on advanced currents in studies of communication and cultural studies,  How the Workers Became Muslims  demonstrates the dynamism of discourse as a social force. Yilmaz reveals how the prevailing categories and classifications that are deployed in political discourse deliberately direct attention toward conflicts over cultural norms and values in order to deflect attention away from material and political conflicts over resources and rights. This book shows how anti-Muslim mobilizations are not merely manifestations of cultural racism and Islamophobia, but rather key tools for the perpetuation of class dominance and the occlusion of class conflicts.” —George Lipsitz, author of  How Racism Takes Place.

" Capital has no particular interest in full employment; to maintain discipline among its workforce it needs an industrial reserve army. One can add that capital has no interest in productivity or growth per se either, as long as low growth and lagging productivity are accompanied by rising profits as a result of a declining wage share. Given the current distribution of power under global capitalism, I see the possibility of a return to full employment only in regional niches privileged by a favorable resource endowment, including inherited productive institutions, and a good fit with the (changing) demands of global markets. But even there the advance of robotics and artificial intelligence may make for a bad surprise among those who place their bet on serving as a new middle class of the global economy, performing its relatively well-paid managerial, engineering, and design jobs while the satanic mills of the factories of the Manchester era have long relocated to Bangladesh

Ilan Pappe demolishing "the peace process" The settler colonial model is accurate because it captures the spirit of Zionism from 1882 to the present: a project to settle the land and deal with the indigenous people by a process of “elimination and dehumanization.”

Poland: "The liberal intelligenstia are responsible for this situation"

"Dedicated to the victims of local and foreign terror in Syria" Baba Amru , a piece by the Iraqi 'ud player Naseer Shamma.

A revival of competing beliefs has polarized Chinese society [the full article requires free registration] "Chinese society is apparently rediscovering, or at least re-prioritizing, its moral and ideological cravings. Over the past several years, ideological forces and divisions have moved back to the center of Chinese political and social life, and ideological tensions among Chinese elite are now arguably higher than at any point since the immediate aftermath of the 1989 protests. The image of a “ post-ideological ” China has become increasingly outdated. In China today, the signs of an ideological revival are everywhere. Most visibly, a number of icons, long thought dead, have made prominent and in some cases highly successful resurrections in national political rhetoric.  In fact, one could just as plausibly argue that the party has played a reactive role, rather than a proactive one: its ideological campaigns to revive figures such as Mao and Confucius reflect intellec

US student debt: Lessons to last a lifetime

Why some Muslim voters are betting on Donald Trump

Notes on the great Syrian exodus

18 Incredible Photographs of Time Standing Still

Refugees buying one-way tickets home after finding Germany intolerable

British Imperialism, the City of London and Brexit

The Clinton-Backed Honduran Regime Is Picking Off Indigenous Leaders See also "The War on Democracy" documentary

We’re mugs: being gassed in the Calais Jungle is an easy life in Europe

Academic Critique of Neoliberal Academia (A free registration is required to access the pdf file)

"Even among elite PMC careers, workers are seeing much of their professional autonomy removed. Forty years ago, most lawyers worked in individual practice or small firms. Now, young lawyers are more likely to work for huge corporate law firms for very long hours doing  depressing work  like “document review,” all because they have no other choice if they want to pay back their mortgage-sized student loans. For the first seven years of a career as an  investment banker , a young associate may work 90 hours a week—to support a Boomer managing director, who may only work 60. Young college professors are  much more likely  to be part-time and non-tenure track than Boomer professors were at the same points in their careers, leading to  increased militancy  among adjunct professors."  — Bryan Williams, Newrepublic

Changing the rules or changing the game?

Academic Waste

Why aren't the British middle-classes staging a revolution? An unusual article on The Telegraph on the ongoing plunder (" privatising the profits and socialising the losses).  Even Trotsky is quoted. It says something about the ruling class and what it fears: a section of the middle class sinks to the bottom. It fears cracks in the buffer.

British and Israeli assistance to U.S. Torture- and  Counter-insurgency strategies in Latin America  1963-1997

Amazon 'used neo-Nazi guards to keep immigrant workforce under control' in Germany

“Political Economy and Social Movement Theory Perspectives on the Tunisian and Egyptian Popular Uprisings of 2011”

Osama Bin Laden in a secret letter in 2009 "I  direct my talk specifically to those who support real change, especially the youth," it begins, before declaiming "the tyranny of the control of capital by large companies" that has evidently harmed the American economy."

What would you call a "liberal" state that supports a terrorist, colonial state? Canada's Liberals Condemn Palestine Solidarity Imperialists in need, imperialists indeed. Obama Signs Trade Law protecting Israeli Squatters from Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Britain:  Shunning Israeli goods to become criminal offence for public bodies and student unions "Evidently state involvement in economic decision making is acceptable for an ostensible "free market", provided of course such involvement goes some way to shoring up British relations with a colonial, criminal entity called Israel. The latter also being an important customer for British weapons exports." — Daniel Read

Robert J. Gordon y el ascenso y declive del capitalismo estadounidense

Why the rise of fascism is again the issue Good, but is Pilger part of that "left" which supports Putin or refuse to include the Russian regime in the barbaric  camp? No word against other Western powers, either.

What main limitations do you see in Sanders’ campaign? "The Sanders’ campaign, of course, is easily disparaged as one-dimensional: his foreign policy positions, for example, are disappointingly unclear and in many respects little different from Clinton’s. His specific economic reforms are also less radical than they seem. Breaking up the Big Banks, for example, is the Progressivism of La Follette and George Norris (great 1930s liberal Republicans) redux; socialists would propose instead to nationalize them as public utilities. He would tax the superwealthy at the same levels as LBJ but less than Eisenhower. Moreover, he has carefully sidestepped traditional left demands for reductions in military spending and abolition of the surveillance state. And his employment strategy (the right to a decent job was the cornerstone of FDR’s program) is timid and unoriginal: all recent Democrats have routinely and without conviction advocated job creation through infrastructure investment. 

Samo Tomšič,  The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso 2015) "Building on this argument, Tomšič argues that the unconscious is not the realm of the irrational or the private, as we so often think, a place where social reality is suspended. On the contrary, it is a terrain where the political system is most effectively reproduced, a space which is territorialized and organized by social and political reality. Tomšič then shows that the idea of homology between political and libidinal economy implies that the same discursive structures operate in the subjective and social realities. The effect of this is that we are made to feel that the structure of our desires and the structure of our society mirror each other. Consequently, the grip of capitalism intensifies on an unconscious level, making capitalism seem inevitable and unavoidable. In other words, Tomšič shows that whilst capitalism appears to be the effect or our desires, we are better off seeing our desires as the

Disney ‘sanitises poverty Britain: More than 85% of public tips on benefit 'frauds' are false Meanwhile, the big thieves in the country are not only walking freely on the street, but they are also rewarded for their ongoing robbery. 

Britain:  Asian sex abusers to be stripped of UK citizenship. White ones to be knighted