Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 It is a nightmare that Americans easily sleep through Related Birth defects and the toxic legacy of the war on Iraq

 The apparent hoax at the centre of New York Times ‘Caliphate Podcast’

 A variant of capitalism “140 companies failed to pay £6.7m to more than 95,000 workers”

  A Syrian film and TV series director and script writer passed away on 29 December 2020

 A new variant of life “Quarantine? What quarantine? We are British!” Brits in Switzerland Brits in Australia

The author here does not consider the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Ennahda in Tunisia, for instance, part of the counter-revolution–socially and economically. He does not mention how and why they got support from the major imperialist powers, either. It is also a liberal journalistic piece that does not mention the class character of the Islamist parties even once. The end of political Islam as we know it

 

An excellent piece by Bourdieu. In English, French and Spanish  Manufacturing public debate

The words are spoken by Le Carré’s fondly loved character George Smiley. “ The privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman , if you will allow me – is the greatest dissembler on Earth,” he says. “Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.” –John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

A very interesting argument here. What can science learn from religion?

How the EU is complicit in Egypt’s brutal regime

15 janvier 1939-26 décembre 2020 Militant et écrivain tunisien

 In Tataouine

 Five-day walkout at British Gas over fire and rehire plans

A revolt that began a year ago

 In a summary by Claudia Mende , I have found only this worth quoting: “Following initial euphoria for an Arab world on the brink of a new era, people in the West have largely lost interest.   Outmoded stereotypical views of the Arab world have re-emerged. Too religious, too backward, the region and its people are different after all – just a few widely-held western opinions. The West continues to back stability   But when issuing judgements such as these, the West should critically scrutinise its own role in the Middle East. After all, while Europe and the U.S. may have always paid lip service to democratic values and human rights, some of their policies run directly contrary to these. Arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates prop up repressive regimes and stoke conflicts. In the name of democracy, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and created a fiasco. When current military leader of Egypt Sisi violently ousted the democratically

Some statements in this article are arguable, but there is an interesting analysis of the situation in the country. 30 years to the day since Nicolae and Elena Ceaucesçu were executed. “Capitalist restoration, which followed the December 1989 uprising, led to the large scale collapse of industry and agriculture, forcing millions to emigrate. The majority of those who have remained are confronted with poverty, low wages, job insecurity, precarious public services and a political caste that is solely in the service of capitalist elites.” Capitalist restoration in Romania and the alternative A better analysis cab be found here Romania Redivivus

 الاستقلال يعني السلطة والكهرباء

  Michael Roberts , 25 December 2020:

  Still mostly valid since it was written in March 2020. The virus, capitalism and the long depression

 Fashion retailer Boohoo selling clothes made by Pakistani workers ‘who earned 29p per hour’

Targeting minorities, again. The European Court of Justice bans kosher and halal slaughter

“ One might argue that, for us as historians, the principal challenge is to imagine the region outside of the commonplace assumptions about modern Middle Eastern societies, namely that they are best defined by a series of  absences or negations —the lack of “authentic” nation-states, capitalism, democracy, secularism, human rights, and so forth. Against the hegemony of these Orientalist narratives, we can encourage students to understand history as a far more complex process of contingency and contradiction, for example, by grasping the contemporaneity of modernity and tradition. This style of thinking encourages students to move away from conceiving of history in terms of simple oppositions, such as capitalism  or  socialism, democracy  or  despotism, religion  or  secularism, and instead grasp historical processes in the elegance of their complexity. History emerges, then, as the unstable play of forces, rather than the unfolding of teleological logics. More concretely, this means vi

“ The recent surge cannot be blamed on a mutant virus alone; in fact, government mismanagement of the pandemic meant that many more people became infected, creating the conditions for mutations to occur.” A string of failures helped Covid-19 to mutate

“ At an almost planetary scale, and for some years now – certainly ever since what was called ‘the Arab Spring’ – we are in a world awash with struggles, or, more precisely, with mass mobilisations and assemblies. I propose that the general conjuncture is marked, subjectively, by what I would term ‘movementism’, namely the widely shared conviction that significant popular assemblies will undoubtedly achieve a change in the situation. We see this from Hong Kong to Algiers, Iran to France, Egypt to California, Mali to Brazil, India to Poland, as well as in many other places and countries. One may revolt against the actions of the Chinese government in Hong Kong, against the power grab by military cliques in Algiers, against the stranglehold of the religious hierarchy in Iran, against personal despotism in Egypt, against the manoeuvres of nationalist and racial reaction in California, against the actions of the French Army in Mali, against neofascism in Brazil, against the persecution of

 

 1917: Black soldiers executed for Houston riots

 حفريات في جسد عربي لمختار اللغماني

من هوامش على دفتر النكسة   نريد جيلاً غاضباً..   نريد جيلاً يفلح الآفاق  وينكش التاريخ من جذوره..  وينكش الفكر من الأعماق  نريد جيلاً قادماً..  مختلف الملامح..  لا يغفر الأخطاء.. لا يسامح..  لا ينحني..  لا يعرف النفاق..  نريد جيلاً..  رائداً..  عملاق..  نزار قباني، 1967

 “We refuse to recognise the hostile verdict against Leyla Güven”

“ The left is White. It is Eurocentric. It believes itself to be materialist but it is actually idealist. For example, it is anticlerical, and this is understandable in the historical context of a powerful church at the heart of the state. But, as a materialist, you understand that neither Islam nor Muslims dominate the French state. Muslims are the poorest section of the working class. These two elements should have made the left the main allies of Muslims. Without discussion. But there was discussion, on the backs of the poorest classes. The left did not see the wretched of the earth, they saw the veil. Again this Eurocentrism. The White experience prevailed over everything. Liberation would be the way White people experience it. The experience of White women would be the experience of humanity. But the veil affair showed that this particular experience of gender relations is not the experience of everyone. When our parents came here, they were the poor relations of class struggle. T

 Why are Russians paying for bombing schools in Syria

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;  I have spread my dreams under your feet;  Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. —William Butler Yeats, Irish poet

المغرب وإسرائيل ... تآمر مشترك

There is little historical evidence to trust that any French leader would have done things differently.  The rights of global south populations cannot possibly match those bestowed upon the civilised masses in Europe, so why undermine the potential for profit for those who are so disposable? Or perhaps his universalism is genuine - which would explain his own commitment to violent repression of political movements and the repeated assaults  on civil liberties in France.  The French state’s relationship to "rights" is always connected to its own interests, as is the “terrorism” it claims to fight . Sisi and the hypocrisy of France’s so-called defence of human rights

 Can Arabic language ‘translate’ into the modern world?

 Record number of journalists jailed worldwide

 A Forward to Selected Writing of Mahdi Amel

I telephoned hope yesterday I asked him: can you  extract for us odor  From onion and haddock?  He said : Sure! I said : and can you  Ignite with water a fire?  He said : sure! I said: is it possible to distill form Colocynth the honey? He said : sure!  I said : and is it possible  to put earth  in Saturn's pocket ? He said : yes… sure! everything is possible I said : then our Arabs [Arab leaders] will feel ashamed someday  He said : not in a million years  will ever happen what you say. — the Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar

While they are talking about how life has got worse since the Arab uprisings,  one of the richest countries in the world is having Unicef feed its hungry children .

 Very good! Biden replaces Trump: A malignant ‘normalcy’ is restored

It must be clearly established ... that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population.     —Che Guevara, from a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, 11 December 1964

 The best five books recommended by Jonathan Wolff

New rural ghettos

By Sameer Khalili, a Syrian from Homs living in the Netherlands. December 2020

 Warning: there are graphic expressions in this article US foreign policy has always relied on favourite dictators

 Do not reconcile Related I am with terrorism

Macron, unlike his American or British counterparts, is trying to be consistent. Since he violates “human rights” in France itself, why should he condition co-operation in defence and economic matters on human rights situation in Egypt? How the ruling class and imperialist backers ensure the survival of an authoritarian regime

War profit: Danish pension funds financing war in Yemen

 From Ishmahil Blagrove diary: Cuba December 2020 Related Internet fuels rate protests

  The vaccine pioneer the world forgot

 I think this is worth watching. Ethos, a Turkish TV series

 UK government and military accused of cover up

 The states supplying the guns that kill Mexican journalists

 Human-made materials now outweigh Earth’s entire biomass

 Young Chinese brush up on ‘Das Kapital”

 The division over Brexit. A liberal left view. A civil war with British capitalism Related UK government and military accused of war crimes cover up

 Deep and comprehensive dependency

 A historical victory for coal miners

 1960’s covert activities in Latin America

" Men  make  their  own history, but they do  not  make it as they please; they do  not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from  the  past." Almost the complete opposite of fascism

 International Criminal Court finds war crimes but it will not take action

“The question of whose stories we tell, whose culture we privilege, and which forms of knowledge we immortalise into formal learning are inevitably influenced by our Western colonial heritage” says Lucy Rycroft-Smith, editor and developer at  Cambridge Mathematics . How modern mathematics emerged from a lost Islamic library

 A very engaging review of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism

 Football: Debunking the ‘opium of the people’

A book review   Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World

 Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa

 “Collateral damage” Civilians killed in air strikes soars by 300%

 Why the Australian state supports Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians

 A general strike in context

  The top 1% of households own 43% of global wealth, 10% owns 81%, while the bottom 50% have just 1%

 A new Gramsci mural

 Students plan the largest rent strike in 40 years

 How has it embraced ethnic nationalism?

  The Popular Revolutionary Alternative

  Marx’s debt to people of African descent Related The Africana paradigm in Capital

“ From the outside, it must seem strange to watch the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world choose its path by means of moral scolding and sanctimonious posturing, both positions washed in on millions of litres of high-octane American tears. This must be particularly annoying when you are also aware that whatever this country chooses to do will have enormous consequences for your nation and your life, and that your tears will count for nothing in our majestic deliberations. I feel your pain. Really, I do. I weep.” Make them cry

  Free State of Jones

You should be able to access this article when you type  “Universities challenged FT” on google search rather than through the FT website. Universities Challenged

A story that reminds me how I was brave under a police state, how I confronted it, got tortured, etc and became a coward in “liberal democracy.” “My mother taught me we are far from the rational creatures we think we are, and that a loaf of bread will bring two people closer than all the world's philosophies combined. She taught that community is not an intellectual construct, but a performative one. The refusal to condemn is not simply to refuse the ‘good Muslim’ label - it is a resistance of our yearning to be seen by Power. To refuse to condemn, then, is to face the fear of mobilising on our own terms. There is no bravery without cowardice, no strength without vulnerability, no wisdom without ignorance. Insofar as the two drives of the world stand at their strongest - that is, capitalism and nationalism - our intentions will always waver between our desire to please God and Power. Why I no longer play ‘the good Muslim’

This was written in 1909: We must  know how  to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses  in a materialist way . The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion. Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressist, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains th

 Washington’s Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations

 Dispossession and imperialism repackaged as ‘feeding the world’

  Key prosecution witness is part of academic cluster which has received millions of pounds from UK and US militaries

A few years ago I was told not to talk politics in class. I left my job. In my current job I am very cautious. I had lived under a police state, and in a “free market democracy” you don’t fear the state, but you fear loosing your job. You may be even hated by others for expressing your non-conformist views. “Social activism could cost you valuable career currency”

 End the denial

 The Syrian Chambers of Commerce in 2020: The Rise of a New Business Elite

 “Selective justice”

  Americans have decided on who is the most influential Arab Someone who reflects “Western values and culture” and created in the bourgeois image.

I strongly appeal to the “International law” and “the international community” to do something about this. I always believed in your “values” and “the upholding of the peace.” I always agreed with the Western states definition of terrorism. When we and our allies do it is either an ‘accident’ or ‘fighting for freedom’. When they do it, it’s ‘terrorism’.   Top Iranian scientist assassinated  Related Five scientists in 10 years

A long tradition of complicity in crime This article is available in four languages An indispensable’ partner in the  EU ’s strategy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean 

 Some laughter.

“This is the people’s vaccine,”  said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program.  “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity .” Calling the shots

  Why the ‘Arab Spring’ failed

 

 “ I think we can get too distracted by minor doctrinal disputes between self-proclaimed centrists and right-wingers and miss the fact that the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing. It tends to take reactionary and anti-left positions and has done so for a long time. The names can change. People can switch institutional affiliations. But the defense of the establishment and the US-led liberal order and other Cold War verities such as classical liberalism, Western values, the Enlightenment, and Zionism remains their primary task. This is the legacy of the lucrative conformism noted by Alfred Kazin and Czeslaw Milosz.” The Liberal Establishment is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’

 Barack Obama’s Kill Lists Related

“When we murder, it is a ‘tragic accident’. When they murder, it is cause to light the Eiffel Tower in solemn remembrance and to commemorate the dead on Twitter with hashtags expressing human solidarity.  “Guilty of state-sponsored terrorism”

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

After 19 years the most powerful military power in the world and history, with the biggest annual GDP and powerful wealthy allies, has failed to defeat the Taliban, stabilise the country and ‘liberate women’. And it is leaving behind a weak government. 26,000 Afghan children killed or maimed since 2005

 Records surge in racist violence

The usual privatise the profits, socialise the losses and costs Squeeze on public sector salaries

“This weekend, the  G20 leaders’ summit takes place  – not physically of course, but by video link.  Proudly hosted by Saudi Arabia, that bastion of democracy and civil rights, the G20 leaders are focusing on the impact on the world economy from the COVID-19 pandemic.” G20: the debt solution

  Why Trump gained support among minorities

 Bloody Sunday 1920

“ Production of chlordecone was stopped in the United States - where it was marketed as Kepone - as far back as 1975, after workers at a factory producing it in Virginia complained of uncontrollable shaking, blurred vision and sexual problems. In 1979, the World Health Organization classed the pesticide as potentially carcinogenic.   But in 1981 the French authorities authorised chlordecone for use in banana plantations in the French West Indies - and even though it was finally banned in 1990, growers lobbied for - and got - permission to carry on using stocks until 1993. It was only in 2018 - after more than 10 years of campaigning by French Caribbean politicians - that President Emmanuel Macron accepted the state's responsibility for what he called ‘an environmental scandal’. Martinique is an integral part of France, but one of the island's MPs, Serge Letchimy, says it would never have taken the state so many years to react if there had been pollution on the same scale in Bri

Ishmahil Blagrove, 21 November 2020: It’s interesting how some people nowadays avoid using ‘the ruling class’ and opt for ‘the establishment’.          

 The repression of the yellow vests

 The Eye of Providence

 

The Syrian Revolution Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death

  Watch for this story and compare how much coverage it will have compared to the coverage of the four people recently killed in France. “And it wasn't just that these alleged executions took place, it was the manner of impunity by which they happened. In fact, according to the report, there was an air of competitiveness within the special forces. One moment stood out in Gen Campbell's address: when he described how some junior soldiers had allegedly been coerced to shoot unarmed civilians to get their "first kill" - a practice known as "blooding". He said that weapons and radios had then been allegedly planted to support claims that the victims had been enemies killed in action.” We’ll we ever see “Je suis Afghan civilian”? Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]

  Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat [sic] Trump has never been an autocrat. I don’t see the author using the word metaphorically.

 Another page of the unfinished book of corruption in the UK, and especially in England. What will the “public” do? “I don’t care much. That’s how things are. Now I am looking forward to the vaccine to go back to my normal life.” Then comes the ritual again: we will cross a piece of paper “to make a change.” It is more likely that the Conservatives will be re-elected. Indifference is not only towards migrants ‘dying’ in the seas and the vulnerable in society, but also to cronyism and clientelism at home. Corruption of the City of London, the Panama Files, HSBC money laundering ... have not made the “public” even protest on the street. Faith combined with fear and conservatism are still working in favour of the ruling class.  Despite of what has happened since 2008/09, there is a general sense that the state has managed the crisis and the pandemic. The state intervened and has been paying those made unemployed. Thus the resignation. Cronyism and clientelism How Covid revealed the new sh

“ Robinson makes the point in a number of his novels that to be dogmatic, to preach instead of to explore, is to surrender to the very constraints that we need to challenge.“ Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Return of Nature

Cruise liners turned into jails for migrants

 Save capitalism, tax boomers, new report suggests

One of the two bookshops on the same street, where I bought some of my favourite books mainly during the period between 1995-2000, when I left political activism and immersed myself in reading on the benches of l’Avenue Habib Bourguiba. It was the period when I was trying to get a passport. The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism  (French versions) by Wilhelm Reich Germinal by Emile Zola Zorba by Nicos Kazantzakis (French version) The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells One-Dimentional Man by Herbert Marcuse (Arabic version) The Second Sex (le deuxième sex) by Simone de Beauvoir and others One man’s fights to preserve relic of bygone age

 A feminist icon from 13th century Hafsid era

  Decolonising Maghreb history

“The United States, as pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two almost equal-sized political universes. But power abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the evolution is towards differential experiments in post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, will face a new depression without the wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does this point except to total destruction in the 2022 midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?” — Ecologist and geographer Mike Davis

Brave New World was a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror... 1984 has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere. —JG Ballard, 2002

 Did America commit war crimes in Vietnam? Related The most notorious war crime of the Vietnam era

Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles “Ethnic differences entwine with other social differences –especially of class, region, and gender. Ethnonationalism is strongest where it can capture other senses of exploitation. The most serious defect of recent writing on ethnonationalism has been its almost complete neglect of class relations (as in Brubaker, 1996; Hutchinson, 1994; Smith, 2001). Others wrongly see class as materialistic, ethnicity as emotional (Connor, 1994: 144–64; Horowitz, 1985: 105–35). This simply inverts the defect of previous generations of writers who believed that class conflict dominated while ignoring ethnicity. Now the reverse is true, and not only among scholars. Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles. Yet in actuality these two types of conflict infuse each other. Palestinians, Dayaks, Hutus, and so on believe they are being materially exploited. Bolsheviks and Maoists believed t

 

  Pandemic, China, Israel, the US, the Arab uprisings ...

  How the north was made—and unmade

 Biden’s election is not a mandate for centrism Related “The problem—as we have witnessed over the past decade and are likely to continue seeing—is not only that Democrats and Republicans disagree on issues of culture, identity, and power, but that they represent radically different swaths of the economy. Democrats represent voters who overwhelmingly reside in the nation’s diverse economic centers, and thus tend to prioritize housing affordability, an improved social safety net, transportation infrastructure, and racial justice. Jobs in blue America also disproportionately rely on national R&D investment, technology leadership, and services exports. By contrast, Republicans represent an economic base situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many, and the party sees no reason to consider the priorities and needs of the nation’s metropolitan centers. That is not a scenario for economic consensus or achievement. At the

A la John Wayne’s.   Another extrajudicial assassination by Israel and the US within a sovereign country “The New York Times newspaper reported that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, al-Qaeda's second-in-command” [and his daughter] “were shot dead in the street by Israeli agents following a request from the US.”

 Macron’s political extremism