Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"‘By mid-2017 Yemen faced total humanitarian disaster, its first famine since the 1940s and the world’s worst cholera epidemic.’ The situation was unprecedented and avoidable: both famine and cholera were ‘the result of a civil war dramatically worsened by foreign intervention'." — Helen Lackner Yemen's turn Note: Tariq Ali's position on Syria has been shameful. 

"It's a weird time. This week I'm noticing two rather disturbing bandwagons rolling, both arising from Manchester. One is about UK domestic politics and the other international politics but they are linked by an understandable desire not to see the attack as being used to advance the agenda of the Tories and specifically, to help their election campaign. Both though are ultimately very unhelpful. One is about the need for soldiers on the streets because Theresa May  cut police budgets as Home Secretary. I've seen unlikely people sharing tweets from redundant cops. Tempting to undercut May this way, but wrong - more armed cops do not equal fewer attacks like Manchester. The other is pinning the blame for Manchester on the UK intervention in Libya.  Again, understandable.  But it's important to see that the problem in Libya was not the attempted regime change as such but the regime that people tried to change i.e. Gaddafi's tyranny. It was a regime that - like

"[T]his  reactionary isolationism represents "a national-selfish attitude that doesn't care about what happens to the rest of the world as long as 'we' are not directly concerned and our well-being is not affected - or (the leftwing version) as long as our 'anti-imperialist' conscience is not troubled by any of the complexities of the real world."