Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

For this a leading American professor has been placed in leave. “Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it. Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a

“The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred  on October 7.  The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon. And to this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented compelling proof to back that explosive assertion.” Full email from The Intercept, 15 March 2024: Over the last few weeks, The Intercept has exposed massive holes in the New York Times’s marquee front-page exposé on alleged sexual violence committed  on October 7. Instead of addressing the gaping flaws in the story and issuing a correction, the Times has launched an internal “witch hunt” targeting employees based on their national origin, ethnicity, and race to track down anyone who may have talked to The Intercept about the story, according to the union that represents the Times newsroom employees. The Intercept is continuing to investigate and expose false

" This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy . . . and reason veils her face." —Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason” in  The Berliner Tagg,  October 1930 Julia is just one of the faces in the British gutter media Her first question really makes her complicit in crime, ‘encouraging assassination’ as Barghouti said. Full interview

Israel is indeed committing genocide Related Liberalism at Large :  The World According to the Economist The world the  Economist  made

A photo  via The Intercept Jeremy Scahill:  “From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his ‘great, great friend’ Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction. Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.  Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of prop

Essays for a Free Palestine   (a free e-book) Related Free resources

Really existing capitalism “The ultimate objective is not only to demolish Hamas and/or exclude Palestinians from their homeland, but to confiscate Gaza's multi-billion-dollar gas resources .” Source: MEE

Similar to the previous propaganda and disinformation by Western propagandists such the one about ‘Islam’, ‘reforming Islam’, etc., Western propagandists have continued to wage another battle of disinformation – the one against the Palestinian resistance. “ Here are the top 10 propaganda points western media were pushing on behalf of their favourite settler-colony”

One cannot fail to see how Hamas has been ‘blitzed’ . All the evidence is in one image. All those destroyed buildings harboured Hamas fighters. Everybody knows that. The strikes were so precise that Hamas now is just a ghost, something of the past. Metro is a free paper owned by the right-wing reactionary Daily Mail. When I looked at the BBC Middle East section yesterday, I could not find anywhere the number of Palestinians killed so far. The hostages stories are more visible though. Compare that with the war in Ukraine and how the BBC counted/estimated the killed. Updated 24 October 15:40 BST: I have finally seen a figure published by the BBC . But the corporation implies that we mustn’t believe the number because it is published by the Hamas-run ministry of health. Thus back to the Metro front page: strikes by the Israeli army have been so precise that any number of victims claimed must be inflated, and we should ignore any historical precedent to prove otherwise. It would be better

James Baldwin   once noted : “Whatever you see in other people is what you see in the mirror … everybody knows, or every writer knows … no matter what I may be describing, I am describing myself.” Israel’s routine depiction of Hamas as barbaric, sadistic torturers brings the searing truth of Baldwin’s words sharply into focus. “Worse than ISIS”

“Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law.” Alice Speri on The Intercept follows the mainstream – delusional belief and misleading – concept of ‘international law’. As a counter-argument I have chosen a selection from Between Equal Rights “The debate between jurists is not whether this or that action is a reprisal and therefore illegal, but whether reprisals as a category are illegal. Here, the importance of ‘authoritative’ decision is key. After all, the majority of writers agree that reprisals are illegal. However, as long as Israel, for example, is able to interpret reprisals as legal, openly to claim its activities as reprisals, and to be a strong enough power (with the US’s support) to defeat or silence any dissenters, then it is nonsensical to claim that reprisals are functionally illegal. The same unresolvably structured arguments – again with the weight of opinion against the US – have been batted back and for

BBC: Hamas attack on Israel. Middle East Eye: Palestinian attack on Israel. That is expected from the BBC. Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term "Israeli retaliation ". —Jonathan Cook Related Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State   (Pluto Press 2006). Interview with Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, from Nazareth, Israel.   >>  Listen to Jonathan Cook . How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

Note that it should be Fatah, not El Fatah. I wonder why ‘Arab Springs’ in the plural form? “ Turkey will answer present.” I don’t think that is a correct English. When Turkey comes to terms again with Israel Also available in French, Arabic and Farsi

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has

A good summary by Avi Shlaim . He skipped the origin of Hamas though, particularly the role of Israel in its creation.

Caution: This is not to say that blowbacks are exclusively consequences of external forces – Israel and Western powers. Local socio-economic context as well as political factors and balance of forces also played a role, converged or intersected with external players. How Israel went from creating Hamas to bombing it Related My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

Defying Fragmentation and the Significance of Unity

Good satire, but ...   Another pundit calling it a conflict

"There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Endemic racism One photo shows a volunteer with the Spanish Red Cross comforting a migrant (above) on a beach in Ceuta. The young woman, identified as Luna, told Spanish TV she did not know the man's name, only that he had come from Senegal. "He was crying, I held out my hand and he hugged me," she told RTVE. After the image of th