Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

      Abu Ghraib, Iraq 2004 Gaza, Palestine 2023

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”

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

I think Dabashi should have included a couple of lines about the geopolitical and American imperialism’s objectives of the invasion and destruction of the Iraqi state. How the US media covers up war crimes

An authoritarian state security apparatus inherited from the British

“Jacobin, a radical left wing website, uses ‘international community’ and ‘international law’ without even putting them in inverted commas. Israel’s prison system forms an oft-overlooked dimension of its apartheid rule. The treatment of Palestinian prisoners can involve arbitrary detainment, administrative detention without trial, and conditions that the international human rights community has said constitute “cruel and blatant” and even “ sadistic ”  violations  of international law.”

The writer should have included the American complicity in the use of torture by the US allies from Pakistan to Egypt to Morocco whether before, after or during the so-called war on terror and the rendition programme. US leaders from Bush to Biden are in denial

“When Ihat [ Iraq Historic Allegations Team]  closed, outstanding cases were reduced, overnight, from 3,400 to just 20. It had cost the taxpayer £34m and failed to secure a single prosecution. Fifteen years after it began, we are no closer to holding any politicians or high-ranking soldiers accountable for the disaster of the Iraq war.” “The last person in Britain to be prosecuted for crimes committed by forces under their command was in 1651 during the civil war.” Why we may never know

A new book by Caroline Elkins. A review “ With its enormous breadth and ambition, it amounts to something approaching a one-volume history of imperial Britain’s use of force, torture, and deceit around the world. As devastating as the details of these tactics are, even more damning is Elkins’s account of what she argues has been the persistent and perverse misuse of law to cast a veneer of justice and respectability over the remorseless exploitation of others. “As its title suggests, Elkins’s book argues that violence was not just an incidental feature of the British Empire, not simply its midwife, so to speak. Rather, it was foundational to the system itself, a fact borne out in considerable detail.” But Elkins’s “most original argument lies not in the violence itself but rather in London’s use and abuse of the notion of the rule of law, much touted by Britain as an elevating feature of modern Western civilization and a pillar of democracy. “ Elkins convincingly demonstrates that duri

But most remain imprisoned or have disappeared

After their victory against the Taliban in 2001, with the support of the Americans, local warlords such as Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta Muhammad Noor, and other militia commanders responsible for the murderous anarchy of the civil war, were to play a significant role in the new democratic Afghanistan. They were given immunity from prosecution for their alleged human rights abuses and war crimes, and the opportunity to enrich themselves from the immense inrush of foreign aid. Torture and mistreatment of prisoners in American jails helped turn these sites into fertile recruiting centres for future jihadis. “The memories of Bagram are hard on everyone, especially me,” Jawhar said. “We were three to five in each cell, we had no mattresses and we slept on the concrete floor. I became the imam of my cell, and the soldiers were always harder on the imams. Many times they called me to the door and then sprayed my face with pepper spray. Some [guards] tortured us for no reason, while others wou

on wikipedia

You have not yet been defeated

Given the horrific British record of atrocities, would a mere apology be sufficient?

A lot has been written about the film The Battle of Algiers. This article not only does not answer its own question, but it erases the struggle of the Algerians and the Arabs in general since 2010-11.  “What relevance does The Battle of Algiers hold today, 55 years after it was first released?” When we speak about the film’s relevance today, we speak about Black Lives Matter and Occupy? How appalling! Naomi Joseph has ignored the Arab uprisings of 2010/11 and 2019. The latter year is of the Algerian uprising. How does the movie relate to neo-colonialism as contrasted to colonialism?  Is France today a neo-colonial power in Algeria, in the Sahel, and other places?  Is there anything uttered by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, relevant and echos what is in the film? Do the reactions of the French ruling class, the media, the intelligentsia, and a large section of the population in the aftermath of the violent attacks in France in 2015 and afterwards reveal a continuity or an end t

It is mostly from a British journalist perspective An account to refresh our memory

  Obituary

It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent  estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around  17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated   total of   desaparecidos   was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around  27 million   at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who  vanish  inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed  the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on former detainees’ recollections. The picture that

Focus on suffering of Syrian women inside and outside of Assad’s prisons

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