Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In an interview in 1986 Maxime Rodinson said: " Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty years — I don’t know how long. Where fundamentalism isn’t in power it will continue to be an ideal, as long as the basic frustration and discontent persist that lead people to take extreme positions. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe! Islamic fundamentalists will continue to dominate the period for a long time to come."

How the National Front Changed France Read also France and Its War on Terror and Intellectuals From Left Bank to Left Behind: Where Have the Great Frenceh Thinkers Gone?

Mercenaries in Yemen: the US Connection

The Forgotten Alliance

Pakistan’s Contrary Years (1971-1977): A Cultural History of the Bhutto Era

"We" are still striving to cvilize those " recalcitrant Arabs " and Muslims. Today we do it in a better way. Not only do we use better weapons, NGOs, monarchies as allies, etc, but "we" do it "democratically": we debate it, we vote for it and the public knows about it. Shock and Awe

Via Stathis Kouvelakis  After Tsipras's "historic" visit to Israël and his previous one to Egypt, now it's the turn for Egypt's dictator El Sissi to visit Athens. Tsipras has totally aligned himself with most reactionary forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. “Your visit inaugurates a new period of close cooperation between the two countries,” Tsipras told the Egyptian leader. “You have sincerely conveyed Egypt’s voice to our European friends,” said El-Sissi."

Syria and the Left

Militarized Neoliberalism: Jeff Halper's War Against the People Also, My interview with Jeff Halper (London, June 2008)

The generalised picture of the Arab World portrayed by Albert Hourani looks gloomy but accurate. “The link between the regime and the dominant social groups,” writes Hourani, “might also turn out to be fragile. What could be observed was a recurrent pattern in Middle Eastern history. The classes which dominated the structure of wealth and social power in the cities wanted peace, order and freedom of economic activity, and would support a regime as long as it seemed to be giving them what they wanted; but they would not lift a finger to save it, and would accept its successor if it seemed likely to follow a similar policy."  Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples , Faber and Faber Ltd, United Kingdom, 1991, p 454

The Myth of Leftist Academia The ideological control of the university is intimately related to the economics of “higher education” in the neoliberal era.  Professors who profess too much in ways that might offend concentrated power are easily dispensed with when they are hired only by the course, semester, or academic year.  Department chairs and deans can avoid headaches merely by not renewing the troublemakers’ contracts. Adjuncts and temporary instructors (glorified “Assistant Professors” at many universities) who wish to keep a foothold in academia are well advised not to rock doctrinal boats. As the AAUP notes, “The insecure relationship between contingent faculty members and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom…Contingent faculty may be less likely to take risks in the classroom or in scholarly and service work….The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances.” This content was originally published by tele

Happened at Al-amiriyya Context of the piece

The House of Zion

THE FAMISHED RAJ By John Newsinger "The Bengal Famine of 1943–44, a man-made catastrophe that in total caused the deaths of perhaps five million people, was described by the incoming British Viceroy Archibald Wavell as threatening ‘incalculable’ damage to the Empire’s reputation. [1] It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule.’ Wavell was right about the scale of the disaster. But so effectively has the episode been written out  of the histories of the Second World War and the Raj that it can scarcely be said to have damaged Britannia’s reputation. In the prestigious Oxford History of the British Empire: The TwentiethCentury, a volume that surely sits on the shelves of every university library in the English-speaking world, the Famine goes unmentioned. In Max Hastings’s 600-page study of Churchill during the Second World War, Finest Years, it gets barely a paragraph, while Boris Johnson’s cod biography, The Churchill

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.

"...the chief connection between human rights and market fundamentalism is a missed connection: Precisely because the human rights revolution has focused so intently on state abuses and has, at its most ambitious, dedicated itself to establishing a floor for protection, it has failed to respond to — or even much recognize — neoliberalism’s obliteration of the ceiling on inequality. Could a different form of human rights correct this mistake? I doubt it. This is not to contradict the moral significance and possibly even historical success of human rights when it comes to combating political repression and restraining excessive violence. But whenever inequality has been limited, it was never on the sort of individualistic, and often antistatist, basis that human rights share with their market-fundamentalist doppelgänger. And when it comes to mobilizing support, the chief tools of the human rights movement — the critique of state repression and the melioration of disasters of w

"What is Cameron’s problem with IS? Ordinary people who in their spare time have formed a huge multinational oil trade and a workforce of thousands willing to be paid in rice and fear – that’s the Big Society right there. Cameron called them “Women-raping, Muslim-murdering, medieval monsters” – he carefully avoided saying “child molesters” in case one of the backbench shouted: “Present!” This is before we get to the fact that he used the word “medieval” to justify a military expedition into the Middle East. Of course bombing will cause delight in Islamic State, where it will form the only entertainment. There’s no music, no dancing, and we’re spending a couple of million quid a night providing the  mise en scène  for these sadists’ fantasy life." Frankie Boyle, theguardian.com, 04 December 2015 The ideological disciplining power of neoliberal university economics extends down to students. Students who must begin paying off exorbitant student debts the day after they gra

ISIS Emerged out of the Dashed Hopes of the Arab Uprisings Read also Are We ISIS? Flag Down

Al-maādii, Cairo Laleh Khalili 2015

Murray Bookchin and the Ocalan connection: the  New York Times  profiles the students of PKK Rojava