Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“In recent years, several state-owned Chinese companies, along with other private Chinese firms,  have invested  directly or indirectly in Israeli settlements or companies operating within them. “ China’s actions directly contradict the legal principles it claims to uphold .”

“If you’re a Zionist, you do not get to claim solidarity with Gaza. If you oppose abortion, you have not sided with feminism. If you’re a far-right Christian who loves gay people but 'hates the sin', you’re lying to yourself and everyone around you. If you write a muddled piece about the conceptual importance of 'biological women' days after a ruling that erases trans people from public life, you don’t support trans liberation—hell, you don’t even support trans survival. Claiming support while advocating destruction is not solidarity ; it is self-serving manipulation. It is covert bullying. It is demanding, in dulcet tones, that oppressed people pat you on the back while you slit their throats.”

“If MSF [ Médecins Sans Frontières]  secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. “What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity an...

Loose translation/interpretation by  Michael R. Burch Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men who did manual labor for bread. When I saw him recently, the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence and I felt defeated. But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said: “Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,  and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.  This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters. Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!” Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen, but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain. At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back. “Burn down his house!” some commandant screamed, “and slap his son in a prison cell!” As our town’s military ruler later explained this was necessary for law and order, that is, an act of love, for peace! Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house; the coiled serpent completed its circle. The bang at h...

If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity. Here, as elsewhere, things are what you make of them. — Clifford Gertz

“Even former Nazis could identify with Israeli expansionism — and used this support to absolve their own pasts. “Between 80 and 100 percent of steel and iron for Israel’s growing machine industry came from German resource payments to Israel, without which Israel would have been unable to develop its industrial base…  By 1954, some 20 percent of Israel’s imports were from West Germany, making it Israel’s second-biggest import partner. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gained access to a higher-quality arsenal. German officers were also sent to Israel to train the IDF, while Israeli officers were sent to Germany to be trained by the Bundeswehr, including future IDF chiefs such as Haim Laskov. “Over a thousand West Germans asked the Israeli embassy if they could become Israeli soldiers, including the writer Günter Grass, previously of the Waffen-SS. “Instead of  challenging  the capitalist elites that fed Nazism’s initial rise and continue to dominate German politics to this ...

Although aassociated with the U.S., apple pie's origin is England. “ Targeting vulnerable foreign students or migrant labourers for harassment , abuse and deportation is second nature to US ruling regimes - as American as their sugar-infested apple pie… “President Donald Trump did not invent this particular brand of American cruelty; he is just carrying it to its vicious ends. There is now a systematic crescendo of demonising Trump by the entire institution of liberal imperialism. Embarrassed by his refreshing vulgarity, they are using it as camouflage to exonerate the rest of American history - as if it was a haven of grace, kindness and generosity towards foreigners. “Trump is simply using the precedent set by previous presidents, from Carter to Obama, against people with a moral compass.”

“If Baran was silent, the real Barans of today are being forced into a silence that is far more violent. And I wonder what kind of country tells a child: you can die building it, but you can never live in it .” Related Majidi in context

From Kolbar to 'terrorist'

Next time you hear a British person, for example, especially a supporter of Winston Churchill, says ‘my country’, turn their argument/belief on its head by quoting their ‘hero’: I  do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right.   I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power. —Winston Churchill  To the   Palestine Royal Commission   (1...

Key points Hemedti’s war machine is predicated on continual expansion. Since the RSF offers its recruits licence to loot and raid in lieu of wages, absent fresh targets, its forces have a tendency to disperse. In every city it captures, the RSF has employed the same playbook: destroy state institutions, plunder humanitarian resources, raze civilian property. Its assaults have functioned as an enormous engine of primitive accumulation that has destroyed agricultural land, displaced millions of people, and effected a wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to a class of militia leaders backed by Emirati capital… The paramilitaries have generalized the predatory political economy of Bashir’s regime. While Bashir exploited the peripheries to enrich the centre, the RSF has turned the entire country into a periphery to be plundered. The RSF’s mode of warfare has ultimately proved its undoing. The Sudanese army’s resurgence is partly due to its successful solicitation of foreign support. Qatar –...

Capitalist Colonial  departs from Kaminer's previous work by “ centering questions of coloniality and race , but the departure is not a total about-face, because the last thing I want to do is abandon the labor process or class analysis. At a fundamental level, the book is proof of Stuart Hall’s well-known theorem that “race is the modality through which class is lived.”

Solidarity with François Burgat , a prominent academic who stands trial for apology for terrorism in France. Also in French

Before he became part of the genocide supporters “Starmer wants to be thought a 'safe pair of hands', communicated above all in his commitment to the country's most conservative institutions and ideas, from NATO to sound money to royalism. He clings insecurely to the symbolic security of the flag and its metonyms, sends himself up with tryhard images of himself enjoying football with the lads and a pint, because he is terrified of being seen as anything but utterly mediocre. It's shameful to have a political enemy like Starmer , who progresses almost by default, simply because of the way the historical deck is stacked, and because of his willingness to exploit whatever evanescent advantages come his way, rather than because of any particular skill, charisma, or historical necessity of his appearance.” Good, but What is the point of using wrods that do not exist in a dictionary or online?

“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity. ‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian. “The  essayist Giuliano da Empoli's  argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian ...

 عن علي خنيس، فيسبوك هذه الصورة منذ سنوات لمهاجر من أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء. قالها منذ سنوات انه لا يريد الموت في تونس، ولانه لم يدخلها الا مكرها بقوة حراس حدود أوروبا بالوكالة وتجار البشر الذين تتقاطع مصالحهم. كما أنه لم يتخيّل حينها أنه سيتعرّض هو أو غيره من المهاجرين والمهاجرات سود البشرة جنوب الصحراء لعمليّات سحل على الهواء مباشرة من قبل تونسيين هم نفسهم ضحايا لنفس السياسات العنصرية الأوروبية التي تعيد الدولة إنتاجها على شعبها ويعيد شرائح من شعبها إنتاجها على المهاجرين والمهاجرات جنوب الصحراء. وهؤلاء نفسهم يمارسون العنصرية ضد أبناء شعبهم من التونسيين والتونسيات سود البشرة ولا يرونهم ويرونهنّ إلاّ "وصفان، عبيد وغيرها من التسميات التي يستعملونها في الإشارة لهم وبلا خجل. دولة عنصرية اسمها تونس تقع في شمال أفريقيا أيقظت كل نزعات العنصرية والكراهية الكامنة في المجتمع تحت إشراف خطاب رئاسي يتبنّى كل مقولات أقصى اليمين الفاشي الأوروبي من نظرية الاستبدال و"تغيير التركيبة الديمغرافية" إلى "المؤمرات والمخططات التي يحضر لها منذ عقود" وتستمعلها للتغطية على الفشل السياسي...

80 years since liberation from Nazi-fascism