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Morocco’s Kingdom of Police

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The Myths That Underpin European Identity

  A liberal approach that ignores class, inequality and uneven capitalist development in the EU and the undemocratic nature of its structure and rule. “ Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn… How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint or cr

Settling the ‘Palestinian Question’ Once and for All?

Even Le Monde Diplomatique calls the ‘Palestinian question’. 1. “In the past few months, conferences have been held in Israel advocating resettlement (especially of northern Gaza) as soon as the territory is ‘cleaned up.” 2. The ‘Order and Clean-up’ programme “ involves the ‘total defeat’ of Hamas, then a process of ‘deradicalisation’; the idea is that evacuating the 300,000 Palestinians still living north of the Netzarim corridor will enable the IDF to establish an unbreakable siege of Hamas in this area, and orders to this effect were issued on 6 October this year. A second stage will trap Palestinian fighters in ‘closed military zones’, forcing them to surrender or starve to death, without regard for any hostages who might be held there. This strategy is already in place at the Jabaliya camp, which has been under siege since 12 October.” 3. “On 3 July the government approved the seizure of nearly 13 sq km of land in the Jordan valley, the largest confiscation of land in the West Ban

‘A Racist Society Can’t But Fight a Racist War’ – James Baldwin

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism.  “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. *** From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates “Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Transcen

Quote of the Week: ‘I Wish Children Didn’t Die’

I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?” they would say: “we were playing with the stars.” — Ghassan Kanafani *ليت الأطفال لا يموتون* *ليتهم يرفعون الى السماء مؤقتا* *ريثما تنتهي الحرب* *ثم يعودون الى بيوتهم آمنين !* *وحين يسألهم الاهل محتارين* *اين كنتم ؟* *يقولون فرحين* *”كنا نلعب مع النجوم “* غسان كنفاني   

من مفارقات ماركس

_ كانت الوحدةُ الأمميةُ للعمال من أهم أفكار ماركس، وهو نفسه قد ساهم في بناء أول أممية حقيقية.... بعد قرنين نجد أن ماركس يمثل بؤرة الخلافات داخل الحركة العمالية وعامِلَ انقسام وتذرر. _ كان ماركس علامةً فارقةً في نقدِ الفلسفة، بل إنه كان قد جسد نقده ذاك عمليًا بالاتجاه نحو العلومِ الاقتصادية والتاريخية لِيُخَصِّصَ لها معظم أعْمالِهِ..... بعد قرنين يُقَدَّمُ ماركس على أنه فيلسوف وتُقَدَّمُ أعْمالَهُ على أساس أنها "الفلسفة الماركسية". _ كان الخيطُ الناظم لأبحاث ماركس هو نقدُ الاقتصاد وتعبيرته النظرية الاقتصاد السياسي، وطبعا ليس من الصدفة أن تكون جُلُّ أعْمالِهِ مُنْدَرِجة تحت عنوانٍ واحدٍ "نقدُ الاقتصادِ السياسي"...... بعد قرنين لا نعثر على ماركس إلا بصفته "رجل اقتصاد" وصاحب "نظرية اقتصادية", بل انهم يتباهون لأنهم يستحضرون ماركس لحل مشاكل الرأسمالية. _ كان ماركس قد كرس كل أعمالِهِ النظرية في سياقٍ واحدٍ ولأجل قضية واحدة هي المساهمة في النضال الثوري ضد النظام الرأسمالي، وكان هو نفسه في محطات كثيرة ومهمة مناضلا داخل تلك الحركة الثورية، وهو الذي ساهم في

Core Aspects of Trumpism Have Been Institutionalised

“Over the last eight years, but especially during the Biden administration, core aspects of Trumpism have been institutionalised. Let’s take a look at the record. First, the ‘China problem’ identified by Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, became a bipartisan obsession. It is now hegemonic to the extent that Harris attacked Trump from the right on this issue during their debate, condemning him for having ‘sold us out’ by selling chips to China. (He, in fact, limited sales of chips to China.) Second, economic nationalism – including protectionism, stimulus and a domestic industrial policy – was embraced far more vigorously by Biden than Trump. Ironically, he was enabled in this by pressure from the Sanders left, just as Trump was inhibited by pressure from the Republican right. Third, the far right’s borders agenda has been adopted uncontested, and now forms a major plank in Harris’s platform. Fourth, in all essential ways, Biden adopted Trump’s foreign policy. The withdrawal from Afghanist

‘The Death of Humanitarianism’?

“[ I]nvocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective.” It s like the West’s selective reading of history . “It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order” – the international liberal order preached in and after Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. “[N]o Western government has invoked R2P [the Right to Protect] in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.” “[A]s the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia’s aversion to R2P was not because Vladimir Putin is ‘the crude defender of sovereignty as so often presented’, but rather the West’s selective deployment of it .” (My italics N.M.) “[W]ill the death of the liberal order clear the way for a more democratic, accountable and egalitarian world?” I am not optimistic. One of the reasons is that articles like Lynch’s are so critical and an antidote to amnesia, a help for students, etc. but does not delve into structu

Criticism of Hezbollah Should not Mean Support for Israel

While one can understand that the positive reactions to the assassination by Syrians opposed to the Syrian regime are a form of revenge because of Hezbollah’s complicity, the context surrounding the current moment, matters. We have to be clear, Israel’s war against Lebanon is not to promote the freedom of Syrians or any other population in the region suffering from authoritarian states. With this in mind, Palestinians and Lebanese people have the right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. This includes the right of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the main actors involved in the armed confrontation with the Israeli occupation army, to resist.” Joseph Daher explains why celebrating Israel's assassination Hezbollah's Nasrallah is short sighted when it comes to Syrians’ struggle against Assad's regime.

Israeli Philosopher Y. Leibowitz on Israel and ‘Terrorism’

In line with his view that holiness was totally separate from the material world, Leibowitz denied that the  Land of Israel  was holy and that the Jews had a special right to it, writing that "the idea that a specific country or location has an intrinsic 'holiness' is an indubitably idolatrous idea" and that "talk of rights is pure nonsense. No nation has a right to any land." In a 1968 essay titled "The Territories", Leibowitz postulated a hellish future: The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire