NM's blog

He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. —Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

 Pro-Israeli forces' efforts “ have not been limited to attacking individual activists and groups, universities and media outlets, community organisations and artists, but have also targeted politicians and governments.” Missing from Massad's piece though is Labour Zionism and the earlier evolution of both Zionist socialism and nationalist Zionism.

A Cuban exile, a former CIA operative who carried out a series of bombings , including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. He was never convicted by the U.S.

Gail Hamner reading Benedict Anderson in relation to nationalism, religion , and affect (affective binding).

About 75% of Muslim women in Indonesia today wear the hijab, up from only 5% in the late 1990s, according to Human Rights Watch report in 2022. This is largely thanks to recent legal decisions. — Women's Media Center

The 'revolution' is still hardly assessed in official historiography.

On this day, 15 May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine ended on the date which is now commemorated as Nakba Day - meaning “catastrophe”. Israel declared independence a few hours beforehand, and British forces withdrew that day. The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for the establishment of the state of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. The United Nations had approved a plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. According to that plan, the 30% of the population which was Jewish would be given 70% of the land. But around 42% of the population of this land would still be Palestinian Arabs. To ensure a bigger demographic majority, in December 1947 Zionist militias began a programme of ethnic cleansing, to expel the Palestinian Arab population. One early operation was an attack by the Irgun against the village of al-Tira, which killed 12 Palestinians and injured six others. Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals described the Ir...

“In an anthropological spirit…I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. “It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely...