Skip to main content

Aljazeera - British Empire in the Middle East

Middle East Panorama show on Resonance FM 104.4 or resonancefm.com Every Friday 14:00 - 15:00 London Time (GMT) "I can definitively say that what Al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable," Rumsfeld told reporters on 15 April, 2004 after Al-Jazeera showed the bodies of women and children killed by U.S. bombs in Fallujah. "...Al-Jazeera has been ragarded with suspicion by Arab governments who complain that its programs bruise their sensitivities and threaten the stability of their regimes," wrote Mohamed Zayani in Al-Jazeera Phenomenon, Critical Perspectives on New Arab Media (2005) Jon Anderson and Dale Eikelman argue that "Al-Jazeera plays a role, jejune as it may be, in the pacification of Arab public opinion." 

The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples' History of the British Empire (Bookmarks 2006). Part of a book launch speech by the author John Newsinger: >> The British Empire in the Middle East 

Friday 8 December: "The Financial War on Terror". Ibrahim Warde, adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of law and diplomacy, Tufts University, Massachusetts, speaks about The Price of Fear: Al Qaeda and the Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror (IB Tauris). 

Friday 22 December: 'The vision of the East and the heritage of the West: the ideological dialectics in the art music of the Jewish community in Palestine and Israel' by professor Jehoash Hirshberg.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond.  Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package.  It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

UK

"We are all in it together" A letter from a doctor to Boris Johnson published a few months ago: ' Johnson has contributed to thousands of deaths ' Related 'The greatest global science failure for a generation' 'Herd immunity' or lockdown

Finance

"The hegemony of finance—the most fetishized form of wealth—is only maintained by the public authorities’ unconditional support. Left to itself, fictitious capital would collapse; and yet would pull down the whole of our economies in its wake. In truth, finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the body of society to feed its own profits. " (my emphasis) —Cédric Durand, Ficticious Capital , 2017, p. 155 

Against Authoritarianism and Neoliberalism in Venezuela

“The current confrontation in Venezuela today is not between left and right.” “We are witnessing the transition from a government with authoritarian tendencies to a dictatorial regime.” “This is not a government ‘backed’ by the military, but, as Maduro himself has said, the government is led by a ‘civilian-military-police alliance’. “Those who continue to support Maduro, including parties and movements of the Sao Paulo Forum or the spokespersons of Podemos in Spain, are causing severe damage to the left in the region and the world. They are damaging anti-capitalist struggles in the broadest sense.” The US embargo is ‘in violation of international law’. This is a useless statement repeated a million times, and it has come back again during the ongoing Israel’s genocidal war. “[A]fter the failure of the current, self-defined “socialist” governments, Venezuelan society tends to associate any reference to socialism or the left with the corruption and authoritarianism of the Maduro governme...