Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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...

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

Yemen: A detailed report of the barbarism of a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States against the people of Yemen

I remember that it was in 2001/02 when I heard of Eric Lerner's theory in The Big Bang Never Happened . I found it logical though I did not have any profound scientific knowledge. After all, "the father" of the Big Bang theory was the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître. "The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told  Phys.org . Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in  Physics Letters B  that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their  new model  in which the universe has no beginning and no end. Read more at:  http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html#jCp

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

Aziz al-Azmeh, among many critics, has been one of the most prominent figures in assering that 'there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it'. مثقفونا "المتنورون" يقولون إن الدين ليس هو منشأ الارهاب بل تمثلاته "الخاطئة" في رؤوس الارهابيين......لكن السؤال هنا: وما هو الدين غير تمثلاته في أذهان معتنقيه؟ الأجدر أن نقول أن منشأ الارهاب ليس هذا التمثل أو ذاك للدين بل النظام الاجتماعي الذي تنشأ في خضمه تلك التمثلات.... ولعل أكثر التمثلات "خطأ" للدين جعله جوهرا متعاليا عن التاريخ. فيظهر هنا كدين إرهابي "بالفطرة" ويظهر هناك كدين "متسامح" "بالجوهر".. أما الدين فهو بالضبط تمثلاته المتغيرة والمتحولة وفق سياقها التاريخي، ولا وجود لجوهر للدين إلا كتمثل خاص ينتجه التطور التاريخي... لكن ماذا نفعل، فمثقفينا يحاربون الارهاب .......بالاسهاب محمد المثلوثي، تونس، 22 نوفمبر 2015

Why Does Cameron Want to Bomb Syria? Yes, There is an Imperialist Ruling Class

Is Saudi Arabia more Extreme than 'Islamic State'? My comment I find this hypocritical. It excludes the extremism of the Western regimes. When an organization kills or beheads people or throws gays to their deaths, etc, they are called extremists and barbaric, but when the Western regimes invade and occupy countries, kill half a million children through sanctions, kill civilians by bombing weddings and shelters, etc, impose economic policies on countries, support or turn a blind eye on Israel's state's and settlers' barbarism, being part of the counter-revolution that has aborted the Arab uprising, rendition, torture, blackmailing, arm-twisting, corporate involvement in fuelling wars in Africa, for example, etc... they are not called barbaric and extremists because they kill "democratically" using their smart bombs, F16s, white phosperous... and give people "freedom". The small barbarism, if you trace it, is the bastard child of the big barb...

Capitalist "democracy" The 20 people on top of the Forbes 400 list – “a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet” according to the report’s authors – own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population, which is about 152 million people. That’s about 57m households, or a population of 40 US states.  FTSE 100 chief executives (CEO) earn on average 183 times more than a full-time UK worker, research suggests .

The Changing Nature of the Algerian Political System and the Illusion of a Civilian Regime A Product of Tunisia's 1960s Resistance Continues to Protest The General Who Tortured Algerians Dies

Self-exoneration via Self-flagellation: The Structure of Neoliberal Guilt

"The Department of Defense and others have noted that between 2006 and 2010,  climate-change-fueled droughts  killed off 70 percent of Syrian farmers’ livestock, driving hundreds of thousands of economic refugees into crowded cities. Faced with scarce resources, the many protesting food shortages were polarized against President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarianism and pushed toward religious extremists who were, as Juan Cole  put it , “everything the state was not” — distributing water, food and oil that Assad had failed to." The War on Climate Change Anthropocene or Capitalocene

"That's a rubbish decision for which John McDonnell bears a considerable responsibility. The unity of the cabinet (which doesn't exist) has been placed higher than maximising our ability to prevent a war. That is an abdication of conscience. This is one reason why I'm not in the Labour Party."   Via  John Rees

The Magical Thinking about ISIS The Wrong Kind of Secularism

 “Capitalism and the ‘war on terror’ not only help to sustain one another but they have this in common: they worship success but are nourished by failure.” (David Keen,  Endless War ?, 2006)

Chomsky and His Critics

"Our way of life" RAF to Look for Any Unbombed Bits of Syria DAVID Cameron has called on Britain to flatten the last remaining bumpy bits of Syria. Making his case for British airstrikes against ISIS, the prime minister told the House of Commons there was an outside lavatory 15 miles from Aleppo that still has its roof attached. He added: “It stands there, being a toilet, brazenly defying our values. If not now, when?” The prime minster then listed seven other small buildings across Syria that remain structurally sound, including a newsagent, a car wash and a fruit kiosk that could be sheltering up 20,000 ISIS maniacs. He added: “We have learned the lessons of Iraq. Too many buildings were left standing in Iraq. And it was in those buildings that ISIS was formed. “We will only bring peace to the Middle East when all the buildings have been destroyed and everyone has to stand around in the street.” Meanwhile, Cameron has not ruled out sending troops to...

The Threat is Already Inside And nine other truths about terrorism that nobody wants to hear Good arguments, and facts, by a defender of the system Note: Foreign Policy calls Hamas and Hizbullah "terrorist organizations".