Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

محمود درويش وناجي العلي

This is an interesting study. There is only a resumé/abstract in French and English. The study is in Arabic.  You may need to create a free accound in order to access the study. Salafi-Jihadi Youth in a 'Popular' Tunisian Quarter

Some points from a speech by Gary Younge Labour produced mugs saying it would be tough on immigration; the Tories produced policies. After more than a decade of war and almost a decade of austerity, social democratic parties across the continent and beyond had failed to develop a programme or strategy that could engage with their traditional bases.  They no longer spoke the language of reform but instead containment. Their project, it seemed, was to limit the damage inflicted by international capitalism, not to prevent it less still to reverse it. My guess is that the overwhelming majority who attended that [historical] march [against the war on Iraq] ... voted for the government they were demonstrating against and at least a plurality, including many here, voted for them again. When Lula won the presidency in Brazil on a redistributive manifesto in 2002 the invisible hand of the market tore up his electoral promises and boxed the country around the ears for its reckless choice.

“MT  [Mother Teresa]  was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of  poverty . She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.” — Christopher Hitchens The Squalid Truth Behind the Legacy of Mother Teresa

هل تعرفون القتل جميعًا ... Syria State Detention Deaths

This is excellent! "Our Wound is Not So Recent"   (pdf) Or "Notre Mal Vient de Plus Loin"

After Syriza's capitulation, in Spain A Year of Change Postponed

It has been 5 years since the start of the Tunisian uprising.  What Happened to "the Arab Spring"? The Irresistible Flow See also Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East A Brief History of ISIS

  This is a very significant vision of the structure of the world: we have a mass of destitute people who make up half of the global population, we have an oligarchy whom I could well call aristocratic, from the point of view of their number. And then we have the middle class, that pillar of democracy, who, representing 40% of the population, must share between them 14% of global resources.  
This middle class is principally concentrated in the so-called advanced countries. So it is largely a Western class. It is the mass support for local democratic power, parliamentary power. I think that we can say, without wanting to insult its existence— since we’re all more or less a part of it, aren’t we?—that a very important aim of this group, which, even so, only has access to quite a small part of global resources, just 14%, is not to fall back into, not to be identified with, the immense mass of the destitute. Which we can well understand. 
 This is why this class, taken as a whole, is

أسطورة الشعب الكسول Hussein, 14 years old, works in aluminium pots industry workshop at Al Gamaliya, Cairo, Egypt. He takes a salary that varies between 15 to 25 EGP per day.  The minimum wage of a worker in the public sector is 1,200 Egyptian pounds ( $170 ) a month. حسين, ١٤ سنة, يعمل في ورشة لصناعة الاواني الالومنيوم بالجمالية. مصر. يتقاضى حسين اجر يومي يترواح ما بين 15 الى 25 جنيه. Photo by @mostafa_bassim 

تونس "دعم المؤسسة الأمنية" هكذا يهتف السياسيون والمثقفون من أقصى اليمين إلى أقصى اليسار، من الأشد تزمتا إلى الأكثر حداثة وليبرالية، من راشد الغنوشي إلى حمة الهمامي، ومن إمام المسجد إلى أكاديمي الجامعة، ومن أنصار الأحزاب الحاكمة الى أنصار الأحزاب المعارضة الأكثرها راديكالية.... جوقة يومية تطالب بتزويد البوليس بالسلاح والأجهزة المتطورة وإحياء مؤسسة المخابرات وإعادة الكوادر القديمة وانتداب المزيد من الأعوان و"تحسين ظروف الأمنيين"....الخ، بل إنهم يلومون الحكومة على تساهلها هنا، وعدم ا لضرب بيد من حديد هناك، وبقدر الصخب والضجيج الذي أثارته بعض قوانين ميزانية 2016 فيما يتعلق ببعض التفاصيل الجبائية فإن رصد أكثر من 10 بالمائة من هذه الميزانية لحساب وزارتي الداخلية والدفاع لم يلق سوى الترحيب من جميع الكتل النيابية في ما يسمى مجلس نواب الشعب... وبما أن "الخطر الإرهابي"، وفق الخبراء والمحللين وكل مرتزقة صناعة الرأي العام، سيمتد لسنوات طويلة، فإن "المجهود الوطني" لتعزيز "المؤسسة الأمنية" و"تطوير أدائها" وتمكينها من كل الوسائل ا

Is there really any difference between a terrorist and an ordinary criminal? and a good comment by Ed Lytwak: " The real question: Is there any moral difference between individual terrorism and State Terrorism?  P.S. apart from the fact that State terrorism is systemic and practiced on a much larger scale."

A Special Relationship See also Henry Kissinger's " Grand Strategies" CIA Roots of Islamic Fundamentalism Birds of Feather  ...

Today, the so-called liberal paper The Guardian removed a comment of mine. I lost the original text, but it was in this vein: I am lonely in London. I tried to integrate for a few years: I conformed and conceded. In the last few years and after seeing the crimes of the state of this country at home and abroad, the plunder of the wealth, the exploitation, the hypocrisy, the vacuousness of the so-called freedom and democracy, the wars, the indifference and complicity of the silent majority and their individualism and self-centrism, the mediocrity and sameness, etc. I have become more radicalised and more extremist, unbearable to people because of my radical views, and I now refuse to integrate in such a society.

A shopkeeper reading a newspaper, Cairo 14 December 2015 A photograph by Everyday Egypt

Unworthy Victims

A Spatial History of a Main Baghdadi Street

Fortress Europe Staunch Defender on the Left It is not a Refugee Crisis

Human Development Read also The Lucky Generation

Sameeh Alqa'sim and the Language of Revolution

Reading while riding A photo by Everyday Egypt

" There is no document of  civilization which  is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Walter Benjamin "لا توجد وثيقة للحضارة ليست في نفس الوقت وثيقة للبربرية" ولتر بنجامين

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine

Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) In a Pomegranate Chandelier Man Without a Country

"...  I think there's a serious misunderstanding... on the role Trump is playing. Trump is not the cause of anti-Muslim bigotry in the US: he is a symptom of it. We're now 14 years into a war that the United States has waged on Muslims, in which all of the extraordinary steps that the state has taken - Guantanamo Bay, torture, black sites, omnipresent electronic surveillance, endless war, unlimited drone assassination anywhere on the planet - are acceptable precisely because the victims of these measures have been racialized. "The innocent have nothing to fear" is code for "look, we're going after Muslims, everyone knows we're going after Muslims, you're white, you have nothing to worry about." And a decade and a half of a bipartisan project to criminalize Muslims - embraced by every mainstream candidate in the United States from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders - has been an American mainstream which is suspicious of Islam at best and violen

Turkey's Time Has Come (A free subscription is required to read this interesting analysis ) Read also Whose Side is Turkey on?

Clash of Barbarisms " The process of civilization is described as a historical process of pacification of human relations, overcoming aggressivness and the rule of law. And what we are seeing in this kind of clash is not, therefore, a clash of civilizations or features of civilizations clashing, but a clash of those kinds of barbaric potentials that every civilization include, whether Islamic or Western. These are barbarian forms which are potentially included in every kind of civilization and which can take over in periods of crisis or some specific historical periods. "  Gilbert Achcar, 2003 Achcar said in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris: "The Western intervention, the Western action in the Middle East, has been creating the ground for all this. This is what I called previously the clash of barbarisms, with a major barbarism represented by Western intervention."  A page from the "Western" book of barbarism

Maxime Rodinson on Islamic "Fundamentalism"