Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Institutional racism “I completely and utterly reject the bad apples argument,” the director told EW . “Chicago just got caught with their pants down in a way that can’t be denied. But I completely and utterly reject the ‘few bad apples’ argument. Yeah, the guy who shot [Laquan McDonald] is a bad apple. But so are the other eight or nine cops that were there that said nothing, did nothing, let a lie stand for an entire year.” “And the chief of police, is he a bad apple?” Tarantino continued. “I think he is. Is [Chicago Mayor] Rahm Emanuel a bad apple? I think he is. They’re all bad apples. That just shows that that’s a bulls*** argument. It’s about institutional racism. It’s about institutional cover-ups that are about protecting the force as opposed to the citizens.” Quentin Tarantino

Gone but not Forgotten Golden Horseshoes (a movie, Tunisia 1989)

... Winston Churchill [compares] Palestinians in 1937 to the dog in the manger after reading the Peel Commission which suggested partitioning British mandated Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Churchill said of the Palestinians in 1937, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." " I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race." The greatest Briton

This is Hell!  interviews Andreas Malm on his upcoming book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming: "It pops up everywhere - in science about climate change, fiction about climate change, in the political debate - 'we' in general have caused this, 'we' all must share responsibility and 'we' all must do our part. As though climate change emerged from a society that was completely democratic and egalitarian and where everyone influenced outcomes to the same degree." The interview in full See also Capitalocene

Mary and Joseph Hit the Wall Omar (the movie)

"He was not Algerian, nor an Arab, nor a Muslim by birth. Indeed, he was middle class, received an elite education, and was a French citizen, as cited. Fanon was not  of  the wretched of the earth. Yet he developed a deep sense of solidarity with the Algerian struggle, based on a mutual history of racial discrimination and colonial chauvinism. An outcome of his contingent internationalism, this radical empathy not only had practical effects on his life direction. This solidarity also forcefully disrupted a politics of difference—by race, nation, culture, and class—established by colonialism." Fanon at Ninety

Anti-Imperial Metropolis:  Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism   (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Politics Isn't a Fairytale about Good Versus Bad Journalist : M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?  Ben M'Hidi : And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. See also

More crimes by state terrorism. Russian this time. "200" Syrian civilians killed. No, they are not French! " All of this infuriates Orabi Hamdan. I met him at a refugee reception centre in Stockholm.  He comes from Deraa, where the first anti-regime demonstrations began, and is waiting to be re-united with his wife who is living in another centre.  He feels he and his family are pawns of the big powers.  "They play and we pay. It is a game. But a bad game and a bloody game. Our children play. You see every day a lot of kids killed without any reasons. You find the kids as pieces without legs, without heads, without arms...why?" The Syrian talks may produce a settlement that allows Orabi to go home.  But the conflict stands as a testament to the failure of the international system. (Source:  the bbc  ) See also What Happened to the "Arab Spring"?

On Social Sadism

The Turkish state terrorism continues See also Turkey's War on the Kutds

A People's History of Churchillian Madness

"While the Right views all Muslims as a problem and as a fifth column in Western nations, the liberal establishment sounds more reasonable in that it differentiates between terrorists and the majority of Muslims. But it nevertheless holds an entire group of people responsible. This is why establishment liberals believe that “moderate Muslims” should “take responsibility” for denouncing the terrorists, that leftists and anti-racists should get over their political correctness, and that everyone should join them in supporting the war on terror and its practices of war, surveillance, indefinite detention, and drone strikes." " None of this is to say, of course, that Trump doesn’t represent a frightening turn in US politics, but rather that we should try to understand the no-less-frightening political dynamic that makes Trump possible, a dynamic that is a product of the political system in its entirety. It bears reiterating that we need to understand this phenomenon in  s...

Spain: an essential background " Despite this pointed Northern patronage, the  PSOE  adopted a new programme at its 27th Congress  of December 1976, the first held in Spain since the Civil War, which seemed to define it as the most radical Socialist party in Europe—a ‘class party with a mass character, Marxist and democratic’. Rejecting ‘any path of accommodation to capitalism’, the programme envisaged ‘the taking of political and economic power, the socialization of the means of production, distribution and exchange by the working class’. Of course such formulations of the final goal had once been the standard, raising no eyebrows among the continental parties of social democracy. But this was now seventeen years after Bad Godesberg had brought programme into line with practice and enshrined a most extensive accommodation to capitalism as the model for European Socialism. The González team, deeply indebted to the  SPD  for material and political aid, had ne...

Unseen Images of the 1953 Coup in Iran See also CIA Admits Role in 1953 Iranian Coup

Turkey's AKP and its record help us understand its present NATO's Islamists (pdf) By the second half of the 1990s, however, it was becoming clear that the Islamist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan were corrupt, inefficient or coercive, while international Islamic banks and credit institutions were plagued by scandal. Faced with state repression, Islamist resistance movements in Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere alienated their supporters by resorting to indiscriminate violence. ‘Actually existing’ Islamist radicalism was becoming broadly discredited. This disillusion with religious militancy in the Muslim world was given powerful impetus by Washington’s change of line. Having been willing to arm the crudest Islamist groups against Communism during the Cold War, and to back such murderous confessional states as General Zia’s Pakistan, the US  had started to distinguish between fundamentalist and ‘moderate’ Islam. The latter referred to religious movements that cooperated with W...

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