Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Holocaust Memorial Day: A Reading List Gabriel Ash : The most honest way people can celebrate Holocaust memorial day is by kicking down a Syrian refugee and stealing their wallet.

Income inequality linked to inequality of life span

الزنادقة" الذين قامت على أكتافئهم الحضارة الإسلامية"

The long hisory of Muslims and Christians killing people together How "little use terms such as 'Muslim' and 'Christian' are to describe the almost hopelessly complex web of shifting power-relations, feudal alliances, ethnic sympathies and historical grudges" that shaped much of European history.

الشرطة المصرية في 2015

That "bunch of migrants" — David Camerom Why are so many people dying in the Mediterranean?

New Texts Out Now: Haytham Bahoora, Writing the Dismembered Nation: The Aesthetics of Horror in Iraqi Narratives of War

Britain is at war with Yemen . A joke by Owen Jones:   "If the British people were fully aware of what was happening, Britain’s involvement would surely be unsustainable."

This “situations wanted” posting from the Times in 1939 is extraordinary ...

This Woman Just Explained Economics In A Nutshell. 

" The organizers of the #ausnahmslos campaign don’t deny that the scale and coordination of the assaults in Cologne were alarming. But they point out that sexual harassment is a far more common occurrence in Germany than is typically acknowledged, especially at traditional German events like Munich’s Oktoberfest and Cologne’s Karneval, where large crowds tend to gather under the influence of massive amounts of alcohol. A  2014 study  from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that one in three women in Germany has been the victim of physical or sexual violence (or both) since the age of 15. “If there’s anything we can gain from what happened in Cologne, it’s that we start openly talking about the issue of sexual violence against women, regardless of who the perpetrators are,” said Elke Ferner, the parliamentary state secretary at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth, who signed the #ausnahmslos campaign’s open letter . ...

How the West Undermined Women’s Rights in the Arab World

I read The Richness of Life by Stephen J Gould about a year ago... It was a fascinating discovery. Now the late Richard Levins is enticing me to read his work. Is human behavior controlled by our genes? Richard Levins reviews ‘The Social Conquest of Earth ’

Immigration Scandals From April, any non-EU citizen earning below £35,000 after five years of work will be denied indefinite leave to remain. (A hint of how that might be enforced came on 17 January, when  Dr Paul Hamilton , an American Shakespeare scholar, discovered that his application for further leave to remain had been rejected when immigration officials arrested him at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon and sent him to Morton Hall immigration removal centre, where he remains today.)

London Students Refuse to Pay Rent and Demand 40% Cut

“Social media are a trap” The Polish-born sociologist  Zygmunt Bauman: " The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is ...

"It's offensive to compare us to the Nazis"

Telling another teacher how to teach? It's a sin, says leading academic

One of the many stories my British and American professors never told me at university The British Colonialists in "Australia"

The battle for neoliberal hegemony: an interview with Nancy Fraser

Donald Trump and the US economy

"The future of the Egyptian revolution" Jack Shenker is the author of the newly-released book The Egyptians .

Sound like an expert with these phrases about Middle East politics

Asylum seekers made to wear coloured wristbands in Cardiff

Our Wound Is Not So Recent Prominent French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his new book about the terrorist attacks of November 13 in Paris, recalls the pressing need of offering the world’s youth, who are highly frustrated by capitalism that does not honour its promises, an ideological alternative. He tries to shed light upon the enigmatic death impulse that drives the jihadists to kill people indiscriminately. It is popularly argued that a type of radicalisation, which builds upon the social and religi ous causes, yields unprecedented violence. Badiou, however, sees these attacks through different lenses; for him, they are symptomatic carnages of our time where there is no limit to global capitalism.  Released on January 11 by Fayard.

‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on

The People's Scientist See also the New York Times review of The Dialectical Biologist

The  Era of Predatory Bureaucratization – An Interview with David Graeber  " In England, it is fascinating to analyse the strategies of the different political parties. Britain got rid of the industrial apparatus and is now trying to kill the university system, so what is going to be left to export? For now, it’s all based on finance and real estate. Why? Why is it that every rich person in the world wants to own a house in London? There are many other beautiful European cities. What’s the appeal? I realised two things: first, you can get everything you could, possibly want, in England, thanks to a docile and subservient working class. I had a friend whose job was to deliver lobsters at any time of the night. Secondly, and most importantly: if you come from Bahrein, Russia or Hong Kong, something could still go wrong, there could still be social unrest. Not in England, it is perceived: the historical defeat of the English working class is Great Britain’s main export produc...

تونس من رئيس الجمهورية الى آخر صحفي برتبة مخبر "يساندون التحركات السلمية ويدينون الاعتداء على الأملاك الخاصة والعامة".....لا شيء جديد في هذا، فهذا ما كان قد قاله بن علي ذات جانفي 2011، وبرهان بسيس ذات ديسمبر 2010 وبشرى بالحاج حميدة ومختار الطريفي ذات 13 جانفي 2011...لا شيء جديد حقا.... الجديد أن النعرة الأخلاقية المدافعة عن الملكية الخاصة (وليست هناك ملكية خاصة إلا ملكية طبقة البورجوازيين، فالبقية لا يملكون سوى أوهام الملكية) قد تسربت لأكثر الأنصار السابقين للحراك الثوري وأكثرهم ح ماسة لاستعادة المسار الثوري. فكأنما هؤلاء قد استبطنوا الماتراكاج الاعلامي بحيث لا تخلو مساندتهم، هم أيضا، للحراك الانتفاضي الحالي من لازمة "التنديد بالمندسين واللصوص والارهابيين"، بحجة أن أعمال النهب ضد المغازات الكبيرة أو حرق مقرات البوليس "تشوه الحراك أمام الرأي العام". وما هو هذا الرأي العام؟ الرأي العام، أصدقائي، ليس سوى القيم والأفكار العمومية والأخلاق...التي يكرسها النظام الاجتماعي السائد. وإذا كان هناك تمرد حقيقي ضد النظام فهو بالضرورة تمرد ضد هذا الرأي العام ...