Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Furore over Black Lives' support of Palestine reveals movement's true allies

Indonesia Gotta Catch all the Communists "A red scare is sweeping Indonesia, digging up the ghosts of the 1965-1966 mass killings, and threatening a fragile democracy." Looks interesting, but access requires subscription

Labour's Red Scare

The War on Syria's Doctors

Britain: A report Evidence suggested the biggest cause of the "acute" disadvantage felt by Muslim women is their religion, it said.  "The impact of Islamophobia on Muslim women should not be underestimated," it went on.  "They are 71% more likely than white Christian women to be unemployed, even when they have the same educational level and language skills."  They face particular issues of discrimination when applying for jobs because of the clothes some of them they wear because of their religion or culture, the MPs suggest. Married women in Muslim communities are often expected to be home-makers while their husbands are the breadwinners, the committee heard from expert witnesses.  "The impact of the very real inequality, discrimination and Islamophobia that Muslim women experience is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role," the committee said. ( source: t

" Infiltrating the Labour Party" Everyone wondering what Trotskyists do all day Victory in Defeat

Will it really hurt? Stephen Hawking's boycott hits Israel where it hurts: science

" A careful assessment of the  Bolivarian Revolution  reveals that Chávez’s socialism only ever manifested itself rhetorically: real gains like income redistribution proved compatible with the global capitalist order." Why Twenty-First Century Socialism Failed

"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?

Arabic literature I haven't read Zaat , but it souns a good novel.  " Zaat  by Sonallah Ibrahim Sonallah was born in Cairo, became a Marxist in his youth, and spent several years in prison during the 1960s for his views. His novel  Zaat  tells the tale of modern Egypt though the eyes of its heroine, Zaat, during the periods of the three presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. It goes from the optimism of the early years following the revolution to the full-blown capitalisation and corruption of Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century. Expertly crafted, each of the chapters narrating Zaat’s life, marriage, work and social life is interspersed with a series of newspaper clippings and photograph captions detailing the political and economic events of the day – corruption cases, financial scandals, torture, foreign debt – that graphically lay open the banal thuggery of the rulers and the greed and stupidity of the nouveau-riche. Poignant, yet darkly hilarious at