Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Pseudo-secularism and the French Left

" This is some deeply weird liberal saviour racism. All the agency in this representation is on the side of the intervening white person , while the Muslim woman is quiet, meek and passively grateful. The intervention doesn't challenge the racist politics of the abuser. Instead you're supposed to "ignore the attacker" and *talk about the weather*. The intervening white person doesn't allow that the Muslim woman might herself have something to say about the racism being directed  at her. The whole strategy of "building the safe space" depends on her being quiet. And through these means, the racist attacker is supposed to give up and go away, fuming in "irrelevance". What if he doesn't? What if he keeps it up? What if he escalates? What if you end up having to shout at the top of your lungs about the weather because now he's screaming about sending them back?  How useless is your solidarity then? Where is your safe space? And even...

Shlomo Sand: ‘There’s no more great thinkers in France’

Fabricationg illusions of people power in post-coup Turkey

90% on many of Verso books

Kiarostami and The Purge

The US national anthem is a celebration of slavery?

How accurate is this? " Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" ( The Causes of World War III , 1958, p. 75).

So basically we are struck but epidemics. Two of these epidemics are narcissims and identity politics.

Etienne Balibar: laïcité or identity? and ... the lastest on the identity crap

Via Joey Husseini Ayoub Middle East Eye asked me to write an op-ed on what's become an all-too-familiar theme following some of the (ongoing) exchanges between the folks at The Electronic Intifada and folks active in the Syria solidarity movement. To be quite honest with you, I got tired of writing the same thing. I think this is the 3rd or 4th time I write this - in fact you can see it as an extension of my piece for Raseef22 رصيفــ22  - and I know people who have written more than I have - emphasizing especially the work of Leila Al Shami and, obviously, the folks over at الجمهورية al-Jumhuriya like Yassin Al Haj Saleh and Yassin Swehat, all of whom have done infinitely more than I have.  It's frustrating, but here's one more.  I added quotes by Jesse Williams given that so much of the power narrative is being dominated by Americans (as usual, making this even more annoying) in the hope that American comrades would be able to challenge the narrative from with...

A Pakistani version of "Take Five"

" LF : You make the argument that we’ve been sold on this  idea that there’s just one kind of love: monogamous heterosexual love that makes a baby. MW :  Yeah. Kant has this goofy German definition of marriage where it’s a mutual contract for the reciprocal use of someone’s genitals. That exclusive-genital sexuality is great if it’s with the right person, but we focus on how much it sucks  not  to have that; we rarely talk about how often it also sucks. Like, marriages are often unhappy—the No. 1 source of harm to a woman is her intimate partner." Love in a Time of Capital

Nasīr al-Dīn Tūsī and evolution?

"How the refugee crisis became invisible"

Who Wants to Save Capitalism?

Headlines on foreignpolicy.com, 26 August 2016 "BAN THE BURQA?:  Eight in ten Germans favor banning the burqa in public spaces."  " THE BURKINI'S WILD RIDE:  A judge in France ruled that municipalities cannot ban women from wearing a certain kind of swimwear." Culturalization of social antagonisms, identity politics, etc .