Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Surprised to see this on the BBC website Austerity is over 

" Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals" For "neoliberalism" just read capitalism or a phase of it.

Deen Sharp, who works at the Centre for Advanced Urban Research, said the situation on the island demonstrates how, “like many states around the world, the Egyptian government is focused on constructing its cities around the needs of financial capital and the powerful rather than those of its citizens”. Cairo islanders fighting violent state evictions

"Environmental defenders being killed in records numbers"

Robespierre sans masque

"Clearly the so-called “sectarian civil war” in Yemen is a recent permutation of the self-declared Sunni monarchies’ geostrategic rivalry with the Islamic Republic of Iran as well as those ruling dynasties’ discrimination against their own Shi`a populations. Overall, ample evidence is presented that the problems that provoked Yemen’s Southern Movement ( hirak ) and the 2011 popular demonstrations, respectively, are rooted in militarism and corruption rather than religion, and that the Gulf’s royal families have for decades feared mass mobilization in the most populous, least prosperous, perennially restive part of the Peninsula." Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf

I hear now and then that this or that person is on the left, this or that university is leftist, Le Parti Socialiste Français and the Spanish Socialist Party are socialists, etc.  The term " left" has become very loose and misleading over the last decades, and the blurring of the distinction has been deliberate.  What it means to be on the left

Michael Roberts reviewing Jonathan Portes' Capitalism: 20 Ideas You Really Need to Know

Between fine art and comic art On the Arab page

When Nasser [the Egyptian leader] nationalized the canal [the Suez Canal] , Eden erupted with egotism, bluster, and outrage. “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser,” Eden berated his foreign affairs minister. “I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered, and if you and the Foreign Office don’t agree, then you’d better come to the cabinet and explain why." — Stephen Dorril, Inside The Covert World Of Her Majesty's Intelligence Service , 2002, p. 613

Is Morocco headed toward insurrection?

Orwell and the language of dystopia

Statement of solidarity with the protests in norther Morocco

Lebanese army accused of torturing Syrian refugees

Inside the Gulag

"In Volume 3 of  Capital   Marx had described Venice and Genoa as urban republics where the merchants ‘subordinated the state more securely to themselves’, and implicit in some combination of Ruthven’s argument with my own is the further crucial thesis that this singularly failed to happen anywhere in the Islamic world. This ties in with a second and to me even more self-evident explanation , which is the one Mielants proposes in his book  The Origins of Capitalism and the “Rise of the West” , namely, that the failure of commercial capitalism in the Islamic world was essentially a failure of mercantilism. It is a striking fact that there was never any Islamic counterpart of the West’s violent mercantilist expansion. Again, the decisive factor here is the very different ways in which commercial capital and the state were linked to each other. The powerful state backing that English merchants received from the monarchy, what Brenner calls the ‘Crown-company partnership’,...

Labour and migration

"The point I try to make in that article is that the debate on whether Jews should be accorded full political rights in 1840s Prussia presents some striking similarities with the debate on Muslims’ integration into French society today. More precisely, my point is that the French state’s demand that religious minorities (and let’s be frank, Muslims in particular) respect the principle of secularism in the public space is reminiscent of Bruno Bauer’s position on the Jewish Question. Bruno Bauer believed that the Jews deserved to be granted political rights only if they stopped being Jews and embraced Enlightenment thought. In other words, he conceived of political emancipation as a kind of award that individuals receive only if they renounce their own religious identity and embrace the identity that the secular state deems as appropriate. Likewise, the French state demands that Muslims get rid of their religious/cultural practices if they want to show willingness to integrate into...

The Guardian's "progressive" Macron "During Netanyahu's official visit to Paris on Sunday, the French president condemned anti-Zionism as the new form of anti-Semitism. But what is the zionist project and how did it all begin?" Where it all began 

Le double jeux de la classe moyenne

Rashomon

The Singing of Marseille

Haft Tapeh sugar workers in Iran

A cartoon by Dan Murphy

The Jew Who Helped Invent the Modern Islamic State