Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

After Obama has "liberated" Malala Angelina Jolie, a woman coming from the heartland of the West and imperialism, is on a mission to "save and rescue" girls and women who are "unfit and cannot help themselves". She is also urging young people to "promote tolerance ." Tolerance ? Where was that "tolerance" when US imperilaism was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and droning weddings, using torture and rendition, and orphaning girls and women?  Didn't she and her ilk tolerate those criminal actions?

The political economy of a long depression

Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He  spoke to the world’s elite  this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of  Time  magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”  His new book is Bill Gates' favourite book of all time! Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity.  It should be added that Pinker is an apologist of the US imperialist violence and he is Islamophobic. The grim takeaway ... is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in  what is known as  the school-to-prison pipeline. Pinker  unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phr

The criminal Tony Blair has refused to personally apologise to the Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who was tortured in a jail in Libya following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 ... Compare that with this: "When Willy Brandt was chancellor of Germany, he sank to his knees at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust. There were hardly any Jews left in Poland, and Brandt, who as a socialist* [sic] was persecuted by the Nazis, was completely innocent of the crimes for which he was apologizing. But in doing so—with his historic kniefall von Warschau (Warsaw Genuflection), he was recongnizing the moral responsibility of the German people, whom he led as chancellor... Of course not everyone agrees that even atonement is due. Historian John Keay put it best: 'The conduct of states, as of individuals, can only assessed by the standards of their age, not by today's litigious criteria. Otherwise, we'd all be down on t

How women beedi workers set up Asia's largest housing cooperative

A "literary giant"! He might have been a good novelist, with a shocking and funny style. Howver, a good novelist is also judged by his/her integrity and principles as well by as his/her relationship to power and justice. Like Harper Lee, Roth accepted a medal from Obama, a criminal, an imeprialist and who, with others, laid the conditions which spawned Trump.

The cowardly BBC

Palestinian women

"Does 'populism' actually mean anything in this discourse, other than whatever may be inconvenient to Anglo-American liberalism?" No, you blithering idiots, Muqtada al-Sadr is not the Iraqi Trump

"Our values" Dear liberal feminists, How shall we remember the victims of the Manchester attack of last year? By having a highly sexualised, commodified celebrity . .

At the heart of it is the bourgeois liberal notion of justice—wherein equal and unequal people must be treated equally. It is equalizing the violent acts of the conqueror with those of the conquered. It is neither the Aristotelian nor the Marxist notion of justice—wherein justice means treating equal people equally and unequal people unequally.

The French rail workers do not want to take England as a role model

Bernard Lewis is apparently worse than I have thought

 Those who have kept silent or supported the Syrian regime's killing of around 400,000 civilians are now condemning Israel! 

UK turns blind eye to dirty Russian money, say MPs Mafia Expert Roberto Saviano Denounces London As 'The Most Corrupt Place On Earth'

Please, accept our apologies. Sorry for using labour strikes when we should have worked; sorry for using suicide bombing when we should have used fireworks and partied in your nightclubs; sorry for using hunger strikes when we should have thanked you for the food and shelter; sorry for stabbing you with knives when we could have cuddled you with pillows; sorry for being in residential areas when you dropped your smart bombs; sorry for threatening your borders and throwing ourselves at your bullets when all you wanted was to defend yourself. Sorry for all the trouble we have caused you, the "international comunity", the UN, and all your friends. The victim must apologize to the killers 

John McDonnell  

"The most urgent priority is not for Europe to understand its alters better, but rather itself and its own history —for it is within Europe's own longstanding structures of self-definition that pluralism in general, and the Islamic presence in particular, have been rendered into nightmares. If so, it is Europe itself which stands in urgent need of therapy. But as yet the patient is still in denial, and as any spychotherapist would confirm, those who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of their self-generated plight find it far easier to engage in a process of transference. Rather than confronting the illusory character of their own mental construction, they prefer to ascribe the very behavior which they refuse to acknowledge in themselves to those whom they believe are harassing them." — Roger Ballard , quoted by Jospeh Massad in Islam in Liberalism , 2015, p. 311

" Ever since  the Gezi Uprising in 2013, Turkey has witnessed a whirlwind of events: popular upsurges, a coup attempt, pivotal elections, changes in the political system, war within the country, war in Syria, bombing attacks. The country has been under an official state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, and the country’s economic model hit the fan in 2013. Erdoğan and his ruling clique have responded to these various crises in the same way: by holding ever tighter onto power and using increasingly oppressive and brutal means to consolidate their standing — a process of outright  fascization , if a very fragile one. The upcoming snap elections are just latest attempt by Erdoğan to stabilize his dominance, this time by quasi-democratic means." The Turkish elections