Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Lebanon Good news for feminism! Lebanon is on the right track in "emancipating" women, following the "Western values" of "liberated women" and " our way of life"

Behind Trump's trade war The AI arms race Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read this FT article.

Along with two criminals,  Aung San Suu Kyi, Barack Obama and others, Mother Theresa was also a nobel prize winner. The BBC has just revealed that Mother Theresa charity in India has been selling babies . But after all these years, the Corporation has still not questioned the mission of the woman/the saint. After all, it is about showing that someone, somewhere in the "Third World" is doing something for the poor. That makes the "West" feel good about itself.

Free ebook Violent Borders - Refugees and the Right to Move

First of all, there's Shell, a company you will be familiar with.   This week they're holding an annual "green-washing" event in London to try and persuade the public it cares about our future. But Shell doesn't really care, and thanks to their unfair employment policies, near 200,000 contract workers at Shell have no future, as they work in temporary, insecure jobs.  Contract workers outnumber permanent workers more than two to one at Shell, and as the company freely admits, do the most dangerous jobs.  We've been asked by IndustriALL global union to pressure Shell to limit precarious work and protect precarious workers' rights; to respect commitments to international standards on the environment, communities and human rights; and to apply the same health and safety standards at operations everywhere, including suppliers.   Please support this important campaign here . Second, we have a somewhat more unusual campaign.  Norway is historically known as o...

"In common with their German, French and Italian counterparts, the Social Democrats are now struggling and are on course for their worst result for more than a century (a recent YouGov poll put them on just 22 per cent." "Keep Sweden Swedish ... Muslims are not fully human."

"Today, the Economics departments that actually take Marx seriously are limited to a handful in the US (e.g. at  UMass Amherst  and  The New School ), the UK (e.g. at  SOAS ), India (e.g. at  JNU ), Brazil, China, and in a few other countries scattered across the globe. Because of the Economics discipline’s lack of openness to alternative ways of thinking about Economics, studies by scholars from these departments will rarely make it into mainstream journals and students from these departments." Marx's birthday and the dismal science

"Her credibility as substitute leader derives from the self-generated myth that she is a humane, skilled opponent of the racist, nationalist Right.  Yet Merkel, though you would hardly know it from the reporting, is one of the major architects of Europe's racist backlash against migrants and Muslims. She is not so much the anti-Trump as, in her way, the condition for all Trumps." Merking

"Obama sang the praises of American multiculturalism but deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president. Now Trump has stripped Obama’s policy of its already threadbare human face." "American carnage"

The Dream of the Red Mansions (You need a free subscription to read this review)

"Business is business" "Pubs charging more during England games," says the BBC. Prices at London hotels more than doubled after London bombing  It's all goood for business! Court ruled seeling weapons to Saudi Arabia during Yemen war was lawful! It saves British jobs!

I like Losurdo's answers on the subject of liberalism, but also his criticism of some aspects of Marxism. An interview with Domenico Losurdo

UK Good news! A quarter of estate agents are in "financial distress" . They are parasites anyway. Using David Graeber's description, I think they are "bullshit jobs" too.

Mexico: violence, corruption and inequality For more details, see  " The Geopolitics of Mexico ", especially the part from "Geolitical imperatives" onwards

Racism and the rise of the right: a reading list

Inglorious Empire - What the British Did to India  by Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 1, with my comments  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, c...

"The horror of the twentieth century was not something that burst into a world of peaceful coexistence suddenly and from without. At the same time, being dissatisfied with the edifying picture of the habitual hagiography and situating oneself on the firm ground of reality, with its condtradictions and conflicts, does not in any way mean denying the merits and strong points of the intellectual tradition [of liberalism] under examination. But we certainly must bid farewell once and for all to the myth of the gradual, peaceful transition, on the basis of purely internal motivations and impulses, from liberalism to democracy, or from general enjoyment of negative liberty to an ever wider recognition of political rights. Moreover, has liberalism definitely left behind it the dialectic of emancipation and dis-emancipation, with the dangers of regression and restoration implicit in it? Or is this dialectic still alive and well, thanks to the malleability peculiar to this current of tho...

Echoes For Samira al-Khalil

The Silence الصمت

Those who refuse to be homogenized by the global capitalist culture; those who are outside the fanum , the "sacred liberal order",  and ... If  we just make Muslims liberal, everything will be alright!  Islamophobia in Germany