Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Fly Emirates! Tortured, detained, disappeared: United Arab Emirates abuses rife in southern Yemen

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of

Japan's demographic crisis No sex, please

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017) Excerpts, part 2 "The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101 The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102 "Laws h

Israel A liberal Israeli paper unlike any Western liberal one

Fiat workers to strike over Ronaldo signing Good, but not enough.

Free ebook “Freedom of movement is a fundamental human right, not something that can be restricted by a racist or nationalist government. Borders are not natural divisions between people or benign lines on a map. They are mechanisms for some groups of people to claim land, resources, and people, while fundamentally excluding other people from access to those places. They create and exacerbate inequalities and they protect the economic, political, and cultural privileges that have accrued over the past few hundred years through the spoils of colonialism, capitalism, and most recently economic globalization.” Excerpt From: Jones, Reece, “ Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move .” Verso. 2016 Capital, "a thing", is free to move anywhere. A human is not. This is one of the ironies of social progress after hundereds of thousands of years of human evolution.

Germany "Neo-Nazi terror was overlooked, or perhaps deliberately ignored," says the BBC. " Suddenly, it was revealed that a neo-Nazi cell of just three people had operated with impunity for 11 years, murdering 10 people - and had remained unknown to police." See also this long read Related stories German soldiers performing Nazi salutes Goebbels' secretary who "knew nothing about the murder of 6 million Jews"

The mass submission to football (Originally published on the right-wing French paper Le Figaro)

Social justice "The top 12 earners on the BBC's latest list of star salaries are all men."  It would have made a difference if half of them were women! "Match of the Day host Gary Lineker has overtaken Chris Evans as the best-paid person on the list, earning between £1.75m-£1.76m in 2017-18." What the fuck does Lineker produce for society? Do the British people question this? We have seen already that they don't give a shit.

American culture and the liberalization of hijab (You need free registration to read the piece)

In a country that wants to bring "freedom" and "democracy" to others

Britain has gone to huge trouble to humiliate itself

Migration "The metaphor of Fortress Europe thus represents a highly sophisticated construction—far more so than the fortified continent of World War Two. Its lines of fortification are mobile and teem with electronic surveillance devices, reinforcing an arsenal of repression centred round the weapons of bureaucracy and fear. Its walls are semi-permeable, designed not simply to exclude but to filter entrance in a highly restrictive way, constantly fabricating and modifying systems of hierarchical categorization, of which the distinction between ‘refugees’—acceptable, but only in limited numbers—and ‘economic migrants’, illegitimate and thus illegalized, is only one example. It operates by establishing compacts with other states or agencies, outsourcing functions of coercion, detention, surveillance and control." — Stathis Kouvelakis

Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology

" There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." — Stathis Kouvelakis Europe's Iron Curtain

From the archive Dedicated democracy

Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor Excerpts - Part 1

Trade war and depresssion

"Cant displays of piety and dogmatism remained anathema to him." The centenary of the birth of Egypt's musical rebel