Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries: is it safe to return?

Centrists won't save Britain

I feel sad for David Beckham , that hero, icon for millions of British and non-British, a charming prince for many ladies, who missed a knighthood, for tax avoidance. What a horrific punishment!  Let's not question the income of a celebrity or a footballer. They are more important than teachers who are deserting the profession or nurses. How boring Britain would be without celebrities!

Is Iraq steering towards post-sectarianism? I think there is some intellectual laziness in describing some non-traditional/governing parties as "populist". This is the adjective that has been (mis/ab) used in Europe as well. I also think that the support of the protests by the highest Shi'a authority is indicative. It aims at absorbing the anger, but also a move that is aware of the growth of the Sadrist movement. After all, this same authority has been generally complicit for more than a decade and has not mobilised the Shi'a (the majority) for  economic and social rights.

Israeli weapons used against Rohingya Muslims

Midle East Monitor , which the bbc says it is pro-Hamas, is trying to tarnish "our British values", spreading hatred of "our democracy and freedoms"!  "UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported that British intelligence officers have been involved in human rights abuses on hundreds of occasions. According to government lawyers, there are concerns that some potential human rights abuses took place within international armed conflict and could amount to war crimes."

Then as now I align myself with Orwell's pessimism. "To the British working class, Orwell argued, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, or Madrid had seemed less worthy of their consideration than 'yesterday’s football match.' Even more disappointing to him was the total lack of solidarity that the English working class had shown for “colored” workers in the colonies." Today, despite a tremendous global flow of information of what is happening elsewhere, Orwell's pessimism has an echo when one looks at the extent of the working classes passivity in the "West" before the plunder, inequality, exploitation and ‘Islamophobia’ at home and people's struggle during the Arab uprisings or barbarism in Syrian and Myanmar. " Orwell’s late collaboration with the propaganda apparatus of Western imperialism is a sad, regrettable, and inexcusable fact." I think the following is a good assessment of Orwell. Geroge Orwell and the ...

Then as now, the question still stands: "Which side are you on?" In Dubious Battle (a movie) (close a few pop up windows and select 'openload')

The coffee shop chain Costa has been bought by Coca Cola   " I will never drink Costa coffee again! Oh boycot them, its a disgrace. I will never set foor in there again! Yes you will.  After all it will be like everything else in this country.  You know, five minutes of frothing at the mouth, righteous indignation and bluster. Then its back to our normal apathetic, lie down and be used as a doormat status quo ante. Nothing changes, sad but true." — a comment on the bbc article The previous owner of Costa,  Whitbread, reported the bbc in 2015 ,  "no longer recognises trade unions. Whitbread has always paid above the national minimum wage, but otherwise pay in the company is set by supply and demand ." Why do you need trade unions in the land of milk and honey and where workers rights are guranteed by the free market? Over to you, Coca Cola! Google "Coca Cola human rights" and you'll get an idea. 

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri...

Very good! The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza/Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that exploits them, appropriating their productive powers while granting them less and less control. On labour and human bo...

Business first Billions of pounds and jobs "The British government has no British values" You British women who want to liberate backward Muslim women from oppression, what are you up to these days?

The disappeared and the dead at the hands of the Syrian regime

From the history of 'liberalism' or things my American professors at university never told me The famous French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) who is known for his major work Democracy in America. "In May 1847, noting that the 'Bey of Tunisia' had already abolished the 'odious institution' [of slavery]—which in Muslim countries, by the French liberal's admission, took a 'milder' form—de Tocqueville expressed the opinion that 'we should doubtless only proceed to the abolition of slavery with care and moderation'. De Tocqueville seemed to be ready to accept a compromise even more favourable to the slaveholding South [of the U.S.]. 'As for the policy permitting slavery to develop in a whole portion of the territory where it was hitherto unknown, I will concede ... that one can do nothing but tolerate this existence in the special, current interests of the Union.' [A letter of 13 April 1857]...

Whenever you do something stupid, just remember that Roman emperor Caligula waged a war on Poseidon [the Greek god of the seas and other waters]. He had his army march to the beach and told them to start stabbing the water.

The Islamophobe Dutch politician Geert Wilders is organising a cartoon competition to depict the prophet Mohammed. Here is what Alain Badiou wrote in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo : "Here and there, people say that  Charlie Hebdo ’s cartoons aren’t attacking Muslims as such, but rather the fundamentalists’ terrorist activity. That is objectively false. Let’s take a typical example of their cartoons: we see two naked buttocks and the caption ‘Et le cul de Mahomet, on a le droit?’ (‘And what about Mohammed’s arse – can we use that?’). So is the Muslim faithful’s Prophet, a constant target for such stupidity, a contemporary terrorist? No, that’s not any kind of politics. It’s got nothing to do with the solemn defence of ‘freedom of expression’. It is a ridiculous, provocative obscenity targeting Islam itself – and that’s all. And it’s nothing more than third-rate cultural racism, a ‘joke’ to amuse the local pissed-up Front National supporter.  It may be amusi...

The tip of an iceberg - Honour bound .. - To defend freedom. Those two of my favourite lines in this film Camp X Ray (a movie) (close the three or four pop-up windows)

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

Iraq Protests and anger of Shia men diretced at Shia politicians? I tought it was fundamentally, inherently and eternally a Sunni-Shia war! "Sunni and Shia politicians sat in the parliament and built fortunes with the blood of the people who massacred each other in the street." Oil flows freely, but corruption fuels growing anger You see, there is no hope in these people. We "liberated them", we "helped them having democracy" after 2003, but it seems they are not fit to catch up with "the civilised world".

The burka and handshaking, and other personal freedoms "Everyone should be able to attend their religious as well as their bodily needs without the police sticking its nose in". — K. M.  But today is not only the state or a company that might repress your freedoms, but also people who disagree with you; they avoid you, marginalise you, or even side with the state in repressing you in the name of "integration" and "our values". You are the Other, the threat, the radical, the non-conformist, etc.

Theresa May in Africa "Aid" is a con. It is partly to mask the criminal role of the City of London in capital flight and as a route to tax havens In figures: "In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States. for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows." How poor countries develop rich countries Or aid in reverse I add the following mechanisms: Uneven and combined development serves the imperialist st...

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.” The US [and its allies] helped massacre Yemeni schoolchildren

Iran 74 lashes for being a trade unionist

"Criminal sons of bitches on the make. That's what we've been." Route Irish (a movie)

The multiculturalism the European right fears ...

John Gamey: As the forces of Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Russian air force, reconquered Daraa city, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, an aid worker reported to Kareem Shaheen in The Guardian that “people have accepted the reality that the entire world is fighting against the revolution, and therefore it cannot continue.” Shaheen is correct; the realisation however is late. The “the entire world” – all the major imperialist and regional reactionary powers – has been against the revolution since its outbreak in March 2011. Their differences have been entirely tactical. The crushing of heroic Daraa involved an unwritten agreement between the Assad regime, Russia, the US and Israel. Four ‘heroes’ of today’s global ‘alt-right’ – Assad, Netanyahu, Trump and Putin – have emerged triumphant over the corpse of the Syrian revolution.” Syria Endgame

This headline is on Foreign Policy, not on a marxist website America is committing war crimes and doesn't even know why (In the url the adjective 'awful' is added to describe the crimes. I am not aware whether under Obama, for example, the likes of FP, ever called the actions of the US "war crimes").  Personally, I began to learn about the crimes of American imperialism only in the build up to the 2003 war on Iraq. At that time, it was through books and documentaries by authors such as Noam Chomsky and William Blum. Before that I mainly knew the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein ...  The claim in the FP article that Iran has been supporting the Houthis is flimsy and has been disputed by a few analysts  who qualified such "a support".    Here is one of those analyses . Related One of Blum's book is the famous Rogue State . Ironically, it is endorsed by Osama bin Laden and available on the CIA website. No, it is not a conspiracy theory ...

From the archive The contradictions of identity Gary Younge will be speaking at the British Academy , London, 17 September 2018

An admission that this one of the inherent aspects of capitalism In Tooze’s view,  “These crises are hard to predict or define in advance,”  and, short of more regulation, there is nothing we can do. In a way, as long as capitalism continues as the dominant mode of production globally, that is pretty much right.  That reminds me of what Greenspan said in his final summation of the crisis: “ I doubt that stability is achievable in capitalist economies, given the always turbulent competitive markets continuously being drawn toward but never quite achieving  equilibrium” . He went on,  “unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible. Assuaging the aftermath is all we can hope for.” Crashed: more the how than the why