Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Britain is a racist country, and prejudice exists within all parties. Labour has attempted to deal with antisemitism in its ranks, not always successfully or adeptly. The Conservatives have ignored the problem. It is not whataboutery to argue that no political party should harbor racists of any hue. But the Conservatives have been able to ignore their own issues and problems because Islamophobia is more broadly acceptable among the public and the media class." The Tories' Islamophobia problem

The Arab uprisings: an appraisal Comparing the Arab uprisings with the revolutions of the 1970s like the ones in Yemen, Nicaragua and Iran, social theorist Asef Bayat, pinpoints some crucial differences between them. The Arab revolutions, he rightly, argues, lacked an intellectual anchor. In contrast also to the ideas and visions behind the English revolution, the American revolution, the French revolution, and more recently, the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Arab uprisings lacked  leadership strategies.  Moreover, the Arab revolutions lacked that radicalism that marked the twentieth-century revolutions: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, social justice, etc. Instead, the prevailing voices from Tunisia to Yemen, from Libya to Syria, were the voices of legal reform, accountability and human rights. The predominant secular and Islamist currents took the free market and neoliberal capitalism for granted and uncritically.  Property relations and structure of powe...

"The case would help shatter the nation’s two-party system, transform how the public viewed the people running the country and, eventually, bring down a government." Spain's Watergate

Sixteen years after the  United States  invaded  Iraq  and left a trail of  destruction and  chaos in the country and the region, one aspect of the war remains criminally underexamined: why was it fought in the first place? What did the Bush administration hope to get out of the war? ," asks Ahsen I Butt. Butt has tried to re-examine the motives of the U.S. in invading Iraq: " Put simply, the Iraq war was motivated by a desire to (re)establish American standing as the world's leading power." He has hit the nail once or twice, but he has not explored what this re-establishment of "the world's leading power" consists of. Nor does he he provide the historical conjuncture and context: the domestic sociology in the U.S., the continuation of 1991 invasion and the collapse of the Soviet Union and "globalisation".  Reviewing Andrew Bacevich's American Empire , Peter Gowan draws a much better picture of the motives behind the invasion of 200...

While the British and their allies supported the royalist North, the new government of South Yemen embarked on a programme of nationalisation, introduced central planning, put limits on housing ownership and rent, and implemented a land reform. By 1973, the GDP of South Yemen increased by 25 percent.  And despite the conservative environment and resistance, women became legally equal to men, polygamy, child marriage and arranged marriage were all banned by law. Equal rights in divorce were also sanctioned. The Republic also secularised education and sharia law was replaced by a state legal code. Sources: Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring ,  2017, p. 5.  Maxine Molyneux, Aida Yafai, Aisha Mohsen and Noor Ba'aba, Women and Revolution in the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen , Feminist Review, issue 1, 1979, pp.4-20.

Canada and Israel "Rather than pressure corporations to act more ethically – a concept that often seems in direct conflict with their bottom-line imperative of making a profit – campaigners might work for deeper reforms, such as public control or ownership of enterprises like Bombardier. Or, perhaps more radically, look to indigenous society itself for ideas on how to curb the capitalist profit motive." Bombardier Abroad: Patterns of Dispossession

An excellent summary of Political Islam Compare the following with the conventional, cultural arrogance of the gladiators of the international "liberal order" (i.e. Western imperialism) and the media pundits. "Political Islam or Islamism is the consequence of the social frustrations, articulated around the social divisions of class and generation that followed from the economic crises of the global neo-liberal experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. The demographic revolution produced large cohorts of young Muslims, who, while often well educated to college level, could not easily find opportunities to satisfy the aspirations that had been inflamed by nationalist governments. Although these diverse studies of Islam are primarily concerned with the modern period, in order to understand such contemporary social movements as Islamism, we need to start in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking we can identify four periods of Islamic political action in response to the soc...

Revolution without Revolutionaries "People may or may not have ideas about revolution for it to happen. For the outbreak of a revolution has little to do with any idea, and even less with a 'theory,' of revolution. Revolutions 'simply' happen. But having or not having ideas about revolution does have critical consequences for the outcome when it actually occurs. Having lived in both Iran and Egypt just prior to their revolutions, I was struck by how different these experiences were. I was enthralled by the Arab Spring's more peaceful, open, pluralistic, and less repressive texture but was perplexed by its nonradical, loosely organised, exposed, and perilous quality." —Asef Bayat, Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring , 2017, Preface, xi (in paperback ed.) "The speed, spread, and intensity of the recent revolutions extraordinarily unparalleled, while their lack of ideology, lax coordination, and absence of any galv...

Reminiscent of the Carter and Reagan era "By implicitly authorizing the Honduras security deals, the US “deputized” Israel to gallop into the region and whip up a posse of right-wing proxy reinforcements in Central America that the US could count on when needed." Israeli arms industry 'great leap' in Central America

New Zealand "[W]hat it is not is shocking. There is nothing shocking about it. How can there be? Have you not been paying attention? Much of his rhetoric and references are borrowed from the political and mainstream media. “People who can only condemn racism and Islamophobia — being ‘horrified’ and ‘shocked’ — only when so much blood is spilled are part of the problem,” the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal  observed on Twitter  on Friday. “Because the rest of the time, they are busy normalising and minimising them.”  —Mehdi Hasan Hasan though seems to legitimise the very same people he is condemning by appealing to them " to stop their anti-Muslim rhetoric ."

"The fact that there is resistance and striving for justice, for which these several hundred mothers stand, does not really fit into this picture. Whatʹs more, the defence of human rights has become institutionalised – like for instance in Germany. We are no longer living in the 1970s or 1980s, when thousands of people took to the streets for democracy and human rights. Today, people prefer to sign petitions on the Internet." Iran: the summer of 1988 A dark chapter in Iranian history