Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Passport by Mahmoud Darwish

Bringing Gender to the Forefront of the Trade Union Movement

India’s middle class had never before faced a revolt by domestic workers on such a scale. Sandhya Gupta, a resident, told the  New York Times : ‘They are like [a] bone that is stuck in our throats — we can neither swallow them, nor can we spit them out’ India's servants revolt

The official celebrations of the Warsaw Ghetto's uprising A letter from last year

مسكون Maskoon (Haunted) a film by Liwaa Yazji

Reclaiming the commons through state ownership? Maybe not (I posted a comment to the article)

The Right proves, in short, that the liberal faith in the impeccable consistency and logic of the status quo is unfounded. They're almost like hackers saying, if this system is as secure as you say, how come we can break into it ? Or, to put it another way, if your version of reality is the only version possible, how come it contains us ? Karl Rove used to be mocked by liberals for saying, "We're an Empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality." The chaos in Iraq seemed to horrifyingly rebut this unspeakable smugness, but did it? Did they not create their own reality? Wasn't the chaos, the civil war, the patrimonial corruption, the torture, the complete social breakdown, the million bodies, their own reality? — Richard Seymour But I think  this analysis  should be a complement to "the confidence men" article although Seymour's use of "democracy" is close to that of  the Financial Times' and the Guardian's, for instance...

"These brave women fighting for freedom, equality and justice face increasing challenges, amidst a violent, Islamic fundamentalist backlash. After 30 years in power, Al-Bashir and his regime have powerful socio-economic, religious and militarised allies throughout the region – and now these forces are working together to fight back against change in Sudan." "Sudan's women face backlash from Islamic fundamentalists"

According to research by the London School of Economics, if you’re a working class graduate with a first class degree you’re less likely to land an elite job than a middle class graduate with a 2:2. And even if you do succeed in getting the position, you'll earn on average 16% less than your middle class counterparts. Why? In this "investigation " Amol Rajan, media editor at the BBC, either has failed to answer why or he was censored (an editor edited him!). The main reason according to Rajan is "class prejudice". Class, thus, is like racism "a prejudice". not a production of socio-economic structure of property and power: how production is organised, who gets the profit, who owns what, and what power relations govern the producers and the owners of capital.  Furthermore, class society has to reproduce itself in terms of power relations and ideas, (i.e. ideology). This main division in society has to be deflected towards "identity politic...

The Taliban of San Francisco

Bassam Shakaa: The Making of a Palestinian 'Organic Intellectual'

Britain's National Breakdown Over Brexit (Written before Johnson became PM)

Made in Algeria: Football, Racism, and the Africa Cup of Nations Further reading: For the Muslims

Syria 1942 Providing food and clothes to Greek refugees.     (Credit to Huda's Welten Blog)

"The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the  kleptocrats fleece us , we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists." From Trump to Johnson: nationalists are on the rise — backed by billionaire oligarchs

“It is worth noting,” [Martin Luther] King said, “that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.” Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx (Click on Free view when subscription message pops up)

We go there to help them develop, we send them aid, our good-hearted philanthropists have relentlessly poured huge amounts of money in African countries, beautiful celebrities have made historical visits and speeches... so that those dark-and-brown-skinned creatures stop coming here and rely on themselves. It is obvious that migrants and would-be migrants should invest in building better boats and take with them onboard smaller boats (those ones that they can inflate when the evil water goes angry at them. They should look on ebay and buy some of them. They need them as back up. If they cannot afford bying inflatable boats, they should learn alternating techniques they would employ if there were too many of them on a boat; every half an hour half of them would swim. They would take turns. In that way the boat does not capsize. They should also take intensive swiming classes, go on diet because weight matters when you take a boat, and most importantly, they should carry out a thoroug...

A bombastic champion of the British empire, UK's 20th Etonian Prime Minister, a hop-ium supplier, now a hero in the tabloid, a representative of arrogance amd chauvinism ... Another outcome of years of mediocrity, celebrity-entertainment, and complicity. Boris Johnson: Gaffeur, entertainer, Brexiteer, Premier

"The attack on the band [Mashrou' Leila] in its home country started with a series of threats and accusations of  blasphemy  by Christian fundamentalist groups a few weeks before their August 9 concert in Byblos, a tourist-favourite town north of Beirut that hosts an annual summer festival." 'Blasphemy' laws to punish gay-fronted band See also Activists in Lebanon have long fought to end the use of article 534 of the penal code to prosecute consensual same-sex conduct. The law is a colonial relic,  put in place by the French mandate  in the early 1900s, and punishes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to one year in prison. It has at times been enthusiastically wielded to persecute LGBT people, often affecting particularly vulnerable groups including  transgender women  and  Syrian refugees .  Human Rights Watch

China's contribution to Middle East drone and missile proliferation (Note: The New Arab is a Qatari-owned news outlet)

One of Iran's Beverly Hills  It is a piece on Aljazeera about a rich enclosed mini-town occupied by Iranian "aristocracy", reflecting obscene wealth in a country with swamps of poverty. Brazil and other countries too come to mind.  However, for obvious reasons, you wouldn't find on Aljazeera an account of the atronomical amount of wealth squandered by the Qatari monarchy whether on weapons or as money invested in Western cities, including bailing out Western banks, instead of being invested in real development and industrial projects in Arab countries. We know what class interests the Qatari rentier ruling class represents and embodies.  "باستي هيلز" 

"How women's lives were revolutionised in Tunisia" Notice the BBC's careful choice of words: "These Tunisians are not doing at all badly. This is one imagines they are as emancipated as any girl can get" "He [the first president] gave ... He banned ... He introduced ..." "He was the liberator of Tunisian women." Women as passive creatures, victims waiting for a saviour, have no agency of their own. Now, imagine that someone says that this or that British, French or German leader was the liberator of British, French or German women. It doesn't happen because that not how it happned. But in a country like Tunisia, Egypt or Syria, an "enlighteneed dictator" has to be there to liberate women. If one looks at the movies, posters, photographs of Iranian university students, upper middle class Egyptian women on the beaches, meetings and social gatherings of the women of the elite, etc., of the 1950s and 1960s (google...