Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The UK universities benefiting from opioid money "Philanthropy" as a facade

What is it? The Advertising Standard Authority (ASA) said the Missguided advert featured "highly sexualised" images and "objectified women", while it told Boohoo to make sure its advertising was "socially responsible". The BBC's research found that on a typical UK High Street fashion retailer's website, 8% of women's modelling images were "racy", compared with 16% for online-only sites. Missguided said: "Our website reflects what appeals to the young women who love to buy from us - sassy, empowered, unafraid of what others think." In a world, "a free market," where almost everything is commodified, who has a monoply on definitions? Is sexualising and commodification of the body confined to fashion advertisement? Is it not one of the values that distinguishes "us," the "liberated", from the Other, but unites us with a commodified/sexualised Colombian or a Japanese?

Here is one of the reasons I once criticised/mocked the American historian Timothy Snyder when he boasted of "the rule of law." He doesn't contextualise that law in class, race and capitalist relations where "big thieves hang small ones."  Jailed for Life for Stealing a $159 Jacket? And 3,200 more serving Life Without Parole

"The women were demanding an end to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, minors, pregnant women, and survivors of torture, rape and trafficking, a practice that is sanctioned in no European country apart from the UK; in the US, it was introduced under the post-9/11 Patriot Act and signed into law under President Obama. The political philosopher Howard Caygill goes so far as to argue that violence at the borders of the modern nation-state has been the chief means by which modernity has contained and denied the violence of its own civility: ‘The possibility of feats of extravagant and unrestrained violence at and beyond the border [have historically] contrasted with the constraints of rational management of violence within the borders of nation-states.’ To put it simply, violence at the border serves a purpose, and so does the shock it provokes. It obscures the violence of the internal social arrangements of modern nations, which fight to preserve the privilege of the f...

s  North  China  Campaign  of  1860  was  not  unex- pected;  most  immediately,  it  followed,  and  was  partly  inspired  by,  wars  in Algeria  and  India  in  the  preceding  decades.  Yet,  there  might  seem  to  be a  contradiction  between  the  liberal  character  of  the  leaders  of  the  cam- pai gn  and  the ir  T ali ban -li k e  dem oli tio n  of  the  pal ac es  and  gar den s  a t Y uanmingyuan.  Ringmar ,  how eve r ,  disputes  tha t  a  contradiction  exis ts . Liberalism  in  the  mid-19th  century  championed  free  exchange.  When  the liberal ’  free-market  policies  met  with  resistance,  s...

Can Violence Ever Be Legitimate?

"Big issues transcend Brexit." Indeed. I remember when in late 2018 I asked someone who works in Parliament: with or without Brexit, will there be an end to obscene inequality, exploitation, austerity, tuition fees, support of dictators...? He replied: "No," with a strange look at me as if I had asked him questions that either he never heard of or they were irrelevant. Ken Loach

ore corporate management models, they increasingly use and exploit cheap faculty labor ... Students increasingly fare no better in sharing the status of a sub ‐ altern class beholden to neoliberal policies and values’ (Giroux, 2014, p. 20). The implications of this go far beyond the university itself, resulting in what Giroux, one of the leading writers on this topic, has called ‘the near‐death of the university as a democratic public sphere’ (p. 16). In these assessments, neoliberalism, in its impact on Higher Education, is associated with a range of other terms or ‘discourses’: The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institu ‐ tions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an ...

"A Quiet Revolution" by Leila Ahmed I personally disagree with the word veil and hijab because they are not specific. They both mean a cover, but they don't specify what is covered. "Hijāb" in Arabic means "to cover"/"to hide". "Headscarf" is a more accurate term. 

Members of the Kurdish Women's Protection Units A photo by Delil Souleiman (AFP and Getty)

"Over the past few years a number of brilliant scholars have been hounded out of the academy because of their political convictions, their commitments to struggles for Palestinian rights and against white supremacy. At the same time, cowardly administrations repeat right-wing talking points about free speech. It’s indicative of this capitalist, upside-down world that tells us that corporations are people but people are disposable, that we live in a knowledge society but facts, learning, and education are simultaneously devalued and commodified, that success brings freedom when in fact it brings debt and entrapment in the service of the capital accumulation of the very rich." Which side are you on? The Comradely Professor

The biggest threat to the U.S. is not China, Russia or the enemy within (Muslims, socialists, etc); it's another emerging super power with a larger economy, bigger military power and higher productivity, and it's a few miles away. Cuba. U.S. sanctions on Cuba

Supported the 2011 uprising from the beginning Fadwa Souleiman May Skaf

Poverty prize

"In her book  Learning From the Germans , the philosopher Susan  Neiman observes that the enormity of the Holocaust has forced Germany to address the darkest aspects of its past. But it has also allowed Britain and America not to do so, to avoid thinking too deeply about the history of slavery or of empire, to minimise their horrors in comparison with the Holocaust." —Kenan Malik, the Guardian online 13 October 2019

95 suicides or about one death every four days! "In the drive to make universities profitable, there is a fundamental confusion about what they are for. As a result, there has been a shift from prizing learning as an end in itself to equipping graduates for the job market, in what for some can be a joyless environment. At the same time as access to university was dramatically expanded, spending on public services was slashed: in the decade after the financial crash, day-to-day spending on public services as a share of GDP was at its lowest since the late 1930s. This meant savage cuts to local authorities, schools budgets and NHS mental health provision." In addition to the workload at university, according to a 2014 report , "a significant number of students  (45%) do paid part-time  work alongside their studies, with 13% doing a 35-hour week." That's what we call joyful learning and learning to develop critical thinking! In reality, corporate universit...

Propaganda – Engineering Consent

Israa Abdelfattah, 41, was one of the most iconic leaders of the 2011 revolution. More arrests in Egypt

"This image has also become a stereotype because it is simplistic in its pitting supposedly free sisters in the West against wretched victims in Arab countries. Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct." The West's gleeful obsession with "oppressed Arab women" Further reading: Islam in Liberalism by Joseph A. Massad "In his analysis of the emergence of 'military humanitarianism,' David Chandler notes that the development of the NGO regime prevalent in the 1980s focused on 'capacity buidling,' 'empowering,' and 'civil society' (and this is of course in line with the democratisation ideas...that Muslims lack civil society and one has to be created for them to advance democracy), 'as they argued the need for a lo...

Via Michael Roberts Poland, the largest Eastern European country, goes to the polls today. The socially conservative Law and Justice party government is expected to increase its vote share in the election. The centre-right Civic Platform — which ruled Poland from 2007 to 2015 with EU President Donald Tusk remains unpopular because of its previous austerity measures in line with EU policy. In contrast, Law and Justice has raised welfare  benefits. The flagship policy was a child benefit scheme, dubbed 500+, that pledged a monthly payment of 500 zlotys for every second and subsequent child, a sum that could provide larger families with the equivalent of another salary. And now the government is offering a sharply higher minimum wage which would increase in steps from 2,250 zlotys (€511) today to 4,000 zlotys by the end of 2023 — a 78 per cent jump. This is the basis of support for Law and Justice probably despite its promotion of Catholic-infused conservative values; and...