Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A few years ago I was told not to talk politics in class. I left my job. In my current job I am very cautious. I had lived under a police state, and in a “free market democracy” you don’t fear the state, but you fear loosing your job. You may be even hated by others for expressing your non-conformist views. “Social activism could cost you valuable career currency”

 End the denial

 The Syrian Chambers of Commerce in 2020: The Rise of a New Business Elite

 “Selective justice”

  Americans have decided on who is the most influential Arab Someone who reflects “Western values and culture” and created in the bourgeois image.

I strongly appeal to the “International law” and “the international community” to do something about this. I always believed in your “values” and “the upholding of the peace.” I always agreed with the Western states definition of terrorism. When we and our allies do it is either an ‘accident’ or ‘fighting for freedom’. When they do it, it’s ‘terrorism’.   Top Iranian scientist assassinated  Related Five scientists in 10 years

A long tradition of complicity in crime This article is available in four languages An indispensable’ partner in the  EU ’s strategy in the Middle East and the Mediterranean 

 Some laughter.

“This is the people’s vaccine,”  said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program.  “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity .” Calling the shots

  Why the ‘Arab Spring’ failed

 

 “ I think we can get too distracted by minor doctrinal disputes between self-proclaimed centrists and right-wingers and miss the fact that the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing. It tends to take reactionary and anti-left positions and has done so for a long time. The names can change. People can switch institutional affiliations. But the defense of the establishment and the US-led liberal order and other Cold War verities such as classical liberalism, Western values, the Enlightenment, and Zionism remains their primary task. This is the legacy of the lucrative conformism noted by Alfred Kazin and Czeslaw Milosz.” The Liberal Establishment is ‘a Stranger to Self-Examination’

 Barack Obama’s Kill Lists Related

“When we murder, it is a ‘tragic accident’. When they murder, it is cause to light the Eiffel Tower in solemn remembrance and to commemorate the dead on Twitter with hashtags expressing human solidarity.  “Guilty of state-sponsored terrorism”

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

After 19 years the most powerful military power in the world and history, with the biggest annual GDP and powerful wealthy allies, has failed to defeat the Taliban, stabilise the country and ‘liberate women’. And it is leaving behind a weak government. 26,000 Afghan children killed or maimed since 2005

 Records surge in racist violence

The usual privatise the profits, socialise the losses and costs Squeeze on public sector salaries

“This weekend, the  G20 leaders’ summit takes place  – not physically of course, but by video link.  Proudly hosted by Saudi Arabia, that bastion of democracy and civil rights, the G20 leaders are focusing on the impact on the world economy from the COVID-19 pandemic.” G20: the debt solution

  Why Trump gained support among minorities

 Bloody Sunday 1920

“ Production of chlordecone was stopped in the United States - where it was marketed as Kepone - as far back as 1975, after workers at a factory producing it in Virginia complained of uncontrollable shaking, blurred vision and sexual problems. In 1979, the World Health Organization classed the pesticide as potentially carcinogenic.   But in 1981 the French authorities authorised chlordecone for use in banana plantations in the French West Indies - and even though it was finally banned in 1990, growers lobbied for - and got - permission to carry on using stocks until 1993. It was only in 2018 - after more than 10 years of campaigning by French Caribbean politicians - that President Emmanuel Macron accepted the state's responsibility for what he called ‘an environmental scandal’. Martinique is an integral part of France, but one of the island's MPs, Serge Letchimy, says it would never have taken the state so many years to react if there had been pollution on the same scale in Bri

Ishmahil Blagrove, 21 November 2020: It’s interesting how some people nowadays avoid using ‘the ruling class’ and opt for ‘the establishment’.          

 The repression of the yellow vests

 The Eye of Providence

 

The Syrian Revolution Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death

  Watch for this story and compare how much coverage it will have compared to the coverage of the four people recently killed in France. “And it wasn't just that these alleged executions took place, it was the manner of impunity by which they happened. In fact, according to the report, there was an air of competitiveness within the special forces. One moment stood out in Gen Campbell's address: when he described how some junior soldiers had allegedly been coerced to shoot unarmed civilians to get their "first kill" - a practice known as "blooding". He said that weapons and radios had then been allegedly planted to support claims that the victims had been enemies killed in action.” We’ll we ever see “Je suis Afghan civilian”? Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]

  Biden may pave the way for a more competent autocrat [sic] Trump has never been an autocrat. I don’t see the author using the word metaphorically.

 Another page of the unfinished book of corruption in the UK, and especially in England. What will the “public” do? “I don’t care much. That’s how things are. Now I am looking forward to the vaccine to go back to my normal life.” Then comes the ritual again: we will cross a piece of paper “to make a change.” It is more likely that the Conservatives will be re-elected. Indifference is not only towards migrants ‘dying’ in the seas and the vulnerable in society, but also to cronyism and clientelism at home. Corruption of the City of London, the Panama Files, HSBC money laundering ... have not made the “public” even protest on the street. Faith combined with fear and conservatism are still working in favour of the ruling class.  Despite of what has happened since 2008/09, there is a general sense that the state has managed the crisis and the pandemic. The state intervened and has been paying those made unemployed. Thus the resignation. Cronyism and clientelism How Covid revealed the new sh

“ Robinson makes the point in a number of his novels that to be dogmatic, to preach instead of to explore, is to surrender to the very constraints that we need to challenge.“ Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Return of Nature

Cruise liners turned into jails for migrants

 Save capitalism, tax boomers, new report suggests

One of the two bookshops on the same street, where I bought some of my favourite books mainly during the period between 1995-2000, when I left political activism and immersed myself in reading on the benches of l’Avenue Habib Bourguiba. It was the period when I was trying to get a passport. The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism  (French versions) by Wilhelm Reich Germinal by Emile Zola Zorba by Nicos Kazantzakis (French version) The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells One-Dimentional Man by Herbert Marcuse (Arabic version) The Second Sex (le deuxième sex) by Simone de Beauvoir and others One man’s fights to preserve relic of bygone age

 A feminist icon from 13th century Hafsid era

  Decolonising Maghreb history

“The United States, as pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two almost equal-sized political universes. But power abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the evolution is towards differential experiments in post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, will face a new depression without the wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does this point except to total destruction in the 2022 midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?” — Ecologist and geographer Mike Davis

Brave New World was a far shrewder guess at the likely shape of a future tyranny than Orwell’s vision of Stalinist terror... 1984 has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere. —JG Ballard, 2002

 Did America commit war crimes in Vietnam? Related The most notorious war crime of the Vietnam era

Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles “Ethnic differences entwine with other social differences –especially of class, region, and gender. Ethnonationalism is strongest where it can capture other senses of exploitation. The most serious defect of recent writing on ethnonationalism has been its almost complete neglect of class relations (as in Brubaker, 1996; Hutchinson, 1994; Smith, 2001). Others wrongly see class as materialistic, ethnicity as emotional (Connor, 1994: 144–64; Horowitz, 1985: 105–35). This simply inverts the defect of previous generations of writers who believed that class conflict dominated while ignoring ethnicity. Now the reverse is true, and not only among scholars. Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles. Yet in actuality these two types of conflict infuse each other. Palestinians, Dayaks, Hutus, and so on believe they are being materially exploited. Bolsheviks and Maoists believed t

 

  Pandemic, China, Israel, the US, the Arab uprisings ...

  How the north was made—and unmade

 Biden’s election is not a mandate for centrism Related “The problem—as we have witnessed over the past decade and are likely to continue seeing—is not only that Democrats and Republicans disagree on issues of culture, identity, and power, but that they represent radically different swaths of the economy. Democrats represent voters who overwhelmingly reside in the nation’s diverse economic centers, and thus tend to prioritize housing affordability, an improved social safety net, transportation infrastructure, and racial justice. Jobs in blue America also disproportionately rely on national R&D investment, technology leadership, and services exports. By contrast, Republicans represent an economic base situated in the nation’s struggling small towns and rural areas. Prosperity there remains out of reach for many, and the party sees no reason to consider the priorities and needs of the nation’s metropolitan centers. That is not a scenario for economic consensus or achievement. At the

A la John Wayne’s.   Another extrajudicial assassination by Israel and the US within a sovereign country “The New York Times newspaper reported that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, al-Qaeda's second-in-command” [and his daughter] “were shot dead in the street by Israeli agents following a request from the US.”

 Macron’s political extremism

 Three quarters of England’s care workers earn below ‘real’ living wage The article fails to include a fundamental facto: care as a source of profit in an extremist market. “The pandemic has also exposed the privatised care system as catastrophically unfit and ill-prepared. In 1993, 95% of care at home was  provided publicly by local authorities . Now, almost all of it – and almost all residential care – is provided by private companies. Even before the pandemic, the system was falling apart, as many care companies, unable to balance the needs of their patients with the demands of their shareholders, collapsed, often with disastrous consequences.” Both Tory and New Labour governments were responsible.

 Ignore the statue, read the man. Engels comes of age

“ From the executive leadership of top weapons-makers, to the senior government officials designing and purchasing the nation’s military arsenal, the United States’ national defense hierarchy is, for the first time, largely run by women.” And they say there is no gender equality! Women could be as good as men in running machines of death not only international institutions of enslavement. Let’s hope that these women CEO’s encourage the development of smarter and sexier bombs and other toys to be used to liberate other women–and men– from their bodies. How women took over the military-industrial complex

“We did all we could to rescue those onboard,” said the medical team of the NGO Italian Emergency, operating onboard the Open Arms. “All this took place just a few kilometres away from an indifferent Europe. Instead of preparing a structured search and rescue system, they instead continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending not to see the cemetery that the Mediterranean sea has become.” Just more dark-skinned people have ‘died’. In fact, they were killed by indifference and negligence. They were killed because many walls have been erected to keep the Other away. They were killed because some rescue boats/organisations are underfunded or stopped from operating. They were killed because some Western states led by NATO helped make Libya lawless. They were killed because, like other human beings,  they sought a better life. They were killed because for decades local regimes working with international institutions have not been able to create decent jobs and improve the lives of the

 The Living Mahabharata

 When the Read Flag flew over Iran

“A Harvard University study estimated that the worst fires in decades in 2015 were linked to more than 90,000 early deaths. The fires that year are also believed to have produced more carbon emissions in just a few months than the entire United States economy.”   Inside the destruction of Asian’s last rainforests

 Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crush

 Angry TV-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary The documentary Coup 53   (use “vidoo” option to play)

A very good summary by an athropologist: What is the way forward for Muslims living in the West? I do not think there is a single answer to that question because Muslims in the West are not a single homogeneous group, sociologically or theologically. Nevertheless they are seen, and will continue to be seen, as a minority within the Western nation state. And given the widespread violence perpetrated by heavily armed Western states and lightly armed jihadists (a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one) Muslim minorities in the West will continue to be the object of suspicion and discrimination. Our concern in this matter should not be to find someone to blame but to try to understand the limits of action facing Muslim minorities. The very common suggestion that Muslims should undertake a reform of their own religious tradition to help prevent “Islamic extremist violence” assumes that Muslims constitute a single political subject, that they are entirely self-contained, and that refor

 Another piece using the so-called divide to throw dust and hide the real divide. Red or blue, capital rules. ‘The misunderstood state’

 US approves $23bn advanced arms sale

“Liberal or centre-left governments in Israel and the US, who pushed for a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish majority one, have arguably done settlers a greater service than right-wing hawks... Trump’s team did not change the reality on the ground, but it did dispel the myth that endless rounds of negotiations would result in a Palestinian state.  With Joe Biden’s return to power as president, this myth will lovingly and carefully be restored, like some biblical archaeological find. Israeli settlers will continue the business of cutting down Palestinian olive trees. Israeli courts will continue to dispossess Palestinians of their legal rights to their land. Heads will shake with disapproval in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, but nothing will be done. Many words will be uttered about the justice of the Palestinian cause, safe in the knowledge that it will never see the light of day.” Why Palestinians are not joining the party

“The [Islamic State] group has exploited poverty and unemployment to recruit youth in their fight to establish Islamic rule in the area. Many locals complain that they have benefited little from the province's ruby and gas industries.” In one of the poorest countries on earth. In a country where there is no ‘secularism’, Charlie, or cartoons. In a far far away country

A rentier economy, squanderer of resources, normaliser of Israeli oppression, majority of its population is foreign, 11% of the total population are cotizens, capitalism all over the place, but coexists with a ruling family, stoning, flogging, amputation as punishments, horrible treatment of migrant workers ... A reactionary regime that is now trying to change some of its legislations to please the Israelis and their Western protectors, marshalling a façade of social liberalisation while squashing economic and political rights. Now at least two of barbaric practices, lashing for alcohol consumption and criminalising “fornication”, are going to cease. However, these are not personal freedoms won by the people and it will mostly concern the non-Muslims. Power relations and property ownership in the country are entrenched and would not allow the breaking of social norms. UAE announces relaxing of Islamic laws for personal freedoms

 Film challenges marital rape impunity in Arab countries

 Biden’s love affair with Israel will pick up where it left off

 ‘Islam’ is not in crisis, liberalism is Related "The most urgent priority is not for Europe to understand its  alters  better, but rather itself and its own history —for it is within Europe's own longstanding structures of self-definition that pluralism in general, and the Islamic presence in particular, have been rendered into nightmares. If so, it is Europe itself which stands in urgent need of therapy. But as yet the patient is still in denial, and as any spychotherapist would confirm, those who refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of their self-generated plight find it far easier to engage in a process of transference. Rather than confronting the illusory character of their own mental construction, they prefer to ascribe the very behavior which they refuse to acknowledge in themselves to those whom they believe are harassing them." —  Roger Ballard , quoted by Jospeh Massad in  Islam in Liberalism , 2015, p. 311 "If, according to Zwemer, the truth that Islam fa

 No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump And we shouldn’t loose perspective:

“I find it a remarkable irony, incidentally, that up to about the end of the Second World War, if not later, European (or Christian) civilization was triumphantly declared to be the creator of the modern world but that now, confronted with a menacing future, it is more common to hear people talk about humanity’s self-destruction – as though the peasants and working classes of the world had the same responsibility for that future as the industrialists, politicians, military careerists, bankers, and arms manufacturers.” — British anthropologist Talal Asad

“ Europe and the US may use different counter-terrorist measures, but both are involved in a more insidious practice, which is gradually taking root due to the climate of fear. The political game of criminalising immigrants, and connecting terrorism with foreigners, Muslims and young second-generation immigrants, often with deprived, religious backgrounds, provides hate figures and creates a climate of suspicion. But the profile that has emerged from police investigations into Islamist terror attacks in Europe reveals different characteristics: most entered Europe legally or were born here, are not very religious but have a deep sense of injustice, have professional qualifications and are often university educated.” The globalisation of state violence  (2001-2007)

The threat of academic authoritarianism Related Britain: Banning of anti-capitalist resources in schools Teaching white privilege as uncontested fact is illegal, says minister

 Weaponisation of Labour Anti-Semitism

 غياب السلطة في مواجهة جرائم قتل النساء

The no vote polled the highest national vote with 37%.  There were another 20m voting age Americans excluded from the poll for various nefarious reasons (they had committed a felony or the state administration had refused their registration). In fact, the turn out was 58%. And make no mistake, if the election was not held in an unprecedented situation, i.e. the pandemic, Trump would have won. Contrary to “Biden will unite and heal the country,” some liberals have no illusions:    It’s still Trump’s America

 Are you Charlie or not?

 “ This tension between “equality” and “property” rings through subsequent history and still shapes much discussion today.” It’s true, we ignore parts of our history

 Jailed Loujain al-Hathloul’s health is alarming, say UN experts Related The feminist movement in Saudi Arabia

 The crushing of Chechnya’s aspirations for independence

 Pointless jobs, technology, capitalism

  The world will pay the price for the Democrats’ failures

 The Good Lord Bird

 “It’s clear that Trump’s strategy of polarisation on the basis of a far-right agenda has allowed him to strengthen and expand his popular base. Whoever scrapes into the White House, the US is going to be very hard to govern on the basis of the liberal internationalism that has served big capital so well since WWII. The crisis of the neoliberal version of this hegemony that started under George W. Bush with Iraq and the Global Financial Crisis is going to intensify.” —Alex Callinicos, 04 November 2020

  Condemn death threat against leaders of the education union

 An entrenched and poisonous status quo will continue. “  Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.” Trump has not been repudiated Related The left (sic) just got crushed There is leftist wing in the Democratic party, but to say it represents the Left is a fallacy that has been going on for decades, and not only in the US, in order to reject the real left. Even if Biden won with a comfortable majority, including the Senate, his administration would be like others: a representative of big business, making cosmetic changes if the declining economy allowed, hawkish, and imperialist.

“ Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.” The Great War?

  On the future of US relations in the region

 Israel could be ‘forced’ to take action against Iran

 History is a merciless teacher

  The economy - some facts

“ The US electoral system is more directly organised by capitalist class power than other democracies, and fund-raising requirements are only one part of this problem. The dominance of the system by two parties of business, with barely any democratic or even strictly ‘party-like’ structures, organised by business-aligned elites, makes it very difficult to mobilise alternatives. This is one of the reasons why there has never been a successful labour-based party in the US. The strategy of takeover by the ‘grassroots’ succeeded only in the Republican Party, where the candidate preferred by the base was a self-funding billionaire. Workers, white or not, are left with choices emerging out of a balance of forces favouring capital.” —Richard Seymour, February 2017 Related Biden: a war cabinet?

Election in an oligarchic, plutocratic system Will the status quo that Trump’s 2016 election upset be restored? Follow the Money for Both Parties Related Biden: a war cabinet?

  The Great Lockdown hits the Third World hard

This piece is still one of most sober analysis of violence by non-state actors. And it is by a liberal magazine. There is a major inaccuracy in a statement though . “ The history  of the West is every bit as violent  as the modern Middle East, with brief periods of relative peace punctuated by periods of bloody conflict.” As violent as? The violence of Nazi Germany, the Belgian Genocide in Congo or the American war on the Vietnamese, just to cite three events, had no comparable examples in the history of the Middle East. The Threat is Already Inside

  Sicily’s enduring North African heritage

 The struggle for real democracy

Robert Fisk, the revered foreign correspondent for The Independent, his knowledge and insight of the Middle East is perhaps unrivalled among contemporary commentators. Fisk, who has met Osama bin Laden three times, talks about his experience of covering conflict throughout the region, the Middle East's history and the possibilities for its future.  Here is part of a talk I recorded at the Institute of Education at the book launch of Fisk's  Wars for Civilization,  London 13 October 2005.  He was a vigorous opponent of the new-fangled concept of “embedded journalism”. Latterly, however, his own embedded reports on the continuing civil war in Syria, which tended to absolve the Assad regime of some of the worst crimes credited to it, provoked a backlash, even among his anti-imperialist acolytes. Obituary

 Bidenomics: boom or bust?