Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  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 achiev...

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 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-c...

 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 Isl...

 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