Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It’s time to ask questions and learn lessons? Related Covid-19 is not a pandemic

What is it?

How some liberals/neo-Keynesians are digging to justify why governments should play a big role in the economy. A ‘new’ form of capitalism is a necessary in order to get out of the crisis and prevent any possible social unrest.  What 2008/09 and the pandemic have demonstrated is that monopoly capitalism has to change for the system to survive. That Biden, for example, has introduced a big stimulus package and revoked Trump’s cuts in corporate tax reflects the uneasiness of the ruling classes and that a few things have to be done. The Woman Who ‘Shattered the Myth ’

A very belated report by Human Rights Watch. Let’s read it and see how much ‘antisemitism’ in it! “ Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” Israel called into account A Threshold Crossed :  Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution

Une «guerre civile» imminente, dise la tribune d’ex-militaires

One Man Protest at Google, London

Beyond Exceptionalism

How France propped up slain ruler in Chad

A good piece as usual by Joseph Massad. However, I think he is doing a disservice to socialism by calling what existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before 1990 a ‘socialist world’. Economic democracy is the missing link in the struggle for human rights

MERIP Report – Spring 2021 Free access to all articles

“ This act of communal killing had ideological underpinnings in Nasserism and the brand of Arab nationalism that it propagated, which viewed the nation as an organic, harmonious whole with a clear popular will, rather than a myriad of different social groups with conflicting interests that needed to be mediated.” The writer suggests that the conflicting interests “needed to be mediated” and that “ a deep process of reconciliation” is the solution! Conflicting class interests under an authoritarian repressive regime is to be solved by reconciliation without overthrowing the repressive power relations? And since this goes back to ‘Arab nationalism’ and the type of the regime it has generated, why is it that since the 1950s, and not only in Egypt, ‘mediation’ and ‘reconciliation’ have not materialised? I wonder whether the writer while writing the article had the Arab uprisings in mind and how the regimes and the counter-revolutionary forces destroyed them or the decades of repression, pr

Why the pandering to the Israeli lobby?

“ Many are arguing that  Al Jazeera  is an independent, journalistic entity that is not in the business of producing opinion-led or biased content. I would question that premise. Today,  Al Jazeera,  with its various global operations, is designed to cater to a range of different audiences. It is such a large operation that it has begun to segment its audiences and market shares.  Al Jazeera Arabic  and  Al Jazeera English  have their own distinct audiences, discourses, editorial policies, and red lines.  Al Jazeera Arabic  has long catered to right-wing communities in the Middle East, crafting specific messaging to a conservative market share. Meanwhile,  Al Jazeera English  speaks to a more diverse, cosmopolitan, and progressive audience. Even so, I would say that  Al Jazeera as a whole has begun to venture right. This is an important factor that anglophone readers and viewers —and even  Al Jazeera English ’s  staff to a certain extent—do not realize. ” Al-Jazeera’s New Digital Chann

Football: a people’s sport?

I have always thought that this is the norm and part of ‘our values’. Should Egyptian gymnasts campaign to ‘liberate’ their European sisters? European gymnasts Egyptian gymnasts

The roaring twenties repeated? Related Why the threat posed by Covid to the global economy is not over

The prison population and prison conditions

The IMF is Hollowing out Pakistan’s Sovereignty

I watched this movie many years ago. My second view has given me a very different understanding of such a beautiful and well-directed film. The actors are outstanding.

For totally ignoring Western human rights abuses A good slam, but ... He is the same Jeffrey Sachs who advised on how to violate the human rights of eastern Europeans after 1991 by ‘liberalising’ (read plundering) their economy, and we know the disastrous outcomes of Western policies implemented. “Shock Therapy has been popularized by Sachs, the  IMF and others as the three ‘-izations’, which ... are now familiar to every schoolchild in Eastern Europe: liberalization, stabilization and privatization. More recently a fourth, final step has been added: institutionalization.”  —Peter Gown, Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe, New Left Review, September-October 1995

“ Debates about blasphemy and apostasy laws among Muslims are naturally influenced by international affairs. Across the globe, Muslim minorities – including the Palestinians, Chechens of Russia, Kashmiris of India,   Rohingya   of Myanmar and   Uighurs   of China – have experienced severe persecution. No other religion is so widely targeted in so many different countries. Alongside persecution are those  Western policies  that discriminate against Muslims, such as laws prohibiting headscarves in schools.” Two Muslims identify with each other regardless of their nationality or ethnicity. That is their ‘imagined community’. In addition, many Muslims regarded the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq as a ‘wars on Islam’. It is a socio-psychological question when we see them support executing an apostate or wanting the implementation of shari’s laws. Thus authoritarian regimes in alliance of Muslim sc holars find support among many when it comes to blasphemy and apostasy, for example. Why blasphem

A New Consensus?

Related In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades — roughly from 1825 to 1855. The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it. Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s — strikes in England, — riots in the Northern US, — and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

Jenkins’ last sentence is meaningless.  – Jenkins  “can safely write this whilst the Taliban kill and torture in Afghanistan with impunity.” – “If the Taliban can ''torture and kill with impunity'' after twenty years of western war against them what exactly is the point of continuing?” As for Britain, it invaded Afghanistan twice in the 19th century, once in the 20th and–with the US–once in the 21st. Four times and yet the British have been unable to bring ‘democracy’ to the Afghans! What did Wester intervention achieve? Related Who cares about what happened to the Afghans? ‘We’ confronted terror with more and bigger terror, and attacks took place in France, England, Germany, the US ... We shouldn’t forget though that ‘we’ gave Malala the Nobel peace prize, helped her go to Oxford University, and even met Obama. And ‘we felt happy with it. How great we are in bringing freedom to women and kites to kids!

An interesting liberal take on Jordan and how liberals now are saying enough with supporting authoritarian and monarchical regimes. The Arab uprisings have exposed everything, including many hypocritical liberals. A U.S. satellite and protectorate on the verge of implosion 

Rojava’s Suspended Future

 A New Myanmar?

 The Myth of the Israeli Nuclear Deterrent

“The insurgents are primarily Muslims from the coastal zone of Cabo Delgado, recruited by local fundamentalist preachers with a basically socialist message - that Sharia, or Islamic law, would bring equality and everyone would share in the coming resource wealth.“ A Peasant Uprising Related Jihadists and the curse of gas and rubies in Mozambique

 A Window Into India’s Class Society

Research ‘Was 97% Publicly Funded’

«الشبكة العربية» ترصد بناء 35 سجنا جديدا بعد الثورة

 Memorialising Complexities

Why the British system is so easily gamed by reckless opportunists

The BBC has confirmed it received 109,741 complaints from the public over its coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh's death. The figure makes the coverage of Prince Philip's death the most complained-about piece of programming in BBC history. I have seen the floods of headlines on the BBC front page, but I have never read a single article about the death of a prince. Nor did I bother to send a complaint. 

  The Contradictions of Capitalist Democracy

  The Great Transformation and the Countermovement to Capitalism

 How Do We See Each Other in a ‘Market Society’?

  Is it possible to stop people from becoming fascists?

“Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony, wrote these hauntingly beautiful lines: It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. ” Quoted in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays , p. 190.

By blending historical inquiry with theoretical critique, Whyte’s account clarifies that neoliberal human rights did not emerge “from nowhere” but, rather, flowed from a long-standing, self-conscious, neoliberal tradition of forging rhetorical links between market morals and human rights. The Morals of the Market

At school we were barely introduced to such a valuable novel by Ibn Tufayl. “Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.“ “ When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted because they were inevitably bound with context.” Speaking of context, the liberal writer forgot to mention the current context in end of his article. The Muslim who inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe

 Raoul Peck on his bold new colonialism series

 Islands of deterrence

 The riots are the death spasms of a broken Britain Related Unrest in Northern Ireland

  The real link between racism and class

Beaud and Noiriel have no problem with the concept of race. They merely feel that it must remain in its proper place and be dealt with only as a  “variable or special case, understood as part of a broader scientific problem”  (p. 192). We are in complete disagreement with this, but we do agree with the authors when they assert that there is no such thing as pure racism, independent of inter-class domination. But this is also true of class relations, which never exclude racial or gender domination, which inclines us to  “conceive both the irreducibility of the racial question and its inextricable link with relations of class and gender.” Now while race and class are closely associated, the injustices and wrongs suffered by racial minorities can nonetheless not be reduced to class relations, to capitalist domination. To reduce everything to class locks us into an interpretive framework which is both Eurocentric and economistic (precisely the one used in Race et sciences sociales). Yet a

 Killer Prince

“In the past, identification with the pharaohs – symbols of biblical and Quranic despotism – was always ambivalent. But now under Sisi it has been fully embraced: with armoured chariots, laser beams and fireworks. In the country with arguably the highest number of political prisoners and torture victims in the world, even the dead cannot be left undisturbed.” The Pharaoh is dead! Long live the Pharaoh!

  Who are the real anti-imperialists?

 Assad is preventing the return of refugees

Erased From History Related A poem

  From colonialism to Covid-19

 How Women Communists Challenged the Colonial Order

“ Not only did they inhabit the unseemly world of the nightlife district (stigmatised as a moral and literal stone’s throw away from Ezbekkiya’s red-light district), these women also came from poverty and were often uneducated - only learning to read in order to rehearse (and pioneer) Egyptian theatre - a far cry from bourgeois feminism.” Review of Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring '20s

  A policeman measures the distance between a woman's knee and the bottom of her bathing suit. Washington DC, 1922. Library of Congress, USA. Think of France banning burkini and the headscarf, for example. 

How Winston Churchill and the British government attacked the Greek Resistance and sowed the seeds of civil war

 A review “Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here. A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.” Dreamworlds of Catastrophe

Bezos could at least provide the Amazon drivers with hygienic bottles for free, couldn’t he? Alternatively, he could provide training on how to hold it for longer. In that way productivity increases. Drivers urinate in bottles

 Egypt’s Sisis threatens ‘instability that no one can imagine’ Related

“ The report minimises and at times denies the existence of institutional racism in Britain, despite the fact that, as the government now acknowledges, several witnesses  gave detailed evidence  of the forms of institutional and structural racism that they feel do operate within the UK. It was produced by a commission led by figures who had rejected the concept of institutional racism years before they began work. Arguably it has achieved exactly what the government wanted, adding credence to the false binary that underpins  their culture war agenda : that the nation faces a choice between addressing racial inequalities or class disadvantage.” A poisonous patronising report

 The controversy over left-wing populism

Wikipedia disputes the claim of the 100,000 deaths in the 10 years of the construction of the Canal. This site cites 120,000 deaths .   The Long Struggle Over the Suez

 How wealthy nations are creating vaccine apartheid

  Shouldn’t Martin Ødegaard, when protesting against worker exploitation in Qatar, do the same against his club’s most important sponsor, the United Arab Emirates, which treats its migrant workers the same or perhaps worse than Qatar? Norway and the boycott of Qatar World Cup

 From Roasted Beans to Social Revolution