Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Yes, it is an important ruling. However, let’s not forget that Israel occupies territories and finds ways to sell products from what the ‘international law’ calls illegal settlements to the world. Court annuls EU deals with Morocco

  The World for Sale

“What is clear … is that greater recognition must be given to the way Western concepts (religion, political, secular, temporal) reflect specific historical developments, and cannot be applied as a set of universal categories or natural domains.” What is political Islam?

That great French novelist … “To amuse the crowd, Mohammed Ali's jester took a woman in a Cairo bazaar one day, set ber on the counter of a shop, and coupled with her publicly while the shopkeeper calmly smoked his pipe. On the road from Cairo to Shubra some time ago a young fellow had himself publicly buggered by a large monkey-as in the story above, to create a good opinion of himself and make people laugh. A marabout died a while ago-an idiot-who had long passed as a saint marked by God; all the Moslem women came to see him and masturbated him-in the end he died of exhaustion-from morning to night it was a perpetual jacking-off. . . . Quid dicis of the following fact: some time ago a santon (ascetic priest) used to walk through the streets of Cairo com­pletely naked except for a cap on his head and another on his prick. To piss he would doff the prick-cap, and sterile women who wanted children would run up, put themselves under the parabola of his urine and rub themselves with

For the first time in its history, the Austrian Communist Party has unexpectedly won a municipal election in the country’s second-largest city, Graz. According to preliminary results, the KPÖ came out on top on Sunday with 29% of the vote, ahead of the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) on 25.7%. “Their success in Graz is down to their focus on local issues -- especially housing policy -- while scaling back any Marxist ideology.” In Berlin, however ,  Germany’s highest court ruled  in favour of capital in April saying  that a cap the local government imposed on rent prices last year was unconstitutional and void.   The rule froze rents for some 90% of Berlin apartments at June 2019 rates for five years. In many cases, existing rents needed to be reduced to conform to the new threshold. After the court ruling, many tenants faced hefty back payments.

I have not read most of these articles . I will be exploring their approach in the coming days.

The scourge of Islamophobia

Surprise! Surprise! Related “The U.S. Army School of the Americas is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.” —  Congressman   Joseph P. Kennedy II The School of Latin America’s dictators

There was a time when the French press lauded the mujahideen

“ Syria, virtually alone among major Arab states, blocks the entry of other Arab [comic] strips, creating its own monopoly of images. […] Nowhere in the Arab world does a government so effectively control the comic strips as in the Syrian Arab Republic.”  “Committed to freedom and dignity, [our] aim is to document events during the revolution as well as the catastrophic consequences of rupture, displacement and dislocation in its aftermath. […] As the name indicates, the comic is the medium of choice to record everything from brutality in prisons, activities at demonstrations and the violence of military interventions.” The short comic strips below portray a complex image of the way the war translates into everyday life. As I see it, this is where one of Comic4 Syria’s major strengths lies: in their conscious decision to avoid a Manichean view by refusing to rely on easy dichotomies of good and evil.  Archiving Syria’s hopes and despairs

“There is enough empty property in China to house over 90m people, says Logan Wright, a Hong Kong-based director at Rhodium Group, a consultancy. To put that into perspective: there are five G7 countries — France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Canada — that could each fit their entire population into those empty Chinese apartments with room to spare… The Chinese state owns almost all of the country’s large financial institutions , meaning that if Beijing orders them to bail out Evergrande or other distressed property companies, they will follow orders “Unless China’s regulators seriously mismanage the situation, a systemic crisis in the country’s financial sector is not on the cards,” says He Wei, an analyst at Gavekal, a research company. “The context of the Evergrande crisis is entirely different from Lehman Bros in 2008. Most obviously, Lehman operated in a free market; Evergrande does not. Lehman’s fate was sealed when banks would no longer lend to it. The bulk of Evergrande’s liabili

“A leftwing radical in some things, she was a time-server and opportunist in others; she made a late return to Islam but she also admitted to 14 husbands (there may have been a few more) and had a carefully cultivated reputation for debauchery.” In memory of Tahia

“As the Israelis and the Americans understand very well, the ongoing discourse on terrorism is not about the victims of ‘terrorism’ but about the ‘perpetrators’. The fact that state armies more regularly target the very same victims that ‘terrorists’ target, yet are not referred to as ‘terrorists’, clarifies that it is not the act of ‘terrorism’ that defines the actor as ‘terrorist’ but rather the opposite: it is the perpetrator’s conferred identity as ‘terrorist’ that defines his/her actions as ‘terrorist’ in nature. “The binary world of terrorists and anti-terrorists”

"Maometto"-Mohammed-turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno, He is located in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell, in the ninth of the ten Bolgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan's stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal, the blasphemous. After Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Brutus, and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, which is where Satan himself is to be found. Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante calls seminator di scandalo e di scisma. Mohammed's punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante's

According to a research by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think-tank, 67 per cent of young people polled would like to live in a socialist economic system.  Scary! 

‘What a wonderful world!’ A ‘Trojan horse’ in Congo

“ Currently none of Starbucks' 8,000 US cafes is unionised, meaning the world's biggest coffee house chain is under no obligation to negotiate with staff over pay and conditions. But the baristas hope to change that at five cafes in Buffalo, setting a precedent that could disrupt the firm's business practices much more widely.” One Starbucks at a time Related

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

A lot of propaganda have been pouring, hailing women in high position from Christine Lagarde of the IMF to Angela Merkel of Germany. All in the belief that capitalist power relations, inequality, exploitation, the profit motive, imperialism, etc. can be done away with if more women led governments and other positions of power.  Leaving her support of  Israel and the suppression of BDS aside, as a woman who headed a rich capitalist country for 16 years she  has done almost nothing to address the gender pay gap, one of the worst in Europe.  Women made between 19% less in wages than men in 2019, compared to 20% in 2018. It was 21% in 2020 according to this website .  It was still higher than the European Union average. Or has she ever questioned, for example, the pay gap between a nurse and a footballer?

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore,   it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."          Antonio Gramsci,  Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932

And this is only one example. It is a con more than a scandal. It is a smokescreen, a cover, employed by a an imperialist state as an ideological tool: “we are good people and we show compassion.”  It is a deception. British aid is a scandal Related Aid in the case of Palestine

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Somebody Blew Up America?

Very interesting and useful approach. Why did Islamist movements begin to genuinely challenge their political establishments only after the 1970s?  Why do we see such a great variety in the socio-economic policies and programs among different Islamist governments and movements?  Why have Islamist movements become more successful in industrializing countries?  why is it the small industrialist and not the Islamist businessman that is at the heart of the rise of Islamism?  Uktu Balaban discusses  the case of Turkey

A collection of articles

“ Subsidizing Apartheid : How the Canada Revenue Agency Contributes to Palestinian Dispossession”

Europe’s reputation as a cosmopolitan haven has been exposed as a mirage Related A bigger picture was captured by Peter Gowan more than 20 years ago: “The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.” The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism

“Britain is at least 90,000 truck drivers short.” “Logistics UK, the trade body for hauliers, said Britain had a chronic driver shortage for many years, but the problem was now acute. Many cite similar tales of poor working conditions for quitting but other reasons include poor wages compounded by a tax reform, known as IR35, that prevented most drivers from operating as limited companies, resulting in a significant cut to take-home pay.” “Add to that Brexit. For truckers, that meant endless paperwork, including customs procedures they were never trained for and queues at the border. Other issues included the need to take UK driving exams that many truckers did not have the language skills for, along with a more hostile attitude to foreigners in Britain. For the EU drivers that have left but still have the right to return and live in the UK, the prospects of higher pay that some UK companies are now offering was not enough. Many said they had already found work elsewhere on higher wage

A review by Priya Satia

 In Islamic philosophy failing to question authority is an intellectual sin

“ The Costs of War Project is analytically conservative. Unlike several nongovernmental surveys over the years, it does not conduct epidemiological studies to determine the true lethality of the war – such as deaths from war-shattered public health systems, lack of access to clean water, war-prompted displacement, and other indirect but real consequences of conflict. Instead, the project only counts  direct  death. The authors acknowledge the shortcomings of this approach.” Over 900,000 People Dead, a ‘Vast Undercount,’ and $8 Trillion Looted 

A good report by Anand Gopal

An interview with Ussama Makdisi

The Telegraph calls it an invasion , the BBC calls it a coup . A 20-years war, an election organised under occupation and during bloodshed, with a president elected by 923,000 votes out of 9.7 million registered votes out of a population of 30 million. No, it is not a coup. The Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion and then Taliban won that war. There was no government or Afghan army to speak of. It was a regime kept alive by the American forces ruling over about 30% of the population. But those who always scream about fair and democratic elections, do not care about facts. Ironically, the BBC is one of the proponents of ‘Fact-check’. 

“The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. The US’s conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but what’s frightening about them is not just the violence they inflict. This new kind of American war is revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance. Humanitarian and military lawyers bickered around how much wartime humanity was going to be enough. They tacitly agreed not to fight over the war itself. The campaign to seek more humane war did not challenge the enterprise of war itself. Through the presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump, the US could take strides to keep its wars humane. But it did so while entrenching its globalised militarism, as one anti-war candidate then another became an endless-war president. And now one more, alas, seems a prisoner of the script.” Note that Samuel Moyn uses the term terrorism to refer to terrorism carried out by non-state agents, but he never applies the te

From a response by Edward Said and Oleg Grabar to Bernard Lewis : Then there is the meaning of  thawra , the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of  thawra inc identally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of  thawra  acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that  thawra  is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising up” a parenthetical instance,

Can inequality be blamed on the Agricultural Revolution? Related Against the Grain

I am at the end of this book. I recommend it. You just need some updated figures while you are reading. The Globalisation of Production, Super-Exploitation and the Crisis of Capitalism Two major factors cause capitalist crisis: declining profitability and overproduction. I am not convinced that the latter is a major factor. The problem is not that capitalism produces too much, but that what it is produced is not provided to the global population. Half of the world population is unable to buy what is produced or buys too little of what is produced because it is too poor. That means that lack of investment in large swathes of the world–Latin America and South Africa, Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia–unemployment, precarity, etc. deprives half of the world from getting access to what is produced. Those who produce get little or almost nothing from what they produce.  According to the WHO “around 45% of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. Thes

 

It is mostly from a British journalist perspective An account to refresh our memory

As Kabul fell to the Taliban, so did Bagram prison. As a former prisoner of this place, it’s hard to describe the emotions I felt at hearing this news. The Times  describes  Bagram as “the scene of some of the darkest episodes of the US-led occupation”. But to me, it’s the scene of countless unresolved war crimes, and I’m an eyewitness. It is regarding those crimes that I gave  testimony  to the International Criminal Court, and for which the US government threatened to prosecute its members. Former Bagram and Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg on what he saw Related Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]

A massacre and a cover up

  Obituary

Eminent historian S Irfan Habib called the project a "corporatisation of monuments," that has been done "at the cost of history, cost of heritage". Indian outrage over a revamp of memorial Related Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

while my country was being ripped apart by coronavirus

A meeker approach and false parity

“Because of the polarity between the left and the right, I don’t feel I have an identity with politicians on either side. The left wing have abandoned the working classes, and with a lot of the left – I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan when I say this – I feel like there is too much nitpicking and stupid fights, especially online. But I hate the Tories with a passion. I was raised to hate them, I still hate them, and I always will. They clearly know who they stand for and they don’t represent people like us. A quarter of the kids in working families in my region are in poverty. Nobody sticks their neck out for the north-east. The line in Aye – “I don’t have time for the very few” – that’s the one thing that always going to be my main gripe on this planet, the sheer disparity between the 1% and the rest of the world. These culture wars are valid wars that need to be fought – there’s a lot of bigotry, a lot of racism and homophobia. But in order to get the Tories out, you’ve got to