Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Caution: This is not to say that blowbacks are exclusively consequences of external forces – Israel and Western powers. Local socio-economic context as well as political factors and balance of forces also played a role, converged or intersected with external players. How Israel went from creating Hamas to bombing it Related My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

What might he say about today’s pandemic?

Views on China

“ We must ask ourselves … equality with what? Do men have such idyllic lives that we want the same for ourselves? In a world where people are valued as economic units rather than as people, to be an equal economic unit must not be the height of our ambition.” – Sheila Rowbotham

Some of the arguments in this review are very interesting. Here is one of them. “If you had told someone at the start of 1975 that the architects of the new age were going to be the  MP  for Finchley [Margaret Thatcher] , the bishop of Krakow [ Pope John Paul  II] , the exiled ayatollah [ Khomeini]  and the ostracised apparatchik [ Deng Xiaoping , you would have been laughed at. Apart from anything, they looked so powerless. So we shouldn’t be surprised if we can’t yet spot who is going to make the difference this time round. What we’re waiting for is the counter-counter-revolution, led by progressives who have learned the lessons from the age of neoliberalism and are unafraid to make use of its instruments in order to overthrow them. Plenty have started trying. Someone will get there in the end and maybe by the end of the decade we will discover who. But it is unlikely to be anyone near a position of power right now.”

هدم الآثار وجه من وجوه الرأسمالية المصرية

Who will benefit?

Les êtres humains pourraient tous vivre bien En English

Rebranding of Palestinian dishes as ‘Israeli’ cuisine in Western countries

Five Crises

‘British troops to help at Poland-Belarus border’ ‘Polish forces tear-gas migrants at Belarus border’ ‘Poland to build border wall to stop migrant influx’ ‘Freezing to death on the edge of the EU’ The sad fact is that we have become immune to the suffering of other people unless they are pets or useful material. After all, they are not white Belarusians fleeing ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’.

The forgotten Arab Republicans

“ The National Crime Agency has estimated that £90bn of criminal money is being laundered through the UK every year, 4% of the country’s GDP. London has become the global capital of money-laundering and the beating heart of European organised crime. English is now the international underworld’s lingua franca. Crime is an essential part of the British economy, providing hundreds of thousands of jobs, not just for professional criminals – the NCA reckons there are  4,629 organised crime groups  in operation – but for police and prison officers, lawyers and court officials, and a security business that now employs more than half a million people.” Inside the 21st-century British criminal underworld Related   Gangs of London (2020). A British crime drama in 9 episodes

A discussion of neoliberalism and the future of the global economy

Source: taxjustice.net

“ The international financial press has trotted out the usual boilerplate in its attempt to explain this instability, asserting that African countries cannot manage their own affairs and that Western institutions must swoop in to rescue them. Once again, as the refrain goes, it’s a question of the West’s benevolence in contrast to Africa’s violence and corruption.” “  Political crises in Africa are always an opportunity for Western capitalist economies to set the conditions for more free market measures, more free movement of capital, and more privatization.” “Every  new government finds itself with a list of policies that must be implemented in order to receive the benefit of the IMF, the World Bank, and bilateral aid.” “ The scene is the same no matter which government is in power. Even if a regime falls, the neocolonial extractive model doesn’t.” “Because they’re detached from the real needs of their populations, elites in Africa are facilitating this precarity and poverty and incre

The oldest political prisoner in Europe

Arms, aid and counter-revolution

After more than 55, the murder investigation is reopened because  a man who was a policeman at the time of the 1965 killing, alleges “ New York police and the FBI conspired in the murder.” ‘Justice’, the American way

  The military never conducted an independent investigation

“ Europe’s pathological fear of migrants complements the Polish government’s patriotic self-indulgence — all evident to cunning Lukashenko, clear-eyed enough to see their failings, and exploit them.” The hollowness of European humanitarianism

And the roots of the 2011 uprisings

Fuelling narcissists’ worst desires, making debate near impossible

What does it mean? You might need to open a free account to access the article

Carbon dioxide beneficial for plants, chief culprit of climate change

Situating the Holocaust in a broader context of white racism, colonialism and imperialism 

Union activist jailed for fabricated terrorism charges

According to a study by the University of Virginia  Center for Politics and Project Home Fire  “s ignificant numbers of both Trump and Biden voters show a willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms if needed to serve their priorities. Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts,” and roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union .”

Why not? Has not everything been commodified and many students are in debt? Normalising selling sex

The court heard a British officer provided a written statement to a commanding officer after a member of the special forces told him all fighting-age males were being killed regardless of the threat they posed.  The officer said: "It was also indicated that fighting-age males were being executed on target inside compounds, using a variety of methods after they had been restrained. In one case it was mentioned a pillow was put over the head of an individual being killed with a pistol." Senior military officers buried evidence that British troops were executing detainees in Afghanistan

Iranian rock and heavy metal

“Far from the world being swept by a wave of rationality, historical accuracy and universality, the very turmoil produced by [capitalist] globalisation, by the collapse and discrediting of the dominant radical ideologies of the twentieth century, of left and right, and by a world where violence in many unexpected forms is prevalent, has led to a strengthening of myth and emotional claims. We are aware, through the work of sociologists and students of nationalism, of the role of such myths in mobilising people and enabling them to make sense of their complex and often bewildering lives. Hence we can recognise that the more rapidly the world changes, and the more interaction and conflict there are between peoples, the more potent these ideas become.”  –Fred Halliday,  100 Myths About the Middle East , 2005, pp. 14-15 Some of the myths  “ The Middle East is, in some fundamental way, ‘different’ from the rest of the world and has to be understood in terms distinct from other regions.” “The

 شركاء في الاضطهاد

An alternative paradigm of interpretation. Very engaging! The mythological machine in the great civil war

This cliché of invoking the ‘international community’ is again not helpful. The authors ignore what the ‘international community’ – the big and regional powers’ stands towards Egypt and the Yemen war, for example.  The Sudanese must rely on themselves. They trace back to Al-Bashir era Related Deans suspend studies indefinitely

Richard Seymour: Owing to the increasing technological difficulties and commercial disadvantages associated with fossil fuels, Tooze worries that I am too “sanguine” about the chances of “green modernisation”. I do argue that the far-sighted members of the ruling class might react to this crisis by accelerating “the transition to renewables” with “more energy-efficient buildings, transport and supply chains” and even competition “over who transitions fastest”, resulting in trade wars over the control of the rare metals needed to make solar panels. What Adam Tooze gets wrong about capitalism and climate change

  “[H]istory is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole  unconsciously  and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want,

 A very good approach! And in case one has not realised yet that the IMF and the World Bank impose policies with “criminal outcomes” – the words are Eric Toussaint’s and Damien Millet’s – this is a must read . The difference is that the crime here is part of a long destruction of nature for profit and capital accumulation. Related Crimes Against Nature Building in wood

Alaa Abd el-Fattah

  A liberal view. There no global economic-system and it’s crises, there is no uneven development, migration and capital, there is no class, there is no demographic pressures, especially of the youth, no lack of prospects for many, no precarity … Only abstract concepts such as ‘inequality’ and ‘lack of democracy’, without even being able to define what democracy or real democracy is. Asked what defines “real democracy,” Burke admitted it was somewhat subjective: “One person’s democracy is another person’s autocracy.”

The pandemic slump has raised poverty across the globe

Karl Marx, Sergei Eisenstein and Bourgeois Vampires Unite in Bloodsuckers

Anthropological Reconceptions in Precarious Times

A Council of Europe pro-headscarf-endorsed ad pulled

Given the horrific British record of atrocities, would a mere apology be sufficient?

“It projected hatred towards the British”

A VPN is required Mistress of War

 إلزام فرنسا بتعويضات من 1830 إلى جلاء آخر جندي

A decade of struggles Credit: Transnational Institute

Thank you, Shahar In solidarity.

The Reformation that went far beyond Luther’s intentions

“ Whilst attempting to show his leadership on climate, Biden was at the same time trying to persuade the OPEC oil producers to increase production, so as to keep petrol prices down for US consumers.” — Jon Sopel, the BBC Then Biden was seen asleep. ‘Mission accomplished’.

“The University and College Union says the plight of young academics who are desperate to get a firm footing on the career ladder is getting worse. Staff at 146 higher education institutions have until Thursday  to vote  on whether to strike once again – potentially before Christmas – over unfair pay, “untenable” workloads and casualised contracts.” Vicky Blake, the president of UCU, said: “Many people are still shocked to learn that higher education is one of the most casualised sectors in the British economy. There are at least 75,000 staff on insecure contracts: workers who are exploited, underpaid, and often pushed to the brink by senior management teams relying on goodwill and a culture of fear.” Related HE’s casual approach to employment

 السؤال عن النهايات في الشرق