Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

State and vigilante-style violence Related My interview with Jonathan Cook back in 2006

Many of the laws criminalising homosexual relations originate from colonial times.  And in many places, breaking these laws could be punishable by long prison sentences. Out of the 53 countries in the Commonwealth - a loose association of countries most of them former British colonies - 36 have laws that criminalise homosexuality. Countries that criminalise homosexuality today also have criminal penalties against women who have sex with women, although the original British laws applied only to men. Related “Honour killing”

Does she believe Europe will want her, I ask, given that she arrived through illegal passage. "Let them say that I came in an illegal way," she replies "but if they ask me and hear my story, they will understand my pain." They will not understand your pain; they will apply “the law” in a hostile climate of a Europe that has seen a rise of the far-right and economic stagnation. They will look at you as the Other, the undesirable, and a threat to their standard of living, and their superior nation-state.  They have already forgotten what the immigrant workers have done during the pandemic.

Some good news at last! More than a thousand protestors forced the Home Office to release two men they had detained in a dawn raid

  Why he cannot even condemn Israeli violence Related “If Israel didn’t exist, the U.S. would have to invent one.” It’s “a three-billion-dollar-investment.” He said that in 1986. And “the Saudi are not bad guys; they’re fine people.” Listen to him

Historical records and appraisals are not always reliable. Many are deceitful. As we all know, in a long dynasty, heroes abound; in a short one, most are villains. Why? Because a long dynasty chronicles its own history, hence eulogy; a short dynasty has its history written by its conqueror, hence denunciation. Lu Xun told his audience, in one of his 1927 lectures on the Wei-Jin era (coinciding roughly with the late Roman Empire). This is interesting but access to the full review is not free. Meanings of June the Fourth

Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance... We are the generation of settlement, and without steel helmets and the maw of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water. Millions of Jews, annihilated because they had no country, gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people. Rise and Kill First  (2018) by Ronen Bergman, p. 49. Citing  Moshe Dayan  (09 April, 1956) by Mordechai Bar-On, p. 128-129 There is no more Palestine. Finished . . . As quoted in  TIME  Magazine (30 July 1973)...

How a state that was established as a settler-colony treats children seeking refuge  Related War crimes by Australian elite troops

  Political Assassinations and the Revolutionary Impasse in Lebanon and Iraq

A tweet

A must read A Gramscian Perspective

Interesting as always to see how leftists are up in arms screaming at another crime of the Israeli-settler state, posting one article after another, one image after another, resuming their ritual of marching and chanting ... These are the same leftists who hardly lifted a finger against the Asad’s regime crimes in Syria, or even supported it. 

Poor Denmark! It doesn’t have either the money, the houses or the moral obligation to accept 100 more Syrian refugees. Denmark is providing a model on how to deal with unwanted refugees. Other European states might/will follow suit, especially in right-and-far-right-led countries. Copenhagen will not renew residency rights

This book is definitely a must read. It implies though that there is no alternative to capitalism. State intervention should remedy the ills of the system. The review concludes with a typical misleading suggestion: “If Biden truly intends to establish a more just and egalitarian economic order, he would do well to consult both the achievements and the tragedies of U.S. development documented in Levy’s book.” The use of the comparative form implies that there is already a sort of ‘just and egalitarian economic order’, which an absurd thing to say. Biden could make that order more just and egalitarian. Why does one not just state: “if Biden truly intends to establish a just and egalitarian order...”? Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country

Another excellent article by Joseph Massad. Admitting it now is too little, too late Related A liberal argument. The United States Ignoring Israel’s Violence Against Palestinians

A leading liberal economist’s latest book. The wrong assumption, and not hardly questioned by the reviewer, is that socialism and communism existed in modern times. “ Capitalism, Alone  demonstrates the limits of studying capitalism’s empirical effects without a theory of how the system actually works—or especially, how it doesn’t.” Surely, without (referring to) theory–the Marxist tenets and analysis–then our description of the socio-economic system that existed in the Soviet Union, would be the mainstream one: socialist/communist. A fundamental pillar of capitalism is the rate of profit, not just profit-making. This also has not been even hinted at. How any form of capitalism that is dominated by private capital invests and therefore achieves growth is determined by the rate of return.  “ Where the globalization literature of the 2000s was exultant with promise, Milanovic’s book frankly admits the limitations of actually existing capitalism and resigns itself to making the b...

“Jean-Daniel Lévy, managing director of Harris Interactive, which conducted the poll, said: “Overall, the French have the same views as those that were expressed by the generals. Researchers say that support for Le Pen in the army has been running at just over 40 per cent, which is not far off the level in the wider population given the far-right’s support among the young and the relative youth of active soldiers. In the police, support exceeds 50 per cent.”

A comparison between the left’s programme and Biden’s