Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

First full report on the regime’s massacre

In English En français بالعربية

ترجمة عربية لمقال  درشانا نارايانان

‘People are much angrier now’

The crisis of development: uneveness, polarization and contestation

“Approaching each other with a clear and direct agenda, mostly revolving around the mutual benefits of boosting trade, investment, and business in a win-win situation, was determinant. The power fatigue resulting from following highly contrasting geopolitical and ideological agendas and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the post-2011 era encouraged the conflicting regional players to follow pragmatic behaviour and prioritise the economy, business, trade, and interest-based agendas rather than ideological ones. The regional and international dynamics that have led to this rare moment of de-escalation and reconciliation among the different regional players, in particular, are not constant and subject to sudden changes. Besides Egypt, several Arab countries are severely exposed. If the war is set to prolong, then one should not rule out that a looming food crisis coupled with skyrocketing food prices would trigger uprisings. Despite the very positive regional atmosphere resulting ...

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”  Fatma Aliye

 

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has...

Since the 2000s, there has been a shift in France’s media and among its politicians. While the media landscape had evolved in the 1970s and ’80s, with many supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination and the need to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which Israel and the US denounced as a terrorist group), the consensus position has since shifted dramatically. Some now see Palestine through the lens of the “war on terror” and the “Islamist menace”. Any condemnation of Zionism is presented as a form of antisemitism. This reflects the position of European governments, especially France, which have aligned themselves with Israel and adopted - what many consider to be - Islamophobic positions in recent years. “How French media censored my views”

The story of one of the world’s major tax haven

“The Inverted Consciousness of the World” The constitution of “Islam and the West” as a civilizational divide was a colonial concoction, an ideological chimera, a mode of false consciousness that centers “the West” (where capital is believed to have accumulated) and marginalizes “the Rest” (where cheap labor and raw material are thought to be located). Both capital and its abused labor and ravaged earth, however, are global and rapidly globalizing; neither has any center or periphery. This relatively recent ideological concoction, however, has been rooted in the material forces of capital, labor, raw material, and markets. At work has been the accumulated capital that required a normative center and correspondingly the dispersed labor and raw material that were at the service of that accumulated capital. “Islam and the West” was perhaps the most potent component of “the West and the Rest” that facilitated and enabled the operation of that relation of power. I have also put forward the ...

Dear Priti, Rwanda is not deterring ‘aliens’ . What are you gonna do about it? Related A couple of figures in the article below are not inaccurate.  There isn’t a single mention of the stark hypocrisy, racism and double standard in migration policies. “Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit.” Not true. A few people benefit of cheap labour and driving wages down, and others use restrictions on migration to win elections. The century of climate migration

Saying that Lewis was a historian of “vast erudition” and “ a usually very good author” is very arguable.  The review though is good. Note that on the demographic ‘problem’ the current fertility rate in countries like Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia is similar to France’s (see fertility rates of each country on wikipedia). The question remains: it is about the form of economic development.  What Went Wrong

“ The oil world I inhabited brought together geopolitics and the everyday. It was material and dirty, and bloody and wracked by wars, coups d’état and revolutions. It was a world wrought by political struggle on the streets and at the diplomatic table. Corporations, universities and security apparatuses all had a finger in the pie. And along with the people who worked the oilfields and filled the streets during demonstrations they changed the world in perceptible ways, sometimes suddenly and monumentally, as when Middle East and Latin American leaders negotiated better oil deals for their countries; sometimes gradually, through a series of unintended consequences.” A review of Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson Laleh Khalili’s critique highlights good missing points in Thompsons’ book. However, Khalili never mentions capital and profit and their role in shaping geopolitics. We blitzed it Related Carbon Democracy

More admission that capitalist production, i.e. the way the global capitalist system has been producing food and the way it is consumed is the main cause of environmental degradation, not the myth of over population is the cause of climate change. Related One-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally .  This amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year, worth approximately  US$1 trillion . All the food  produced but never eaten would be sufficient to feed  two billion people . That's more than twice the number of undernourished people across the globe.

I think this is the best part in Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm’s essay The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie : The self-enclosed universes of Hijab and The Grand Balcony exist and function against the background of a revolution taking place in the outside world. In both instances, the revolution forms a threat to the very existence of the bordello. In The Balcony , the revolution fails after destroying the Queen, the Archbishop's palace, the law courts, and the army headquarters. As the Chief of Police becomes the master of the new counter-revolutionary order, Genet transports Madam Irma and her clients out of the "house of illusions" to become the Queen, the Archbishop etc. in support of the new regime of repression. In the Hijab episode the revolution succeeds after destroying the old centers and symbols of Jahilian power. As its chief, Mahound, becomes the master of the new revolutionary order, Rushdie transports him and his "queens" into the "house ...

It all happened in, you know, “other places.”  So it doesn’t count.

Retour sur une légende du désert

Get the good old syringe boys and fill it to the brim We’ve caught another nigger and we’ll operate on him  Let someone take the handle who can work it with a vim Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom.  Hurrah. Hurrah. We bring the Jubilee. Hurrah. Hurrah. The Flag that Makes him free.  Shove the nozzle deep and let him taste of liberty Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom. An interview with the author and excerpt from the book Related

 Interesting. Édouard Louis's latest book

How European intellectual property hinders affordable medicine

When it comes to the micro and macro the analysis in the article is accurate. However, when it comes to ‘the underlying cause’— ‘neoliberalisation’—it is a mainstream argument. The working of capital and global capital, profitability and capital accumulation—whether by the imperialist states or by Qatar and UAE, for instance—is the underling cause(s). The impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the region

 ثورة بلا ثوار: كيف نفهم الربيع العربي

The different ways that workers fight for their rights

“ Sri Lanka —like so many other countries struggling for solvency —remains a colony with administration outsourced to the International Monetary Fund. We still export cheap labor and resources, and import expensive finished goods —the basic colonial model. The country is still divided and conquered by local elites, while real economic control is held abroad. The I.M.F. has extended loans to Sri Lanka 16 times, always with stringent conditions. They just keep restructuring us for further exploitation by creditors.” Sri Lanka Collapsed First, but It Won’ Be the Last By Indrajit Samarajiva  The New York Times,  NYTimes.com   15 August 2022 As a Sri Lankan, watching international news coverage of my country’ economic and political implosion is like showing up at your own funeral, with everybody speculating on how you died. The Western media accuse China of luring us into a debt trap. Tucker Carlson says environmental, social and corporate governance programs killed us. Everyb...

The bombing killed more than 160 civilians

The BBC, for instance, does not commemorate the Rabaa massacre as it does every year with Tiananmen  Square massacre.

A quarter of them have been in the Middle East and Africa

قرأت الكتاب قبل سنوات، ولكن أجدني أعود إليه لأنه من تأليف صادق جلال العظم.    سلمان رشدي وحقيقة الأدب

 The Role of the Rentier Intellectuals Under colonial duress, Muslim public intellectuals were thus the principal agents of changing their own ancestral faith into an unrecognizable site of ideological contestation with what they categorically identified as “the West”—the self-designated code with which the hegemony of colonial modernity faced and stared down the world at large. Factual relation of power between colonial modernity and Islam eventually gave rise to fictive terms of opposition between European colonial ideologues and Muslim public intellectuals. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, and in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 9/11, enough remnants of this binary supposition were resuscitated for us to see the psychopathological origin of its formulation, and the political potency of its appeal. To see how this dialectic of generating and sustaining a fabricated hostility between “Islam and the West” has worked over the last two hundred years, ...

The freedom to move and to stay

We have heard a lot the refrain “they hate us.” “In a landmark interview in 1965 Malcolm X was asked by his interlocutor why he preached “hate to meet hate.” Malcolm X denied having ever advocated hate. The white man questioning him persisted that he had. “No,” Malcolm interjects, “that is the guilt complex of the American White Man that is so profound that when you begin to analyze the real condition of the Black Man in America, instead of the American White Man eliminating the causes that create that condition, he tries to cover it up by accusing his accusers of teaching hate.” In that singular moment of rhetorical rebuttal, Malcolm X stages a condition of dialectical reversal, where a Muslim critical thinker reasserts agency and reclaims history, not just by confronting the White Man’s monological premise but by epistemically overcoming the limitations of his moral imagination.” Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi

One of the architects of the Assad regime’s notorious security apparatus

Fealty to Israel

«صمت من أجل غزة» لمحمود درويش

When the US converts the world into a battlefield, how do Americans know where to draw the line? More precisely put, it is not immensely shocking that a country that inculcates its citizenry with a macho, shoot-’em-up attitude vis-à-vis other human populations might end up with some, well, “murderers” on its hands – particularly when the domestic panorama is one of dystopian capitalism and acute alienation. Capitalism is the culprit

We have been seduced by Harari because of the power not of his truth or scholarship but of his storytelling. As a scientist, I know how difficult it is to spin complex issues into appealing and accurate storytelling. I also know when science is being sacrificed to sensationalism. Yuval Harari is what I call a “science populist.” (Canadian clinical psychologist and YouTube guru  Jordan Peterson  is another example.) Science populists are gifted storytellers who weave sensationalist yarns around scientific “facts” in simple, emotionally persuasive language. Their narratives are largely scrubbed clean of nuance or doubt, giving them a false air of authority—and making their message even more convincing. Like their political counterparts, science populists are sources of misinformation. They promote false crises, while presenting themselves as having the answers. They understand the seduction of a story well told—relentlessly seeking to expand their audience—never mind that the un...

 "لا خوف على الحريات"؟

“ Seeking rational explanations for Israel's strange behaviour may be superfluous , because the best explanation may come from the world of social psychology. Israeli society no longer sees the occupation at all - because the status quo appears to Israelis as normal and natural. And, under these circumstances, Israel is bewildered every time this situation arouses resistance.”

A South African TV series in 6 episodes. Available on sflix.to (VPN and ad block required)

“There is no redressing the sustained history of US and European universities' involvement with slavery, racism and colonialism without first dismantling its sustained ideological premise.”

For ‘the West’ read the US and UK. ‘The West’ is flirting with disaster

Conservative hegemony amid shifting world order

Paul Bowles and the making of music of Morocco

On  December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama . Her courageous act of protest was considered the spark that ignited the Civil Rights movement.

  Qatar World Cup 2022: How football became a game-changer for the Middle East

Counteroppression by Alpa Shah