Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A long interview with Beydoun , author of  American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear  and   The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. My selection: “ We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.” “The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world…  I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11. What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion peo...

Amnesia.  “The world might not forgive, but wait long enough, the world will forget.” — Leila al-Shami

A hidden universe of suffering 

An excellent article ‘Even when things were at their worst, the majority of Americans were free to say what they thought for the simple reason that they never thought what they were not free to say’. — the atomic physicist Leo Szilard The new orthodoxy

How Arab art embraced cubism

A list of songs which have been banned by the BBC over the years

"But we have to choose whether to treat people all the same or not, whether they are Ukrainians fleeing war, or Africans fleeing war and persecution. Do we treat them all the same or do we treat them according to the colour of their skin?" — the mayor of Lampedusa, Italy  

It is a good revisit, and it always reminds me of a colleague who upon mentioning Orientalism and Edward Said in 2010/11, she said: “that a long time ago,” implying that it became outdated. She too was taken by ‘liberal globalisation’, ‘human rights’, etc.  I still prefer and recommend Vivek Chibber’s and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s approaches, for they show the limitations of Said’s analysis. Hamid Dabashi in his The End of Two Myths has also pinpointed what Said was unable to analyse and incorporate in Orientalism. Furthermore, we should not forget that today there is a whole literature on neo-Orientalism. Why Edward Saïd’s book still matters

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The open letter makes it clear that these issues are not confined to surgery or anaesthetics but are commonplace. Dr Hilary Williams said there was widespread sexual innuendo when she was a trainee. "It's quite frightening to think that the perpetrators are in some way being protected by current systems - not necessarily deliberately," she added. Related Female surgeons sexually harassed while operating 35,000 cases of sexual misconduct in NHS [alone] in five years We know that  half of women  have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace - this rises to  seven in 10  for disabled women.  One in eight  LBT women have experienced serious sexual assault or rape at work. Four out of five women don’t report the abuse they have experienced. Male violence against women is endemic Sexual violence endemic at UK universities and colleges Pervasive in UK schools

Note:  Gabon mentions the ‘egalitarian principles of the French Republic’. I wish he referred to when in its history the Republic has ever had those egalitarian principles in reality. Gabon does not put the word ‘Islam’ in inverted commas. Is ‘Islam’ one as it is often portrayed or attacked? Does the French state have a problem with the ‘Islam’ of the Saudi monarchy? Does it have a problem with the .’Islam’ of el-Sisi in Egypt?  Did the French state have any problem with Bourguiba’s and Ben Ali’s regimes when they banned the headscarf in Tunisia public institutions and repressed those who broke the law? ******* “Even more surprisingly given the extremist and openly anti-Republican nature of Philippe’s declarations - even former presidential candidate  Marine Le Pen  never advocated anything like this - there has been little reaction from the political class, media, and public intellectuals, with the notable exception of an  open letter  by a handful of acad...

In exchange for a bailout from the IMF

“The internal colonialism thesis was not a plausible explanation of South African apartheid. It could not explain the fact that, by the 1970s, the majority of the workforce employed in modern industrial production in South Africa, such as auto plants, textiles, and steel production, came from the nonwhite sections of South African society that were supposed to be colonized.” Racism was deeply intertwined with capitalism, argues Kundnani

Complicity in extrajudicial killings

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Si leurs détracteurs médiatiques et politiques y voient un nouveau signe de la sournoise invasion des  « musulmans   », c’est-à-dire des Maghrébins, leur histoire n’a cependant rien à voir avec l’Occident musulman .

Economy, Society, and Hegemony

According to AJ+, the number of pupils who wear abayas in school represents less than  0.00005 percent   of all students in the country:  A threat to ‘France’s secularism’:  The latest example of how French state institutions work together to uphold institutional racism Related “ Muslim societies are assumed to have sweeping patriarchal structures, while it is claimed that Western societies are pictures of progressive modernity, says Swiss social anthropologist Annemarie Sancar. Neither of these absolute views are correct.” The West's gleeful obsession with the 'oppressed Arab woman' Liberal feminism is bankrupt Imperialist feminism and liberalism A photo from qantara.de

Available in three languages

The state has adopted the model of the "military camp" in its urban structures and institutions

“The strike is the first in union history to target all three companies at once.” The class war: On Friday, Ford announced that it had laid off 600 workers at a Michigan assembly plant as "a consequence of the strike". And the President is attempting to maintain the social peace.

The other side of ‘the new cold war’

Campaign to free teacher unionists

Why did Libya floods result in such a large loss of life? كان من الممكن تفادي سقوط معظم القتلى  The BBC: A Libyan politician says the country's deadly flooding was a disaster waiting to happen Guma El-Gamaty, head of the Taghyeer Party, says budgets to repair the dams were not allocated properly after Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown Most of the thousands of deaths in the Libya floods could have been avoided, the UN's World Meteorological Organization says Warnings should have been issued, leading to evacuations, "and we could have avoided most of the human casualties"

Frank Ospina, and UK immigration detention centre Related ‘Illegal migrants terrorising’ the UK Agents of Their Own Abuse

The wrong kind of secularism

Meaning of Salma ya Salama In French with English subtitles

A coup at 50

“As ill-defined as the term might be, in the cultural sphere the real value of the Global South is to open a space for decolonising conversations, articulating the kind of hybridity and complexity of modern identity that a nationality cannot, a conversation held far from the old imperialist orders of the Northern hemisphere. A utopian geography that may never be real but can serve a purpose.” A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the ‘Global South’

For years the main Western media outlets and well-known analysts of China have been speaking and writing about the coming Chinese economy big trouble, if not collapse. Nathan Sperber provides an interesting account 

Summary “Western diplomats privately accused the pro-democracy movement of not being pragmatic. This on account of its slogan, ‘No Negotiation, No Partnership, No Legitimacy’, which accurately sums up the movement’s position towards the junta that was killing its members on the streets of Khartoum.  The Western attempt to restore a civilian-military partnership also gave Dagalo the opportunity to reposition himself as a supporter of ‘democracy’.” The Western regimes’ old-new tradition of supporting ‘stability’. “An estimated twenty-five million people – more than half of Sudan’s population – are in desperate need of relief due to a humanitarian crisis made worse by the fighting.  But rather than safeguard the integrity of relief, the global aid response has elected to administer its operations from SAF-controlled Port Sudan. This has predictably led to bureaucratic impediments, visa denials, and the acute diversion of aid by the SAF, as well as by the RSF.” “Neither Washi...

Earlier this year, we noticed something strange about our website traffic:  The number of people coming to The Intercept from stories shared on Facebook had fallen off a cliff. In a single year, our Facebook traffic dropped by a whopping 53 percent. The number of visitors  from our own Facebook page  dropped by 83 percent. This drop-off is being felt across the industry, confirming what we’ve long suspected:  Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to suppress links to legitimate news sources like The Intercept.  Fewer readers means fewer donations — and for a nonprofit news outlet like us, that’s a serious issue. Our ongoing investigations of corporate corruption, government malfeasance, and the dark money pouring into 2024 elections simply depend on reader support… Facebook has been gradually throttling hard news for a while — replacing it with content that’s upbeat and advertiser-friendly.  But what we’ve seen this year is unprecedented.  In th...

Does Kissinger require rehabilitation? Related Henry Kissinger in the Middle East

Priorities of a ‘neoliberal’ regime

Nobody in Fass Boye seemed to blame the migrants for taking the risk. More than a third of the country lives in poverty, according to the World Bank. The young see few opportunities at home. "Macky Sall sold the ocean," said Assane Niang, a 23-year-old fishing captain, referring to the Senegalese president. Fishermen in Fass Boye say the government has granted too many licences to foreign trawlers, which overfish their waters and deplete the catch. “Barcelona or death”

I have not read any Kenyan novel. This account is illuminating and encouraging to explore “East Africa’s leading novelist.” Sarah Jilani on Ngũgĩ’s vision

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “ the Melilla massacre ”. “I suppose we weren’t human any more, we were just like animals.” —Basir, a 24-year-old Sudanese man

A failed attempt to boost Israeli propaganda