Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

“Speaking to the BBC, the city's health director, Hatem Al-Sharif, said more than 700 unidentified people, including young children, have been buried in unmarked graves on the outskirts of Sfax since the beginning of this year.” a Sudanese man, Adel Adbullah, said: "I fled from war. I don't think I will see any worse at sea than I already have. I have nothing to lose ."

   قصيدة للشاعر المصري أمل دنقل

Pertinent. “This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postul...

“Sparking increased profits and growing inequality, sanctions facilitated a structural transformation of the Iranian economy that favoured those who control capital.” The poor are hurt most, the richest get richer

One has to wonder whether CLR James’s critical essay/talk has anything relevant to the uprisings since 2010-2011. The essay was originally published in 1982

 Excerpts According to Will Lloyd , The director is a mass entertainer with an elitist disdain for the masses. In his films, order and hierarchy reign supreme. Nola went to Haileybury College…  A prison… though with better hymns, and one where the prisoners eventually graduate as prison guards.” “Survive your first two years at Haileybury,” claimed RAF group captain Peter Townsend, “and you could survive anything.” Haileybury was a finishing school for a dead Empire. Nolan never slept well there. This was the early Eighties; he believed the world would soon end in a nuclear holocaust. In the dormitory each evening he would lie in his bed after lights out listening to the scores for  Star Wars , Stanley Kubrick’s  2001 , or Vangelis’s score for  Chariots of Fire  on his walkman.” Nolan’s fastidious character hints at a pre-21st century moral seriousness… Nolan believes in deadlines and careful resource allocation. He considers efficiency “a form of cont...