Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I wish leftists, and a few revolutionary leftists, covered, analysed, and spilled as much ink on the oppression of Palestinians as on the slaughter of Syrians by the Assad regime. Debunking myths and ‘the Western’ media and politicians’s complicity in crime. “Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, however grimly, predictably brutal, was not an ‘ invasion’  as it has widely been reported. During the Great March of Return – 2018-2019 – both  “the BBC and Westminster politicians referred to this as ‘ border   violence’.  So did the international press from the  New York Times  to the  Globe and Mail .” The purpose of asserting that there is a border between Israel and Gaza is to euphemise [sic] Israeli violence, and to represent the aggressor as engaging in self-defence. Gaza is not a nation-state. It is not even an ‘ open-air prison’  as is often said. It is a fortified ghetto controlled by the state of Israel… The occupying power, the aggressor, the pu...

“By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. For example, “farmers in northeastern Ghana have been cultivating the cowpea—a protein-rich legume that North Americans know as the black-eyed pea—since the Bronze Age. How was it possible that people continuing to farm in that lineage, some 5,000 years later, could face 15 years in prison for infringing property claims on crop varieties based on the local original?” “We can’t accept this law,” said Faustina Banakwoyem, a 35-year-old soya and pepper farmer and the only woman in the Paga group. ...

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

“ In the midst of all this politicking, thousands of civilians have lost their lives as the West refuses to address the root cause of this decades-long conflict: the continued oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people.” Oppression and dispossessions are the key aspects. It is not a ‘conflict’ though. “It is difficult for Western audiences to understand the terror and oppression to which ordinary Palestinians are subjected on a daily basis, because it is simply not reported throughout much of the media.”  As for solidarity and what can be done, I do think that the solution lays in the region, not outside it. Another revolutionary, but radical, upheaval that topples the rotten, complicit regimes in the region could bring justice to the Palestinians by changing the balance of forces. There is no solution that will come from ‘the West’. Palestinian trade unions

James Baldwin   once noted : “Whatever you see in other people is what you see in the mirror … everybody knows, or every writer knows … no matter what I may be describing, I am describing myself.” Israel’s routine depiction of Hamas as barbaric, sadistic torturers brings the searing truth of Baldwin’s words sharply into focus. “Worse than ISIS”

1.  On Saturday night, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was lit up with the Israeli flag. Careful observers noticed orange blotches on the column — these were leftovers from a  climate protest   several weeks ago. The Israeli flag appeared to have blood stains. The symbolism was perfect: While the German establishment project declares its unwavering support for the Israeli government, it can’t quite hide the fact that  colonialism and apartheid   are inherently bloody affairs. On Saturday, five parties in the Bundestag — CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and Greens — published a  joint statement  declaring their support for the State of Israel and its “right to self-defense.” The far-right AfD, for its part, made an almost identical declaration. Even the reformist left party DIE LINKE, represented by chairperson  Janine Wissler , issued a one-sided condemnation of “terrorism.” [ Just a few years ago, Wissler was part of a  post-Trotskyist organization  t...

A military operation “ was described in Paris as in Tel Aviv as a terrorist attack. This parallel reveals the differing ethnic perceptions of bodily suffering, legitimate violence and the right to resistance, depending on whether people are assimilated to the West or not.” Condemning violence to legitimise one’s own

Support for the brutal, indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza finds its roots in the historical context of western settler-colonialism

The article is available in four languages. This should be a guide to anyone who wants to study religion in general and Islam in particular . 1. “The impossibility of writing the history of a religion as an autonomous entity without considering the economic, social and political dynamics at work. 2. The relative autonomy of religion vis-à-vis social issues. In other words, ideology translates into its own language the contradictions that run through society. 3.  There is not one Islam, transcendent, ahistorical, but several very different Islams, transformed by the historical conditions in which they flourished; these Islams are ideologies, it would therefore be methodologically erroneous and politically ineffectual or even dangerous to regard it as the main motor of economic phenomena.” 4.  The politicisation of Islam and the development of Islamic fundamentalism are the fateful results of the subjugation of Muslim countries by the capitalist powers of Europe. This subjugatio...

 A very realistic approach “Whatever catharsis this constitutes, it is not one that will lead to victory over an Israeli society that has been using violence against Palestinians as its own traumatic catharsis for 75 years, in a world that has a very high tolerance for Palestinian civilian casualties, with most people in the West still supporting Israel whenever there is a high level of Israeli Jewish casualties. If Palestinians are to defeat Zionist colonialism, it will likely take a much different sort of analysis of its violence and power than Fanon offered three-quarters of a century ago, and it will probably require a paradigm shift in the core concepts of what a nation, freedom and independence are at a moment when the entire world, not just Palestine/Israel, is heading towards conflagration.” Israel’s settler colonialism is much more than ‘violence in its natural state’ and thus will require far more than ‘greater violence’ to defeat