Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Ever since its founding after World War II the German Federal Republic, to gain acceptance into the family of “western democracies,”  while denouncing Hitler and his most famous henchmen, almost completely restricted condemnation to the horrifying annihilation of the Jewish people while distorting or ignoring the earlier, intense fascist attacks against the Left, especially the Communist left, which so often ended with a noose or a guillotine. Largely forgotten were also Nazi crimes against almost every country in Europe, beginning in Spain in 1936-1939 and climaxing in the killing of an estimated 27 million people of the USSR. In fact, a large number of the perpetrators went unpunished or regained influence and prosperity. Meanwhile, the policy-makers built up connections with any and every Israeli government, including large financial support, often in the form of armaments (like submarines). But since such support served as evidence that Germany had “overcome its past,” tot...

A ‘propaganda system will consistently portray people abused by enemy states as worthy victims , whereas those treated with equal or greater severity by its own government or clients will be unworthy.’ Similarly, think of Palestinians vs. Israelis, black and brown refugees vs. Ukrainian refugees, minorities in Syria vs. Syrians, an Iranian woman killed by the Iranian regime vs. women and children killed by Israel or the US. Julian Assange ‘How can exposing crime and torture be worse than committing them?’

Page is worth $120 billion. He is co-founder if Google, former manager of Alphabet and currently controlling shareholder. Nick Bilton: Larry Page was talking about the progression of technology and how it was inevitable that humans would eventually create “superintelligent machines,” also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which are computers that are smarter than humans, and in Page’s view, once that happened, those machines would quickly find no use for us humans, and they would simply get rid of us. “What do you mean, get rid of us?” my friend asked Page. Like a sci-fi writer delivering a pitch for their new apocalyptic story idea, Page explained that these robots would become far superior to us very quickly , and if we were no longer needed on earth and that’s the natural order of things—and I quote—“it’s just the next step in evolution.” At first my friend assumed Page was joking. “I’m serious,” said Page. When my friend argued that this was a really fucked up way of ...

Before and after October 07

“Today, India is the largest and most reliable arms purchaser from Israel, accounting for 46 percent of Israel’s global sales. Since 2017, India has been designated a “strategic partner,” participating in the coproducing Israeli weapons.” Port workers insist they want no part in the massacre in Gaza

“Consider the outcry from UK feminists over the tragic case of Iran’s Mahsa Amini, who was punished for her ‘improper’ hijab, leading to her death.  Like many, I was incensed by the injustice she faced. The global reaction to Amini’s ordeal sparked a significant feminist movement, with solidarity in the UK, as   activists staged  dramatic hair-cutting protests in the heart of London.  Yet, the dire situation facing Palestinian women and children in Gaza has not benefitted from similarly loud and passionate advocacy. It’s as though feminist ire and power selectively rears its head for issues that fit a decidedly western narrative of liberation – leaving others, such as those in Palestine, in the shadows. Draped in the lofty notion of ‘liberation’, it often imposes western values on women around the globe, leaving chaos in its wake.”

Business is business

“Rather than dividing the right from the left, migration splits both right and left formations internally. Upon gaining power, the only way for both left and right to resolve this tangle of contradictions is through hypocrisy: to adopt practices that contradict public proclamations. In reality, whoever is in government, it is always the labour market, in turn determined by relevant legislation, the business cycle and the geopolitical situation, that determines migration policies . Barbed wire

As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can! America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers. It’s so hard to spread democracy to the barbarians, but we’ll keep trying

A good review , especially that it questions the authors’ ‘alternative’ and its limitations.

“When people approach you as a person from a refugee background, no matter if you are a writer or not, they approach you with an image that they have about you,” he says. “That image is victimisation. “ I was not a victim. I was a fighter. I was fighting. I wrote two books about that system. I wrote many articles about that system.” “I am not working just as a witness,” Boochani says. “To make colonisers angry, that is my job. It is not about sending a message.” Messages, he insists, are “white, comfortable” things to want.

UN experts appalled by human rights violations

  للحرية الأكاديمية في الولايات المتحدة والنزاع حولها، ومحاولات الحد منها، وتقييدها تاريخ طويل.

“It is … urgent to re-examine the Derna tragedy in light of a long history of colonialism, confiscation of natural resources and destruction of living and non-living things for Western hegemonic purposes via war and militarism.” Related When you hear the buzzwords ‘our way of life’, ‘our values’, ‘democracy or authoritarianism’, not to mention ‘there is a jungle over there’ (Josep Borrell), ‘wasps in the Middle East’ (Thomas Friedman), ‘terrorism’, etc. think of this: The Imperial Mode of Living

“Kenneth Waltz, arguably the most influential international theorist since the Second World War, put it like this: ‘Students of international politics have had an extraordinarily difficult time casting their subject in theoretical terms’ (Waltz 1990, 21). IR students today might think this claim outdated. For it was made at the very moment when IR was experiencing a dramatic widening of its theoretical horizons. From the late 1980s onwards, traditional realist, liberal and Marxist approaches were being joined on the stage by numerous new theories: critical theory, constructivism, neo-Gramscianism, feminism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism and so on. As a result, IR theory today is a very crowded field. And yet Waltz never changed his mind. For him, most of the approaches studied as ‘international theories’ were nothing of the kind. Instead they were theories of domestic society that people were using to think about international affairs. Such theories, argued Waltz, are not useless...

  Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact. Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it f...

Dr Siân Lawrence  says we’re not sliding back to the days of class privilege – we never left them behind . Related What is PPE?