UK: The Telegraph Facebook Page (3)

Sajid Riasat mate you still treat your women as third class citizens so shut up.

Graeme Harris Yes, many do, Harris. Right now the British, the Americans, the German… regimes have been treating Palestinian women (and children) as non-humans that must be sacrificed at the altar. Many women, east and West, north and south, are treated as commodities, highly sexualised and the gender pay gap is obscene even at the heart of Britain. One should have a bigger picture too otherwise we find ourselves complicit in oppression. The Saudis are ‘our’ friends, aren’t they?

Graeme Harris

Ned Ma ide say it’s the Palestinians using their kids as shields for years is a problem. Hamas hiding in hospitals. Palestinians and Arabs world over celebrating when Hamas kidnapped and killed kids. I’ve yet to see an Arab state condemn it. Look at yourselves first then wonder why countries are fed up.

Ned Ma

Graeme Harris at least two prejudices here: 1. no basic knowledge of history of occupation and apartheid and the different forms of resistance Palestinians used over the decades. You blame the oppressed. 2. What is look at yourselves? Who told you I was an Arab? And what do you know of Arab history that allow you to use ‘yourselves’? Is that not another prejudice? Most Arab states did not condemn Hamas attack. I have nothing to do with them. Britain, US , Germany, Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states are now complicit in genocide. Have you condemned them? When British and Australian troops committed wars crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including killing children, have you condemned them? For you, in order to ignore state violence of the states, you start with Hamas attack. There is no history, no build up, no context, something one learns at the GCSE, not to speak of university. Finally, can you go through my arguments here and refute them one by one?

Harris did not reply to the last comment.

Comments

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.” In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people. Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

London

When you own a country, you do with its wealth whatever you want while your brothers and sisters (Arabs and Muslims) from Lebanon’s “failed state” to Syrian refugees are suffering. You also stretch your arms to help reshape the geo-strategical board of the MENA region. You get support from the heart of “free market democracies” interested in selling you properties and weapons, and they protect you. An Arab revolution that does not spread to overthrow those rotten pigs and employ the Gulf resources for the majority of Arabs, cannot be called a revolution. Sheikh Khalifa’s £5bn London property empire

NM's blog

Search This Blog