Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From Democratic Mass Killing to Democratic Ethnic Cleansing Trump called Gaza a "demolition site" and said he had spoken to Jordan's King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory.  "I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding that he planned to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday. "You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million, adding that "something has to happen".  "I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace for a change,"  Trump said , adding that moving Gaza's residents could be "temporary or could be long term".   The US, EU,Egypt, Jordan, Gulf countries should accept displaced Israelis

The BBC, for instance, has excelled in its racism towards the released Palestinians prisoners. One has only to count the number of pictures of the released Israeli hostages in comparison to the ones of the Palestinians released from Israeli jails.. Fania Oz-Salzberger’s stand as a 'leftist' is worse that what Sinan Antoon has reported . “[S] etting hundreds of terrorists free, is the result of Israel’s failure in 7 October. It is also the result of the Israeli government’s failure to release our hostages “by military pressure“, as its head frequently promised, for 470 days. We must pay this price. And then elect a new leadership, which would    make sure that neither Hamas nor any other subhuman would ever be able to repeat 7 October.  How?  By learning from our military mistakes, rebuilding both security and solidarity, and offering a political horizon for Israelis and Palestinians. Also by never forgetting a vile murderer’s face. Enough said, at this point.” Note...

A young woman who had worked in finance a few ago told me that in recent interviews with employers in the financial sector she was offered a salary almost half of what she was paid before. That prompted me to look for an update on the gender gap. According the BBC calculator of 2019 the gender gap at the (in)famous bank HSBC was 30%.  According to AI, as of April 2023, the gap was 43%.

Tehila Sasson’s “argument is, roughly, that international aid organisations – influenced by a long tradition of voluntary service, a desire to find a role after empire and a dislike of the supposed soullessness and impersonality of postwar state-led development and planning – devised programmes and campaigns that relied on and promoted entrepreneurialism, consumerism, individualism and anti-statism. Non-profits weren’t simply too weak to defend against those forces of financialisation, marketisation and privatisation that we lump together under the term ‘neoliberalism’, but embraced them. This is the sense in which they were part of the ‘making’ of neoliberalism after empire, with damaging results. As Sasson puts it most strongly in her conclusion, the non-profit sector ‘helped cement post-imperial inequalities and new divisions of labour between Third World producers and British consumers. In a period marked by deindustrialisation and a crisis of unemployment, the solidarity economy ...

Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded : "Because I have common sense." Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen — Albert Einstein

  France responsible for ‘extreme violence’ in Cameroon independence war, report says

Blinken and co should “talk less about the rules-based international order and more about defending the free world. That is a more accurate and comprehensible description of what western foreign policy is actually about…  As in the cold war and the earlier struggles of the 20th century, the world’s democracies do not need to apologise for being ruthless in defence of free societies.” —Gideon Rahman, Financial Times, 27 May 2024   ‘Democracy’ instead of capitalism or at as, his colleague Martin Wolf calls it, ‘ democratic capitalism ’. Manipulation of history: the 20th century was a struggle netween ‘democracies’ and non-democracies. In fact, the 20th century saw struggles between empires, advanced capitalist state, and movements of national liberations, class struggle in the heart of bourgeois democracies, even struggles against dictatorships such as in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Greece … to overcome capitalism and aiming at establishing genuine democracies. ‘Defending the free ...

It is telling that the BBC puts this in Business section rather than Society. The can afford ir or the cannot. They simply want more.

“Because immediate interests divide the working class, and because they do not directly call into question the structure of capitalist relations, the durability of capitalism depends, in part, on the extent to which struggles over fundamental interests are displaced into struggles over immediate interests.” The complex tension between class interest and achieving class objectives Related Eleven Criticisms of capitalism 

"You can try to carry out a coup with your economic strength and your arrogance, like they did with Allende. But I will die in my law, I resisted torture and I resist you," [the Colombian president Gustavo] Petro said , referring to former Chilean socialist President Salvatore [sic] Allende, who was overthrown with the help of the US.

“For the first time since the end of the Nazi regime, the leader of the  Freedom Party of Austria  (FPO) - a political party that was established by ex-Nazis for ex-Nazis, and that has grown to become a major force in Austrian politics since the early 1990s - has the chance to not only join a government as a partner but to actually  lead the government , with its party leader becoming the future chancellor.” Unfortunately, apart from ‘Muslim and Christian values are incompatible’, there is no elaboration on the ‘why’ in the article : no sociology, no political economy.

Myth 1: Trump put pressure on Netanyahu. That has been depicted by many as if it was him who arm-twisted the Israeli genocidal leader to put an end to the war. Myth 2: The depiction of the current truce as a victory for Hamas. by  Gilbert Achcar

From 2019 “It doesn’t take Ariel long to get used to this new world without Palestinians. He and others do feel flashes of regret and fear. A bartender at the nearby Chez George tells Ariel, ‘Maybe the Arabs will crawl out of every corner like zombies and return to exact revenge’. But twenty-four hours after the disappearance, no zombies show up. In fact, ‘They didn’t find a single drop of blood. They were relieved that the army either wasn’t responsible for the disappearance, or it had executed it perfectly’.” The Book of Disappearance Related Dutch-politician calls for ‘transfer’ of Palestinains to Jordan

During the 1960s, the  Haaretz  newspaper was a staunch supporter of the key political decisions made by Menachem Begin, thus playing a significant role in reinforcing his legitimacy and that of his Herut movement. On the one hand, this support was motivated by the desire to transform Israel’s socialist economy into a freer and less government-controlled market. On the other hand, it stemmed from the aspiration to democratise Israel’s political life. This symbiosis began to emerge in the early 1960s and was sustained over a lengthy period of time, thus underscoring the role played by Israeli bourgeois-liberal circles in the Zionist Right’s path to power. Haaretz  and its long-time owner and editor-in-chief Gershom Shocken  passed away in late 1990, a little over a year before Begin’s own death. After Begin’s demise in March 1992,   Haaretz   dedicated a farewell article in his honour titled ‘Farewell to an Opponent’, portraying a balanced and even eulogisti...