Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From a long investigative report “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked Europe’s single-biggest weapons procurement rush since the second world war. While Ukraine’s Nato allies delivered vast amounts of military aid, the country’s own officials were also forced to find ways to supply troops fighting across a 1,000-kilometre front line. A Financial Times investigation, based on leaked Ukrainian state documents, court filings and dozens of interviews with procurement officials, weapons dealers and manufacturers, and detectives, has uncovered how hundreds of millions of dollars Kyiv paid to foreign arms intermediaries to secure vital military equipment has gone to waste over the past three years of war. “As Ukraine continues to battle against Russia’s ammunition production superiority, the country has been left exposed to the ruthless vagaries of the international weapons market. In several cases Kyiv paid out large amounts in advance to little-known companies for materiel that to t...

Road to October 7

The latest of 'our values' “Giving their accounts publicly for the first time, the veterans described seeing members of the SAS murder unarmed people in their sleep and execute handcuffed detainees, including children. “The new testimony includes allegations of war crimes stretching over more than a decade, far longer than the three years currently being examined by a judge-led public inquiry in the UK.” “[L]aws state that on such operations people can be deliberately killed only when they pose a direct threat to the lives of British troops or others.”  “They pose direct threat.” Where? Was Afghanistan at the time in the North Sea or part of UK territories? And is this really separate from funding the killing of children and women in Gaza? The cover up: “ The testimony, as well as new video evidence obtained by the BBC from SAS operations in Iraq in 2006, also supports previous reporting by Panorama that SAS squadrons kept count of their kills to compete with one another.” And ...

“In recent years, several state-owned Chinese companies, along with other private Chinese firms,  have invested  directly or indirectly in Israeli settlements or companies operating within them. “ China’s actions directly contradict the legal principles it claims to uphold .”

“If you’re a Zionist, you do not get to claim solidarity with Gaza. If you oppose abortion, you have not sided with feminism. If you’re a far-right Christian who loves gay people but 'hates the sin', you’re lying to yourself and everyone around you. If you write a muddled piece about the conceptual importance of 'biological women' days after a ruling that erases trans people from public life, you don’t support trans liberation—hell, you don’t even support trans survival. Claiming support while advocating destruction is not solidarity ; it is self-serving manipulation. It is covert bullying. It is demanding, in dulcet tones, that oppressed people pat you on the back while you slit their throats.”

“If MSF [ Médecins Sans Frontières]  secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. “What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity an...

Loose translation/interpretation by  Michael R. Burch Hamza was one of my hometown’s ordinary men who did manual labor for bread. When I saw him recently, the land still wore its mourning dress in the solemn windless silence and I felt defeated. But Hamza-the-unextraordinary said: “Sister, our land’s throbbing heart never ceases to pound,  and it perseveres, enduring the unendurable, keeping the secrets of mounds and wombs.  This land sprouting cactus spikes and palms also births freedom-fighters. Thus our land, my sister, is our mother!” Days passed and Hamza was nowhere to be seen, but I felt the land’s belly heaving in pain. At sixty-five Hamza’s a heavy burden on her back. “Burn down his house!” some commandant screamed, “and slap his son in a prison cell!” As our town’s military ruler later explained this was necessary for law and order, that is, an act of love, for peace! Armed soldiers surrounded Hamza’s house; the coiled serpent completed its circle. The bang at h...

If common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myth, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is, like them, historically constructed and, like them, subjected to historically defined standards of judgment. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system, though not usually a very tightly integrated one, and it rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity. Here, as elsewhere, things are what you make of them. — Clifford Gertz