Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.    —Frantz Fanon,  Black Skins, White Masks

"'O my body!  Make of me always a man who questions!'  It is a plea that remains as relevant as ever today, as we question the structure of power and oppression in the digital age."

"The national economy, once protected, is literally controlled today. Loans and donations fund the budget. Fishing for capital, either the heads of state themselves or their governmental delegates pay a visit to the capital cities of their former metropoles each quarter. The former colonial power makes countless demands and secures concessions and guarantees, as it takes less and less care to mask its hold on national power. The people miserably stagnates in unbearable destitution and slowly becomes increasingly aware of its leaders’ heinous treason." — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth . How much has changed since Fanon wrote those words in 1963?

With Whites, Jews, and Us, Houria Bouteldja launches a scathing critique of the European Left from an indigenous anti-colonial perspective, reflecting on Frantz Fanon's political legacy, the republican pact, the Shoah, the creation of Israel, feminism, and the fate of postcolonial immigration in the West in the age of rising anti-immigrant populism. Drawing upon such prominent voices as James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Jean Genet, she issues a polemical call for a militant anti-racism grounded in the concept of revolutionary love. Such love will not come without significant discomfort for whites, and without necessary provocation. Bouteldja challenges widespread assumptions among the Left in the United States and Europe - that anti-Semitism plays any role in Arab - Israeli conflicts, for example, or that philo-Semitism doesn't in itself embody an oppressive position; that feminism or postcolonialist theory is free of colonialism; that integrationalism is a solution rather than a ...

Forgetting Fanon, remembering Fanon

This is a good long read.  I have a thought though on the last parargraph: the writer delves into what formed Fanon, especially the context of colonization and how it shaped the mind, pshycology and plight of the colonized. The author, I think, fails to use the same method when it comes to "Davos" and "Dabiq" or Globalisationa and the so-called Islamic State. Is not the latter a product of globalization (global capitalism and imperialism). Davos is the context, Dabiq was spawned by Davos like the violence directed by Algerians against the colonizers and the settlers was born in the context of colonisation. Is it not the context of global capitalism and its functions that creates wars, invasions, dictatorships, neoliberalism, power struggles, geopolitics, "civil wars", uneven-development, neofascism etc? Where Life is Seized