Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How convenient for the liberal pundits to attack the far-right and the ideology of hatred. They tend to ignore the role of "identity politics" that has been used to plague the minds. This was uttered by a liberal columnist in the Financial Times in 2009: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.” This was uttered by the perpetrator of the attack in El Paso, US, in August 2019:  “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the inst...

"The failure of modernization theory to explain political, social, economic, and cultural processes in the Middle East and Muslim countries beyond it seemed to US establishment scholarship as less related to the theoretical fallacies of modernization theory itself and more a function of the exceptionalism of Arab or Islamic cultures more generally. While the rest of area studies and anti-establishment Middle East scholars were turning to dependency theory to underdtand socioeconomic and political processes unfolding in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Samir Amin, who is primarily Middle East scholar, is a pioneer theorist of dependency ...), mainstream Middle East Studies was turning to Islam and culture, ignoring the central attribute of imperial connections to the region that are primarily defined by oil, it was not the nature of US imperial interest in and control of oil production that was seen as "exceptional" about the region, regulating the types of its ruling reg...