Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

There a sloppy about Obama in this article. Unsurprisingly, no mention of class at all as if race and class are not interrelated. The rights/plight of the African Iraqis

"Liberalism has always contained different shades, and its dominant version has varied across countries and periods. In the capitalist world, going back to the eighties, the line of division separating a liberal politics from a politics of the left is their respective attitudes to the existing order of things: does it require structural change or situational adjustment? Between states, the ‘liberal international order’ has for thirty years been the touchstone of geopolitical reason: free markets, free trade, free movement of capital and other human rights, policed by the most powerful nation on earth with help from its allies, in accordance with its rules and its sanctions, its rewards and its retributions. Within states, ‘neoliberalism’: privatization of goods and services, deregulation of industries and of finance, fiscal retrenchment, de-unionization, weakening of labour, strengthening of capital—compensated by recognition of gender and multicultural claims. The first has ...

UK and Egypt J. is only following a British tradition 

Like the World Bank, the IMF and others, Google is deepening its involvement with Egypt's repressive regime

A very engaging review The students were  furious . For the first week of class, they read the polemical first chapter, which argues that human rights are not eternal universal truths, but rather a set of political claims that emerged in the 1970s amid a crisis of the moral authority of communism. They simply would not believe that their own highest ideals dated not to the Bible or “the golden rule” but to the age of disco. As it turned out, the students had a preconceived notion of what it meant to have their preconceived notions challenged, and it did not include historicizing their own moral commitments. This provoked reflection about what historicizing something means and how legitimacy for moral claims is constructed. The Inequality of "Human Rights"

This was written in 1984:  The extent of criticism varies greatly from one part of the Left to another, but there is at least no disposition now to take the Soviet regime as a “model” of socialism: indeed, there is now a widespread disposition on the Left to think of the Soviet regime as an “anti-model.” How could it be otherwise, given some of the most pronounced features of that regime? The socialist project means, and certainly meant for Marx, the subordination of the state to society. Precisely the reverse characterizes the Soviet system. Moreover, the domination of the state in that system is assured by an extremely hierarchical, tightly controlled, and fiercely monopolistic party aided by a formidable police apparatus. Outside the party, there is no political life; and inside the party, such political life as there exists is narrowly circumscribed by what the party leadership permits or ordains — which means that there is not much political life in the party either. ...

A book review  "In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.  
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a...

Israel's thriving war business in Europe

"Western liberals were widely perceived as ‘false friends’, as Conor Cruise O’Brien reported from Africa in the 1960s, and liberalism itself as an ‘ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs’. Distrust of the Western discourse of human rights was likewise constant and deep. The Indonesian thinker Soedjatmoko challenged its presumption of universal morality, pointing to the global inequalities perpetuated by the champions of human rights. Arundhati Roy spoke in 2004 of an ‘alarming shift of paradigm’: ‘Even among the well-intentioned, the expansive, magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of “human rights”’ – a minimalist request, basically, not to be killed, tortured or unjustly imprisoned. As a result, she argued ‘resistance movements in poor countries … view human rights NGOs as modern-day missionaries,’ complicit in the West’s attempt to impose an ‘unjust politica...

Midle East Monitor , which the bbc says it is pro-Hamas, is trying to tarnish "our British values", spreading hatred of "our democracy and freedoms"!  "UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported that British intelligence officers have been involved in human rights abuses on hundreds of occasions. According to government lawyers, there are concerns that some potential human rights abuses took place within international armed conflict and could amount to war crimes."

This is unprecedented. I'm very shocked and surprised! And these academics have always been using their most effective tools at their disposal: letters and petitions. "UK puts money before human rights in Egypt"

First of all, there's Shell, a company you will be familiar with.   This week they're holding an annual "green-washing" event in London to try and persuade the public it cares about our future. But Shell doesn't really care, and thanks to their unfair employment policies, near 200,000 contract workers at Shell have no future, as they work in temporary, insecure jobs.  Contract workers outnumber permanent workers more than two to one at Shell, and as the company freely admits, do the most dangerous jobs.  We've been asked by IndustriALL global union to pressure Shell to limit precarious work and protect precarious workers' rights; to respect commitments to international standards on the environment, communities and human rights; and to apply the same health and safety standards at operations everywhere, including suppliers.   Please support this important campaign here . Second, we have a somewhat more unusual campaign.  Norway is historically known as o...

"what’s happening today marks a dangerous new development in European politics. Until now, the effort to filter out and deter unwanted migrants from reaching  Europe  has generally been pursued by politicians of the liberal centre, and part of their justification for doing it is that these unpleasant but necessary policies will stave off a rightwing populist backlash." The irrational fear of migrants ... But is it really irrational?

Excellent! A must read. " ‘The deterioration of the intelligentsia,’ Arthur Koestler wrote, ‘is as much a symptom of disease as the corruption of the ruling class or the sleeping sickness of the proletariat. They are symptoms of the same fundamental process.’ One clear sign of intellectual infirmity is the desperation with which centrists and liberals, removed from the cockpit of American power, forage for ideas and inspiration on the lumpen right.  What differentiated the Western model from many Asian, African and Latin American networks of women’s groups and indigenous peoples, or alternative development and environmental organisations, was its indifference to ‘economic and social rights’: what Moyn defines as ‘entitlements to work, education, social assistance, health, housing, food and water’. Focusing on the violations of individuals’ rights by states, human rights groups valuably documented the crimes of the Contras in Nicaragua, the army and death squads in El Salvador,...

Coca-Cola as a serial human rights offender

Capitalist criminality and imperialist philanthropy: the two sides of the same coin Like USAID, Gates Foundation, and others, the aim is to portray the capitalist system as having a "human face, "defender of human rights, propagator of "liberal values," and like NATO, IMF and the World Bank, they are tools of Western imperialist domination through debt, exploitation, plunder and military power. Anyone who opposes this global mission, is labelled "nationalist" and "infected by populism." George Soros

"But this week was also the week that Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of China’s Alibaba and a high-tech icon on par with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, visited Israel. On Friday, the first leg of the Giro d’Italia bicycle race begins in Jerusalem (carefully skirting east Jerusalem). There were at least three major cross-border mergers and acquisition deals this week involving Israeli companies totaling a billion-plus dollars." On the recently-discovered Israel's "bad behaviour", "Western human rights", "Western democracies", business interests and other beautiful things

This is a nice piece. The philosophical roots of rights-based liberal individualism lie in efforts to legitimate imperial expansion

Humanitarian relief is increasingly seen as giving Western governments the appearance of ‘doing something’ in the face of a tragedy while providing an alibi to avoid making a riskier political or military commitment that could address the ‘roots of a crisis’.   The advocates of human rights-based foreign policy are in the forefront of the campaign against humanitarian approaches. Under the slogan that ‘humanitarianism should not be used as a substitute for political action’ they are in fact arguing for a rights-based humanitarianism that is entirely subordinate to policy ends. Today, instead of feeding famine victims, aid may well be cut back as the UK government has done over Sudan and Ethiopia.   Human rights advocates would seem to be happier with military intervention and the establishment of ‘safe areas’ rather than granting asylum which is seen as legitimising ‘ethnic cleansing’.   As journalist David Rieff notes: ‘humanitarian relief organizations...hav...

"Human rights concerns are fine when they can be used as an ideological weapon to undermine enemies or to restore popular faith in the nobility of the state. But they are not to interfere with serious matters, such as dispersing and crushing the rascal multitude forming associations against the interests of the men of best quality." Noam Chomsky,  Deterring Democracy  (1991)