Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Stay out of it Like Houda Sharawi, Jamila Bouhired, Nawal Saadawi, and thousands others, many more today are fighting all sorts of oppression. Fatma Ramadan (an Egyptian trade unionist) Narges Hosseini (currently detained for her protest against compulsory 'hijab') Tunisian women protesting against the IMF Iraqi women protesting against new law that would allow child marriage Western women, you who consider Arab and Muslim women unfit and want to "empower" them, and  claim "to defend human rights", stay out of it. Arab countries and people have had enough of  - imperialist states wars and destruction   - support of stability and dictatorship  - co-opting uprisings,  - hypocrisy  - the "rhetoric of 'freedom' and 'democracy' - marketing this or that Arab/Muslim woman to your public - promoting a Clooney or a Jolie as embassadors  Invest in a regime change at home, and in empowering women exploited in workplaces and co

" I would like to use this opportunity in the run-up to International Human Rights Day to focus on the greatest threats to our common humanity, and why states need to throw their weight behind genuine international cooperation and human rights..." " That’s why we must ensure that the powerful uphold and respect international rules and international law." "Genuine corporate accountability must apply to all of the activities of their subsidiaries and suppliers. Impunity for corporations that violate human rights or wreck our environment, as in the mineral-driven conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, must be brought to an end." " There are now more refugees and displaced people around the world than at any time since the Second World War." No mention of the biggest human disaster since the genocide in Rawanda; the killing machine Al-Assad regime. One can list Brexit, Trump, climate change, etc, but fails to mention a brutal murder

From the archive Celebrity culture: The Clooneys and human rights

" What then, do human rights do in a context in which both state and subject are being transformed by neoliberal governmental ratio- nalities? The problem with human rights today is not so much that they conceal their own reliance on national rights, I suggest, but that they have become a discourse that is used to justify both state violence and forms of conversion, including economic conversion, on a global scale." Human rights and the collateral damage of neoliberalism

I disagree with the writer here in using "socialist states" and "stalinist states" to mean the same thing. The analysis, otherwise, is very interesting. The Anti-colonial Origins of Humanitarian Intervention: NGOs, Human Rights and When Humanitarianism Became Imperialism