Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

From the archive We tried to help the "Libyans" get rid of a mad man and organise  the first 'free' elections. But, they didn't understand what 'democracy' mean. So, they started killing each other in a civil war. The disaster in Libya and Who said Gaddafi had to go? Book Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya

A liberal account of 'humanitarian intervention' The Liberal Defense of Murder

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...

"There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically." Wonder Woman: The hero of The military-industrial complex See also My 2006 interview with Lina Khatib: Filming the Middle East My interview with Johnathan Cook: Blood and Religion

" 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

The Liberal Defense of Murder