Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"I'd rather suffer bombs than Assad"

Syria as a globalised war A critical liberal view of the West, bit it is wishful thinking. "Europe's fear of refugees is the only thing that can save Syria"

مسكون Maskoon (Haunted) a film by Liwaa Yazji

In Lebanon: New Waves of Hatred with Little Solidarity

Syria: just another news item while I am sitting comfortably at a café in a rich city sipping coffee... The assault on Idlib and its consequences See also Inside Syria's Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent

Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries: is it safe to return?

"The U.S debt to Syria"

Germany "The AfD is not classically fascist – and does not need to be. Hitler needed his stormtroopers to take on and defeat the most organised labour movement, and biggest communist party, in Europe – and he did so amid double-digit unemployment. But to construct the essential alliance between the “elite and the mob” –  as Hannah Arendt described it  – the AfD just needs to go on normalising hate-speech, recruiting well-heeled people from business and the military, and disrupting the status quo."

"Robin Yassin-Kassab examines the axis of useful idiocy that responds to the rise of torch wielding fascism in the U.S. with whatabout-Hillaryisms, that defends British chauvinism as a tactic to combat globalism, and that defends the genocidal Syrian Regime as a hedge against 'Zio-Wahhabi' imperialism. "It isn’t surprising that the right sees every Syrian refugee as a potential terorist when the left has spent years  opining that the Syrian revolution is run by al-Qaida (or American imperialism, or Zionism). These beasts feed each other. The greatest threats today are rising authoritarianism, whether it calls itself leftist or rightist, and the preference for ideology over human reality, for simplistic conspiracism over complicated facts. This is going to get a lot more messy. We need answers to the politics of austerity and the undoubted tensions of a globalised and increasingly technologised economy. Nostalgia for the social compositions of earlier decades, and the...

We crossed a bridge and it trembled

War is here: The Lebanese political elites unite again

Lebanese army accused of torturing Syrian refugees

"I stood on those Lesbos beaches in floods of tears" Note : You should read the most liked comment after reading the article. A comment that reflects a lot of how many British people think. And this is not the Daily Mail or The Sun.

Where are Syrian refugees registered?

Rather than bombing the Assad regime, Gourevitch says, let the  Syrian refugees  into the United States. What’s being advocated here is clear: no to empire, yes to refugees. Needless to say, I too subscribe to that notion and am against US imperial intervention. But I fear that these two positions are just  not enough . On their own, they constitute an impoverished politics. In order to explain why, let’s briefly apply the same principles to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. When Israel brutally  kills Palestinians , as it regularly does, do progressives in America  only  say “let those Palestinian refugees who manage to escape come to the US”? Absolutely not. Because they know that this would just aid Israel’s  colonial designs  and invite Israel to continue behaving with impunity in the region. Progressives stand in  solidarity  with the Palestinians, call for an end to Israel’s bombings, and demand that Israel be prosecu...

"How the Syrian civil war has transformed Hezbollah"