Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Junket Journalism in the Shadow of Genocide"

Syrian rapper Amir

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

Who did what to defeat the Islamic State group

The other criminals The assault on Idlib, Syria

"While climate change is a major global concern, the rush to link climate change with recent upheavals in the Middle East, such as Egypt’s 2011 revolution, is both simplifying and depoliticizing. The link between climate, bread, and protest erases important social, material, and cultural nuances, distorts the allocation of responsibility, and ultimately, obscures more than it illuminates." Overstating Climate Change in Egypt's Uprising

Salama Kaila (1955-2018) A Palestinian Marxist persecuted by the Syrian regime dies in Amman, Jordan An obituary in Arabic

The disappeared and the dead at the hands of the Syrian regime

Foreign Powers and the Syrian Calculus

There are no good guys" - or "everyone is equally bad" - has become a trope used by many otherwise decent people to absolve themselves of moral guilt for being bystanders to injustice. Are there really 'no good guys' in Syria?

"The party that stood to benefit the most from this situation was the Syrian regime and its allies. There was no change in the balance of power on the ground as a result of the strikes and forces loyal to the Syrian regime suffered no losses." Indeed. Why Russia did not respond to U.S. missiles on Syria

Burning Country Syrians in Revolution and War

From the archive You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. — Humbert Wolfe Robert Fisk's crimes against journalism

"The interesting thing about Rojava is that while the YPG and YPJ are lauded worldwide for their struggle against the Islamic State, the fact remains that the solidarity shown for the Syrian Kurds is based on a notion of a common enemy rather than shared truths. While ISIS was globally understood in the terms of science fictional apocalypse, the city of Kobane became a metaphor for secularism, heroism, anti-terrorism and patriotism, all values assumed to prevent the arrival of the doomsday and behind which, the world, specifically the western world, would securely stand. Ironically however, the ideas that inspire what’s happening in Rojava developed from a critique of western paradigms of capitalism, positivism, individualism and professionalism. Therefore, it is urgent to become informed about the ideals of the Kurdish Liberation Movement and what it does on the ground so that now a larger support can be mobilized for it as it is dealing with Turkish attacks and its abandonment...

"It is interesting to note that the majority of the businessmen were from a Sunni background, with the exception of the inner circle of crony capitalists. According to an analysis published in the Syrian magazine Al-Iqtisad Wa Al-Naql in 2011, from the list of the 100 most important businessmen in Syria, 23 percent of them were children of high officials, or their partners or acting as their “interfaces”; 48 percent were new businessmen, but for the majority they had close and corrupt relationships with the security services; 22 percent were part of the traditional bourgeoisie from before the nationalization policies of the sixties, some of whom also had corrupt relationships with the leaders of the state; and seven per cent had their main business activities outside of Syria. In terms of religious sects, the percentage was the following: 69 per cent were Sunni, 16 percent Alawi, 14 percent were Christians, 1 percent Shia, while there was no Druze, Ismaili or Kurdish presence. It...

The Disappeared of Syria

Syria: Statement from Detainees in Homs Central Prison

"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...

Pre-2011 Syrian Regime Policy in Culture and the A rts

The Syrian government is essentially a family dictatorship rooted in the anti-leftist military wing of the Ba'ath Party. Virtually the only "liberalization" that has taken place under the younger Assad has been economic, privatizing once-public assets to various crony capitalists who pledge fealty to the regime. Just because the United States and other Western governments oppose a particular leader out of their hypocritical imperialist interests doesn't thereby make that leader "progressive." How Syria Divides the Left