Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How America Hides the human Toll of its Military Machine

No surprise here, but good for the record. Complicity in crimes comes in different colours and shades. The Intercept: A comprehensive new analysis by The Intercept has revealed the full extent of the pro-Israel bias in three of America’s most influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. These disturbing findings show directly how mainstream media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians and devalues their lives.  For instance, during the first six weeks of the war, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli ones, Israelis were mentioned at a rate of  16 times more  per death than Palestinians. Highly emotive terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” were used 60 times more often to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians. A similar analysis of cable news coverage by the same authors found an even more extreme anti-Palestinian bias. The U.S. news media’s refusal to recognize Palestinian humanity is directly abetting the...

1.  On Saturday night, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was lit up with the Israeli flag. Careful observers noticed orange blotches on the column — these were leftovers from a  climate protest   several weeks ago. The Israeli flag appeared to have blood stains. The symbolism was perfect: While the German establishment project declares its unwavering support for the Israeli government, it can’t quite hide the fact that  colonialism and apartheid   are inherently bloody affairs. On Saturday, five parties in the Bundestag — CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and Greens — published a  joint statement  declaring their support for the State of Israel and its “right to self-defense.” The far-right AfD, for its part, made an almost identical declaration. Even the reformist left party DIE LINKE, represented by chairperson  Janine Wissler , issued a one-sided condemnation of “terrorism.” [ Just a few years ago, Wissler was part of a  post-Trotskyist organization  t...

A long interview with Beydoun , author of  American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear  and   The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. My selection: “ We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.” “The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world…  I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11. What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion peo...

Unlike Putin, in the current global power relations they are not considered war criminals because they belong to the ‘democratic, free world’. “The men and women who launched this catastrophic, criminal war have paid no price over the past two decades. On the contrary, they’ve been showered with promotions and cash. There are two ways to look at this. The following list doesn’t include anything about the Iraqis who’ve died since 2003. Partly, this is because it’s traditional for the U.S. media to pay no attention to the lives of foreigners.” For context one should read Howard Zinn Peter Gowan Ellen Meiksins Wood David Keen Andrew Bacevich

Nazism and socialism

“ The American media have largely echoed this language. The storming of the Capitol, we were told, was something that happened in a ‘banana republic’, not in America. (No mention of the fact that the ‘banana republics’ of Latin America were corrupt and authoritarian in part thanks to American meddling.) The presence of raucous, overwhelmingly white militants armed with guns stirred comparisons with Nazi Germany, Afghanistan and Syria, as if the many available and suitable comparisons from American history had been declared off-limits, threats to our amour propre. What to call the mob provoked a great discussion – ‘protesters’? ‘dissidents’? ‘insurrectionists’? – until, finally, much of the liberal press settled on describing them as ‘terrorists’, the word we reserve for all that is evil and un-American, and usually Middle Eastern. The use of the T-word represented a belated recognition of how dangerous a threat the far right has become. But it was also a consoling flight from realities...