Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A regional war led by the US and a hot of Arab regimes, UK, in defence of Israel Related “Though the U.S. created the conditions that may have encouraged Netanyahu’s gambit , it was reportedly Israel, acting on its own behalf, without coordination with its allies, that precipitated the latest grave escalation.”

A very interesting article.  Some language is very inaccurate though: “Israel-Palestine confrontation.” (?) Available in English, Français and فارسي

As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can! America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers. It’s so hard to spread democracy to the barbarians, but we’ll keep trying

The New York Times publishes crimes Related Josep Borrell’s garden

An entire academic industry has developed around attempting to explain the apparent persistence and durability of Middle East authoritarianism. Much of this has been heavily Eurocentric, seeking some kind of intrinsic “obedience to authority” inherent to the “Arab mind.” Some authors have focused on the impact of religion, tracing authoritarian rule to the heavy influence of Islam, and the fact that “twentieth-century Muslim political leaders often have styles and use strategies that are very similar to those instituted by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia some 1400 years ago. The history of the region is thus characteristically recounted as a long-standing struggle between the “authoritarian state” and “economic and political liberalization. Instead of viewing the Arab uprisings as protests against the “free market” economic policies long championed by Western institutions in the region, they were framed as essentially political in nature. The state/civil society dichotomy serves to “con

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido

Essays for a Free Palestine   (a free e-book) Related Free resources

  غزة في الوثائق البريطانية

Some good arguments. I see the absence of the American political economy in shaping its imperialism. Hinting to China and ‘normalisation’ with Israel does not allow us to delve into the structural, but we remain in the strategical. For example, what is the purpose of the U.S.’s drive to stabilise the region through pushing for ‘normalisation’? After all, ‘stability’ in the Middle East has been a Western aim for decades. The support of authoritarian regimes has been one of the mechanisms used. When one mentions hegemony, what does this hegemony consist of? American military, the wars, the massive sales of weapons, its NATO-led interventions, its ‘culture’ etc. what are they for? The unravelling of the U.S. position in the Middle East Palestinians transport the injured to the Indonesian Hospital in Jabalia, north of the Gaza Strip on October 9, 2023. Via meer.com

A geopolitical summary and ‘forecasts’ “Rather than transforming the Middle East … the war may leave intact the ‘security architecture’ built by Trump and Biden. Yet the instability of this edifice has been proven. It would only be a matter of time before it buckles once again.” The US and the war on Gaza Illustrasjon: Knut Løvås, knutlvas@gmail.com

“As a historian of the Ottoman Empire with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, I truly believe it is no less than a crime to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past , from the stories of their ancestors, villages, town, and cities in the name of protecting an unstable conglomeration of nation-state formations. The people of the region have been uprooted from their historical reality and left vulnerable to the false narratives of politicians and nationalist historians. It is … important to understand why, more than 100 years since the end of the empire, the erasure of the deeply rooted and intimate connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe continues, and who benefits from this erasure.”

An interview with the editor of the book Samer S. Shehata

The Internet is not your friend

An analysis of related words in 161 languages suggests their shared roots lie in the Middle East – a conclusion that also fits with DNA evidence By  Jason Arunn Murugesu 27 July 2023 The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of related words. Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor. But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says  Paul Heggarty , who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says. The first suggests that the language originated in

Joes Biden has rewarded Abrams with a top appointment

“ At its best, the dysfunctional marriage at the centre of the show becomes a metaphor for the US and its foreign policies in the region. At its worst, the show exemplifies how - after two decades of the terror of US militarism under successive administrations, both Republican and Democrat - the fate of millions of Afghans has become a background prop for a romantic comedy to tickle the political fancies of American and British audiences.” American ‘foreign policy’ as a dysfunctional marriage 

Wagner Group's capabilities have been honed in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in Africa

The system of genders within sharia, which included the role of women within families and households, was in many respects flexible. It was shaped simultaneously by religious concepts and the pragmatic needs of society. European colonialism transformed this in two ways. It froze sharia requirements, which had until then been subject to various interpretations in different communities, as a uniform set of unchanging ideas. The rigid separation of women from men who were not  mahram  (not related to them) is one example: what had once been a principled guideline with religious connotations was transformed into a legal dictate enforced by coercion. Colonialism then inscribed those ideas into a static set of civil and criminal codes imposed on local societies and enforced by new courts, military orders and government decisions. What had previously been a pluralistic mix of religious norms and informal practices around gender turned into something radically different: a rigid hierarchy of s

Accessing the full review requires a subscription – an institutional subscription, for example. Apart from what is available, I have added the following: A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”). T

“Through an analysis of domestic factors, elements that are often presented as separate, or timeless, features of Middle Eastern politics, be they nationalism or religious fundamentalism, may turn out to be much more closely formed and transformed by their association with the state. Just as a more flexible and specific view of history has made historical analysis more effective, a more specific view of the state may, thereby, lead to a recognition of its greater influence.” The starting point is “the approach that is broadly derivative of historical sociology, and of the stronger insights of Marxism, and, by extension, of the international dimensions, at once of history as of contemporary politics and society, that historical sociology addresses. This perspective looks at the core components of a political and social order, the state, ideology and society, and focuses specifically on how institutions, be they of political or social/religious power, are established and maintained. It s