Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It is a long article. “These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.” “Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe ...

Ideological, financial, physical and military contributions to colonisation

Vekuii Rukoro, a Herero paramount chief who tried to sue Germany for compensation in US courts, said the deal is not enough to cover the "irreversible harm" suffered at the hands of colonial forces.   "We have a problem with that kind of an agreement, which we feel constitutes a complete sell-out on the part of the Namibian government," he told Reuters. Germany acknowledges colonial era Namibia genocide Related Link between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust

“ 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...