Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...

While one can understand that the positive reactions to the assassination by Syrians opposed to the Syrian regime are a form of revenge because of Hezbollah’s complicity, the context surrounding the current moment, matters. We have to be clear, Israel’s war against Lebanon is not to promote the freedom of Syrians or any other population in the region suffering from authoritarian states. With this in mind, Palestinians and Lebanese people have the right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. This includes the right of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the main actors involved in the armed confrontation with the Israeli occupation army, to resist.” Joseph Daher explains why celebrating Israel's assassination Hezbollah's Nasrallah is short sighted when it comes to Syrians’ struggle against Assad's regime.

This was written before the assassination of Hizbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah. “ [A] terrorist strategy formulated by a terrorist state par excellence … constitutes a stark confirmation that state terrorism is much more dangerous than the terrorism of non-state groups, as it applies the same logic, i.e. the killing of civilians for a political purpose, but with immeasurably greater potential for lethality and destruction.”

Outside interference, ostensibly on behalf of these 'revolutions', reduced Libya to anarchy and condemned Syria to a devastating proxy war now in its twelfth year. In Egypt, the Free Officers' state was re-booted in its most brutal ever form. The Americans and Europeans did not vainly try to help the Egyptians or anyone else escape from authoritarian rule. Instead, they contrived to seal them up in it. The long oppression of these societies, Kipling’s 'loved Egyptian night', is not going to be ended by the Western powers; these days it is guaranteed by them. Hugh Roberts 's new book political history of the risings in Egypt, Libya and Syria explains how the Western powers manipulated them all .

“In most Western media coverage, there is a near-pathological tendency to portray him as a marginalized figure whose political resurrection reflects the ‘populist’ appeal of his brash and personalist style. But Prabowo’s ascent to the presidency can only be understood through a properly historicized analysis.” Line of succession

“The fact that the Western media only uses the register of violence to speak on Palestine feeds on a co lonial, racist, patriarchal, and capitalist discourse that aims to justify the Israeli settler colonial erasure of Palestine. While violence against the Palestinians is specific, it does not occur in isolation from what is happening elsewhere in the world. Black and brown people are racialized everywhere in Europe and North America, and that racialization contributes to the demonization of Palestinian people.” What ‘the West’, and its media, work tirelessly to hide

“The  written record of Israel’s cut-and-paste  Nakba  policies on the Palestinian people is longer and deeper than the past five days. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is not a momentary or one-off attack: it is the latest stage of an anti-colonial struggle for self-determination. Expectedly, the immediate reaction to these words from Western academia, human rights groups and funding organizations will be to demand a condemnation of the killing of Israeli civilians, women and children, by Palestinian fighters in the uprising. In our respective spaces, Palestinians, activists, students, scholars, artists and human rights defenders alike, will again be asked to declare their opposition to violent resistance, and the direct targeting of Israeli civilians and civilian institutions. By extension, the friends of Palestinians and voices of solidarity will be asked to tell an occupied people how to resist their oppressors, and dictate acceptable methods for their liberation movement.”

The main points in this long but very good article Gautam  Adani “was not only a beneficiary of the new political and economic order devised by Modi to consolidate Hindu supremacism in India. The neglected details of his frictionless rise show that after their calamitous romance with Russia’s oligarchy, Western politicians, journalists and bankers facilitated the ascent of another hyper-nationalist elite with dubiously sourced wealth and an extreme aversion to the rule of law and civil liberties.” “When Modi was barred from travelling to the United States and the European Union because of his suspected complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, and many Indian businessmen recoiled from him, Adani worked hard to rehabilitate his associate. Since becoming prime minister in 2014, Modi has repaid the favour: he turned Adani into India’s biggest operator of private airports and ports, as well as its leading producer of power from coal-fired plants. McKinsey’s global managi...

Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression . Related Longing for crusades Sleepwalking elites

Rayya El-Zein has written about how the framework of neoliberal orientalism has built a fantasy about  the Arab rapper . She explained that Western mainstream media are “eager to imagine Arab youth in non-threatening modes of resistance that are directly related to American culture. The rapper speaking truth to power is a very easy character for audiences to imagine; at the same time, he is a totally benign figure that caricatures authoritarian regimes as all the same bad guys.” El-Zein has argued that when the West focuses on creative youth, it does not have to understand how Western powers are complicit. After the Arab uprisings (Part 1) After the Arab uprisings (Part 2)

Shireen Abu Akleh Related Israel assassinated journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

A leftist detaching the economy and sociology from politics and geopolitics. Is this an approach to counter the liberal and conservative approaches? Maintaining or expanding U.S. hegemony. Yes, but what does that hegemony consist of? What does drive it? Yet it is still worth a read.

Putin is a war criminal – and so was Albright

Another political science and journalistic approach that excludes the political economy of the world we live in.  Leaving the oil argument aside in relation to the invasion of Iraq, I agree that the ‘madman’ argument, racism, arrogance and hypocrisy are long standing characterises of the Western imperialist powers. The ‘madman script and media-propaganda

If only Assange had been Navalny

while my country was being ripped apart by coronavirus

Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles “Ethnic differences entwine with other social differences –especially of class, region, and gender. Ethnonationalism is strongest where it can capture other senses of exploitation. The most serious defect of recent writing on ethnonationalism has been its almost complete neglect of class relations (as in Brubaker, 1996; Hutchinson, 1994; Smith, 2001). Others wrongly see class as materialistic, ethnicity as emotional (Connor, 1994: 144–64; Horowitz, 1985: 105–35). This simply inverts the defect of previous generations of writers who believed that class conflict dominated while ignoring ethnicity. Now the reverse is true, and not only among scholars. Our media are dominated by ethnic strife while largely ignoring class struggles. Yet in actuality these two types of conflict infuse each other. Palestinians, Dayaks, Hutus, and so on believe they are being materially exploited. Bolsheviks and Maoists believed t...