Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

You cannot say:  “ We must mourn all civilian deaths ” because some civilians are ‘human animals’. “In this time of  extraordinary  repression  in academia , Finkelstein appears to be the first professor to be dismissed from a tenured job over anti-Zionist speech since the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.”

I wonder why the comparison of the civilian deaths is focused on the civilian deaths during the US-led campaign against ISIS. Is the implication ‘the collateral damage is worth it’? ISIS attacked civilians in ‘democracies’. Hamas attacked ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Both organisations are ‘terrorists’, according to the ‘free world’. Israel’s war on Palestinians in numbers

Beginning in 2014 and 2015 respectively,  US and Russian interventions would in time lead to some 75,000 air strikes against Iraq and Syria. However much the coalition’s actions against ISIS (Daesh) and Russia’s support for Assad differ in intent and context, both have been disastrous for people on the ground; the bombing campaigns alone have killed between 20,000 and 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi civilians. The alliance’s figure of 1,417 civilian deaths has been widely contested. In December 2021 a  New York Times  investigation based on a review of 1,300 Pentagon reports concluded that ‘the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The coalition claims it values transparency and is willing ‘to work with anyone making allegations or providing new, credible i...