Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

French police violence

In ‘strategic backwaters’, wrote Peter Gowan in 2001, even real genocide can be casually covered or countenanced, as the experience of Rwanda has shown. Where delinquent states are pivotal to American strategic interests, on the other hand, they are vigilantly shielded from human rights pressures, as the cases of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey or Indonesia, to name only the most flagrant examples, have long made clear.  — Peter Gowan, Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, New Left Review, Sep-Oct 2001.

Saudi Arabia  was Canada’s  top customer for military goods after the  United States  in 2022

“Jacobin, a radical left wing website, uses ‘international community’ and ‘international law’ without even putting them in inverted commas. Israel’s prison system forms an oft-overlooked dimension of its apartheid rule. The treatment of Palestinian prisoners can involve arbitrary detainment, administrative detention without trial, and conditions that the international human rights community has said constitute “cruel and blatant” and even “ sadistic ”  violations  of international law.”

Human rights organisation accuse UK Foreign Office of a ‘misleading’ and ‘inaccurate’ report .

The figure of the half a million Iraqi children killed by the sanctions, and which goes back to a 1995 study carried out under Saddam Hussein regime, is an arguable figure. Massad and a few others still repeat it without backing it with recent studies and sources.  A game of capitalist greed

A disappointing piece by Naomi Klein , I think. Klein, the critic of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, fails in a long piece to include a couple of paragraphs analysing the political economy of Egypt in the broader regional and global capitalist relations. Instead, ‘human rights’, ‘civil society’ and the authoritarian regime occupy her analysis. The piece should have been ‘In solidarity with Alaa’.  The interactions of geopolitical powers and capitalist interests are completely absent. There is only a passing mention of ‘anti-capitalist politics’, but not the functioning of capital in Egypt, Israel, the UAE, the US, France, the UK, etc. Klein, who in  No Logo  ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in  The Shock Doctrine  established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism , signals that she has now, in  William Morris 's famous metaphor, crossed "the river of fire" to become a...

Contrary to Western corporate media reports, the protests in Iran are not simply about the “morality police”—they represent a rejection of the structural social, political, and juridical relations that systematically reproduce capitalist patriarchy combined with Islamist codes. Hijab has nothing to do with “women’s culture” in the Middle East, as some postcolonial thinkers imply. In the context of the Islamic Republic, Hijab is a method of class domination, an integral part of capitalist patriarchy, and must be criticized without compromise. Corporate media in the West (for example, the BBC Persian and Iran International) as well as celebrity activists like Masih Alinejad (who work with the most conservative forces in the United States, those in favor of prohibiting abortion and “regime change” via military intervention) are doing their best to promote the reactionary trends within the movement, reducing the whole problem to the question of “human rights.”  They mispresent the soci...

Punish Palestinians, embrace Israel

Denying the inevitable

Violence against the unwanted, the unwashed, the invaders, the illegal

Undocumented Tunisian migrants

A good piece as usual by Joseph Massad. However, I think he is doing a disservice to socialism by calling what existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before 1990 a ‘socialist world’. Economic democracy is the missing link in the struggle for human rights

By blending historical inquiry with theoretical critique, Whyte’s account clarifies that neoliberal human rights did not emerge “from nowhere” but, rather, flowed from a long-standing, self-conscious, neoliberal tradition of forging rhetorical links between market morals and human rights. The Morals of the Market

 British royals met with autocratic Arab monarchs ‘over 200 times’ since 2011

 In a summary by Claudia Mende , I have found only this worth quoting: “Following initial euphoria for an Arab world on the brink of a new era, people in the West have largely lost interest.   Outmoded stereotypical views of the Arab world have re-emerged. Too religious, too backward, the region and its people are different after all – just a few widely-held western opinions. The West continues to back stability   But when issuing judgements such as these, the West should critically scrutinise its own role in the Middle East. After all, while Europe and the U.S. may have always paid lip service to democratic values and human rights, some of their policies run directly contrary to these. Arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates prop up repressive regimes and stoke conflicts. In the name of democracy, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and created a fiasco. When current military leader of Egypt Sisi violently ousted...

There is little historical evidence to trust that any French leader would have done things differently.  The rights of global south populations cannot possibly match those bestowed upon the civilised masses in Europe, so why undermine the potential for profit for those who are so disposable? Or perhaps his universalism is genuine - which would explain his own commitment to violent repression of political movements and the repeated assaults  on civil liberties in France.  The French state’s relationship to "rights" is always connected to its own interests, as is the “terrorism” it claims to fight . Sisi and the hypocrisy of France’s so-called defence of human rights

Macron, unlike his American or British counterparts, is trying to be consistent. Since he violates “human rights” in France itself, why should he condition co-operation in defence and economic matters on human rights situation in Egypt? How the ruling class and imperialist backers ensure the survival of an authoritarian regime

 “The west’s hypocritical, counterproductive human rights regime.” Sudan is being rewarded for its revolution with blackmail