Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Appearances can be deceiving Related “In the long term, the most debilitating state response to the movement may be neither the imprisonment of leadership or propaganda, but the state’s diversion of attention from social justice to development, that is, from the profound violence of the security state to the easily discussable and putatively separable matter of economic investment.” —Emilio Spadola Justice and/or development

“Abdourahmane Ridouane’s deportation is not an ancillary phenomenon. It is a logical part of the inner workings of a system developed long before 7 October and whose vindictive activities continue despite the present political crisis. The power structure uses all available means and finds new justifications in current political events, be it public security during the Olympics or the repression of anti-Semitism - both perfectly legitimate.” A state that has a monopoly on the use of violence and uses it at home and abroad (imperialistically), finds scapegoats in its rule and divide policy and in its distraction from the social, racial and class issues. It manufactures an ‘enemy within’ and nurtures the far-right ideology. It goes as far as passing legislations akin to ones passed by a police state - example: the ban on wearing of the headscarf. When a French student last year admitted that he would be complicit in oppression if after university he would be working with the IMF, whe...

“[T]he US, Israel and other imperial European countries understand well that the resistance of Palestinians, Algerians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis and other peoples around the world to colonial and imperial invasions and bombings is a legitimate and moral self-defence against imperial and colonial terror, which is why they have to launch political propaganda campaigns and fabrications, and deploy the term “terrorism” to depict such resistance as always immoral and illegitimate.” —Joseph Massad, Middle East Eye, 17 September 2021 ‘We are back’ to the same arguments about ‘terrorism’ and ‘international law’ .  – It is a question of power and revenge. Israel’s massive state violence stems from the ability of the state to carry out such acts. – Israel’s massive acts of violence is supported by the major power with whom it has broken the ‘international law’ over decades. – Israel can do it, like the US did it in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other countries because it ca...

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.”

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the   shooting attempt   on former President Donald Trump To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

Ideological affinities and a long intellectual history lie behind the curious reverence for the Syrian dictator among fascists and white nationalists Related Syria and the ‘anti-imperialism’ of fools

From time to time the corporate media cries fouls when a Western researcher faces state violence abroad. A good critique by John Chalcraft from LSE .

 

A biography of a town – and camp – in resistance

“As the Israelis and the Americans understand very well, the ongoing discourse on terrorism is not about the victims of ‘terrorism’ but about the ‘perpetrators’. The fact that state armies more regularly target the very same victims that ‘terrorists’ target, yet are not referred to as ‘terrorists’, clarifies that it is not the act of ‘terrorism’ that defines the actor as ‘terrorist’ but rather the opposite: it is the perpetrator’s conferred identity as ‘terrorist’ that defines his/her actions as ‘terrorist’ in nature. “The binary world of terrorists and anti-terrorists”

Conflicts and commons in the politics of truth Related Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation