Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The modern far-right is not a return to fascism, but  a new and original threat The writer is the author of  Disaster Nationalism The Liberal Defense of Murder

“In The New Age of Empire: How Colonialism and Racism Still Rule the World , Kehinde Andrews explores how the intellectual, political and economic frameworks inherited from colonialism are still governing today’s world, resulting in a new age of empire that perpetuates racism, white supremacy and global economic inequalities.”

So many Germans did ignore the genocide against the Jews. So many stood by when the Rwanda genocide was taking place. So many have ignored the Rohingya genocide. Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like .

“Many terrorist organisations, pilloried as such in the course of recent history, have ceased to be pariahs and become legitimate interlocutors. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Algerian National Liberation Front, the African National Congress (ANC) and many others have been by turns described as ‘terrorists’, a word which serves to depoliticise their struggle, to present it as a confrontation between Good and Evil. Each time the Palestinians rebel, the West, – so prompt to glorify the resistance of the Ukrainians – speaks of terrorism. In 1967, following the Israeli aggression, General de Gaulle spoke these premonitory words: ‘Now Israel is organising, on the territories it has conquered, an occupation which will necessarily involve oppression, repression, and expulsions. If they encounter any resistance, they will call it terrorism…‘ Contrary to what many Israelis claim (…) this is not a ‘unilateral’ and ‘unprovoked’ attack. The fright which Israelis are experiencing just now...

Among the 150-plus photographs, images of Latin America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent appear hardly at all and usually as a foil or kitschy reflection of Euro-American modernity. North Korea, the kitschiest foil of them all, appears as many times as the entire African continent. For all our differences, [the exhibition ] Civilisation seems to preach, we people of the world are essentially the same, and we’re all trying to make the best of life within the inescapable confines of US-exported late capitalism.

John Gray is considered an English philosopher.  According to the British journalist Francis Wheen, Gray “has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.” Excerpts from ‘ The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses?’ The New Statesman, July 28-August 17, 2023 “The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses? If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The West is staking its endgame on regime change. What if that has the same result as it did in Iraq and Libya?” In the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 “ Western military intervention involving British and other foreign troops exacerbated the bloodshed. As...

I have sought not to make amends between “Islam and the West”, but to dismantle altogether this illusory binary, a solid byproduct of European modernity - or what they call “Enlightenment”, and the rest of the world knows as the darkest chapters of predatory colonialism.  I … propose that we read the fetishised concept of “the West” as an ideological commodity and civilisational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicentre for the rise of globalised capitalist modernity.   —Hamid Dabashi The entire binary is false Related Excerpts from The End of Two Illusions

 The Role of the Rentier Intellectuals Under colonial duress, Muslim public intellectuals were thus the principal agents of changing their own ancestral faith into an unrecognizable site of ideological contestation with what they categorically identified as “the West”—the self-designated code with which the hegemony of colonial modernity faced and stared down the world at large. Factual relation of power between colonial modernity and Islam eventually gave rise to fictive terms of opposition between European colonial ideologues and Muslim public intellectuals. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, and in the immediate aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 9/11, enough remnants of this binary supposition were resuscitated for us to see the psychopathological origin of its formulation, and the political potency of its appeal. To see how this dialectic of generating and sustaining a fabricated hostility between “Islam and the West” has worked over the last two hundred years, ...

I think this is worth a read. Islam after the West

The West's Favourite Afghan