NM's blog

Andrew Zimmern, a TV host and food system advocate: “I  learned everything I needed to learn about Moroccan culture in that room. That the Muslim women took sanctuary in that kitchen… it changed the way I looked at womanhood.” How many Moroccan women has Zimmern seen or known in his life? There is no Western-like Moroccan women with 'Western culture' or a hybrid of cultures, with a very similar culture in the kitchen, at work, without a headscarf. I have been in Morocco and at least in 5 of its cities from the south to the north. Zimmern knows next to nothing about 'Moroccan Muslim women in their diverse 'culture' and outlook .  Because he met one kind of women, he generalised his experience on all Moroccan women and the 'Moroccan culture': on the one on the field, the one in the factory, the one in shorts, the one wearing a headscarf, the student in jeans, the one in sport, the artist, the girl that takes her bras in a concert, the underground prostitutes …...

Richard Seymour  pictures what the  BBC cannot picture . – Once again, Ulster’s peace-loving bampots determined that such violence could only have been brought to Northern Ireland by brown-skinned interlopers. Never mind that the province has its own gory history of  knife violence . Never mind that Ogilvie himself had previously been  tortured  by a gang linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force, the loyalist paramilitaries that murdered Catholics with the  collusion  of the British state during the “Troubles.” – To an extent, as Séamas O’Reilly  argues  in the  New Statesman , this is a new expression of old violence: loyalists in Northern Ireland have decades of experience in burning people out of their homes and violently policing community purity. – Among all demographics in Northern Ireland, Catholic or Protestant, young or old, anti-immigrant racism is  pervasive . – Far from “two tier policing” disadvantaging whites, the evidence...