Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Granting immunity to Netanyahu and co.

I do not find the article helpful , especially that it is by a self-proclaimed revolution leftist magazine. On one hand it spreads illusion, for we all know that Netanyahu can easily stay in Israel with US protection or seek refuge in the US in the worst case scenario. He is not Milosevic.  That it is not even mentioned in the article. On the other hand, appealing to the British ‘government’ is a passive call. It reinforces the idea that we should have faith in the very same British regime that has helped create the state of Israel, supported it for decades and complicit in wars and invasions, regardless whether Labour or Conservative are in government.

“[ I]nvocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective.” It s like the West’s selective reading of history . “It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order” – the international liberal order preached in and after Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. “[N]o Western government has invoked R2P [the Right to Protect] in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.” “[A]s the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia’s aversion to R2P was not because Vladimir Putin is ‘the crude defender of sovereignty as so often presented’, but rather the West’s selective deployment of it .” (My italics N.M.) “[W]ill the death of the liberal order clear the way for a more democratic, accountable and egalitarian world?” I am not optimistic. One of the reasons is that articles like Lynch’s are so critical and an antidote to amnesia, a help for students, etc. but does not delve into structu...

With the evidence we have so far, I think we can call it “an-going genocide. Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segev was the first to point out that this war is  “a textbook case of genocide” The International Bureau of the International Federation for Human Rights has adopted a resolution recognizing Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people as  “ an ongoing genocide ”. “Most states (and political leaders) prefer to avoid using the term ‘genocide’, because if they recognize it, they must act, in accordance with the convention they have signed, to ‘prevent’it or to ‘put an immediate end to it’. And this, obviously, is not on their agenda.” A demonstrator carries an image of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and  US  President Joe Biden painted red to imitate blood, during a march in support of the people of the Gaza Strip, in Nablus, occupied West Bank, October 26, 2023. Zain Jaafar/ AFP  via orientxxi.info

A must-read analysis

“Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law.” Alice Speri on The Intercept follows the mainstream – delusional belief and misleading – concept of ‘international law’. As a counter-argument I have chosen a selection from Between Equal Rights “The debate between jurists is not whether this or that action is a reprisal and therefore illegal, but whether reprisals as a category are illegal. Here, the importance of ‘authoritative’ decision is key. After all, the majority of writers agree that reprisals are illegal. However, as long as Israel, for example, is able to interpret reprisals as legal, openly to claim its activities as reprisals, and to be a strong enough power (with the US’s support) to defeat or silence any dissenters, then it is nonsensical to claim that reprisals are functionally illegal. The same unresolvably structured arguments – again with the weight of opinion against the US – have been batted back and for...

I think Dabashi should have included a couple of lines about the geopolitical and American imperialism’s objectives of the invasion and destruction of the Iraqi state. How the US media covers up war crimes

“The question is whether the welcome justice mobilization around the horrors he [Putin] has visited on Ukraine will also be applied to crimes committed by powerful Western actors.” Here are the limitations of Reed Brody’s analysis : “ Any state could find a basis in law for almost any action, because ‘for every claim there is a counter-claim, and legalist opposition to war is therefore ultimately toothless ’.” Realists see the basis of global relations in the clash of state power. They are sceptical of ideas like globalisation and sceptical of the idea of international society. For them international law is no more than ‘a moralistic gloss on power politics’. It plays a useful role in obscuring the extent to which power is still the central determinant of how the world works. The US wants and needs international law – consider the issue of patent protection or intellectual property rights, and so on. Yet it also needs its own freedom of manoeuvre. Because the US is the world’s most pow...

When they commit them, they are war crimes . When we do it, it’s fighting insurgents and terrorists; it’s a mistake or they were rogue soldiers involved; or it’s a collateral damage. I think the article concludes with a utopian vision in the current international balance of powers and the prospects of more wars and instability. Who is going to make the ICC function impartially in every war?  One needs to question the existing regimes East and West and interconnect wars with major social and political-economic issues engulfing the world. Listing war crimes committed by ‘liberal democrats’ and authoritarians, does not go beyond recalling events that have become common knowledge and exposing hypocrisy and double standards that many ordinary people have already noticed. More than ever the type of journalism required today is radical, ‘extremist’ journalism in a very extremist world; as Mark Mazower put it, we urgently need a journalism that is able to “ overcome  the frangmentatio...

Paying the price of the alliance with the army Related Sudan is being rewarded for its revolution with blackmail People’s own struggle achieves in months what NGOs cannot achieve (or hinders to achieve) for decades. Activists react ad Sudan ditches “Islamist laws” A background 

As Kabul fell to the Taliban, so did Bagram prison. As a former prisoner of this place, it’s hard to describe the emotions I felt at hearing this news. The Times  describes  Bagram as “the scene of some of the darkest episodes of the US-led occupation”. But to me, it’s the scene of countless unresolved war crimes, and I’m an eyewitness. It is regarding those crimes that I gave  testimony  to the International Criminal Court, and for which the US government threatened to prosecute its members. Former Bagram and Guantanamo prisoner Moazzam Begg on what he saw Related Australian elite troops killed Afghan civilians [for practice]

 International Criminal Court finds war crimes but it will not take action

  Joe Biden’s America is [another] myth

Even if it was under Obama or Hilary Clinton, a similar action would have been taken because the US regime (or its army) has never committed war crimes and will never ever commit any. International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US

American (and German) state terror in Afghanistan

Did the US commit war crimes in Afghanistan