NM's blog

This foolish world cannot possibly be any more foolish. After millions of years of our descent from the Stone Age, the exact same golden rule remains true: the one with the biggest stone, the thickest stick, and the meanest bully is the one who is right! —Ghassan Kanafani, 1972.  Translated from Arabic

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – Facebook page “Three years ago today, the Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas launched a coordinated large-scale attack on southern Israel. “More than 1,200 people were killed, including around 800 civilians and 36 children. More than 4,000 people were injured, and 251 were taken hostage and abducted to the Gaza Strip. “The attack also marked the beginning of the genocide in Gaza carried out by the Israeli government and military.” Paradoxically, the word 'terrorist' does not occur even once in the interview. “ Gil Shohat, West Asia Programme Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, headed the Foundation’s Israel Office in Tel Aviv from March 2023 to August 2026. “In an interview with Neues Deutschland , he reflects on his time in Israel, October 7 and the trauma it caused, as well as the brutalisation and militarisation of Israeli society, the dehumanisation of Palestinians, the role of the media, the upcoming parliamentary electio...

The trial was adjourned until October 19 and 20 at the request of the defense. “ In today’s France General De Gaulle himself,” writes Alain Gresh, “might be brought to trial, accused of 'the glorification of terrorism'! Also in Français and فارسي

 The Saudis are the biggest losers Correction: the closest transliteration of the Yemeni port city's name is Mokha (المخا like the Spanish j or the German ch), not Mocha.  Related "The “Houthis are Shi‘a” narrative should be seen for what it is—a carefully crafted piece of political rhetoric devised to gloss over important differences between religious denominations, to reinforce the false image of a war between those who identify as Sunni versus those who identify as Shi‘a, and to encourage foreign—and particularly US—military intervention in Yemen. It provides a dangerously simplistic mental short cut for policymakers who are unfamiliar with Yemeni history and politics. In so doing, it diverts attention from the massive humanitarian crisis caused by years of civil war and the US-backed Saudi-led coalition’s ongoing blockade and bombardment. The cynical use of sectarian language casts the conflict in Yemen as part of an epochal, region-wide struggle rather than a local civil ...

The directors said: “In the film No Other Land, we spent five years, together with [Palestinian co-directors] Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, documenting the army destroying Palestinian homes in order to paint a larger picture of a system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the removal of Palestinians from the West Bank. “In NAZA, we are similarly connecting the dots of a system, gathering the testimonies of two dozen intelligence officers and soldiers and depicting the military systems used to perpetrate what a UN commission and the world’s leading human rights groups have described as a genocide.” Related Israeli minister's threat to the film makers

“ What stood out to me was the huge contrast with the lack of real empathy toward even bigger catastrophes in the Global South.”

An investigation by Euobserver

As the Falklands issue raises its head again, MEE looks back at how Israel caused the deaths of dozens of British soldiers by arming the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1980s .

An in-depth reading 1. Imperialism, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism 2. The logic of contemporary inter-imperialist competition 3. Political economy of a genocidal war 4. War liberalism and its enemies

“Antisemitism and Islamophobia do not compete for a fixed ration of public sympathy.  They are the one prejudice in two coats. Each rests on the same premise that a minority may be judged and feared and shut out for its religion. “Israel’s "Ministry of Subversion" now sits closer to an illiberal, nationalist Europe than to the liberal order that once made Jewish life in the diaspora secure.” Would Andreas Krieg argue that the very same 'liberal order' has made Muslims, Jews and others insecure with its double standards, wars, invasions, hypocrisy, institutional racism, marginalisation, obscene inequality, and because of the very same order that the far right is on the rise …? I doubt it. I emailed him for an answer. 

A report by the Transnational Institute  (a pdf document)

In her 2024 book “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Freedom to Palestinians,” Israeli scholar Maya Wind argues that Israeli universities have long helped produce knowledge that sustains Israel’s rule over Palestinians while presenting themselves as liberal, democratic institutions.  Amid an increase in academic partnerships between U.S. and Israeli universities , Wind  told +972  last August that the latter “are in fact deeply implicated in Israeli settler colonialism and now in genocide” — not least because entire academic disciplines “subordinate their knowledge production to the needs of the Israeli state.” 

The ‘day after’ the revolution has been a temporal distortion: a prolonged present bent back toward the past. Events have appeared less as ruptures than as echoes. Instead of discrete moments of dissent, the protests of 1999, 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2026 have repeatedly reinterpreted the excesses and losses of the 1979 revolution. Likewise, the debris of the wars of 2025 and 2026 has lingered as re-inscriptions of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. In between these echoes, Iranians have found themselves in a contradictory condition, between wounds and dreams, hopes and fears, caught in a negative dialectic of origin and destiny, where both life and death are delayed.

Hanieh challenges narrow accounts of the war that reduce its significance to fluctuations in oil prices. Instead, he situates the conflict within a broader political economy of empire, tracing how the Gulf’s strategic importance lies not only in energy exports but also in its central role in global supply chains, financial markets, and emerging infrastructure corridors…  Hanieh’s central intervention is that the war should be understood not as a discrete geopolitical event but as part of a wider struggle over the organization of trade, capital flows, infrastructure, and political authority in a rapidly changing global order. 2025 saw the largest consumption of oil, gas, and coal in human history…  [R]ather than a move away from fossil fuels, we are seeing renewables layered onto an expanding hydrocarbon base.  Since the 1970s, these surpluses have largely flowed into dollar assets, Western banks, US Treasury markets, and consumption of US military hardware. Through these ...

“Metin Cihan, a Turkish journalist exiled in Germany, has documented what a growing number of observers see as Turkish duplicity: all talk and no action , Turkey speaks out against Israel but without cutting trade ties. “Basically,’ explains Henri Barkey, emeritus professor of international relations at Lehigh University (Pennsylvania), ‘Israel and Turkey find themselves in similar situations in Syria. Both occupy a significant amount of Syrian territory. They face parallel security challenges: the Kurds for the Turks, and Hizbullah and other groups for Israel. Neither wants to see the Iranians return, even though that’s unlikely to happen.’ The weakening of Iran, a historic rival, suits Turkey.” The article is available in 9 languages. Socio-economic indicators and political prospects Türkiye's Gini Realities:  The top 20% of earners capture  48% of total national income , whereas the bottom 20% receive just 6.4%. The richest segment earns roughly  9 times more  tha...

An interview with Gilbert Achcar

On the Iran war