Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.” The US [and its allies] helped massacre Yemeni schoolchildren

From the archive The contradictions of identity Gary Younge will be speaking at the British Academy , London, 17 September 2018

"The Syrian war is over, and America lost"

"‘By mid-2017 Yemen faced total humanitarian disaster, its first famine since the 1940s and the world’s worst cholera epidemic.’ The situation was unprecedented and avoidable: both famine and cholera were ‘the result of a civil war dramatically worsened by foreign intervention'." — Helen Lackner Yemen's turn Note: Tariq Ali's position on Syria has been shameful. 

"The reality is that every  president since Lyndon Johnson has forgotten about  America's poor, and especially, poor Americans of colour . Most politicians rarely use the words  "poor" and "poverty"   in their speeches, unless they intend to criticise the poor for their lot in life.  Yet the black affluent class continues to emphasise racial progress and social mobility as if it's 1978, with Jimmy Carter as president and sitcom  Diff'rent Strokes (starring black actors Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges) an NBC primetime hit." Why I don't understand the black affluent class

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of

"Obama sang the praises of American multiculturalism but deported more undocumented immigrants than any previous president. Now Trump has stripped Obama’s policy of its already threadbare human face." "American carnage"

Liberals are criticizing the Korean summit from the Right See also A Murderous History of Korea

I think this is a very good interview. "And we get our delicate fiction and our sophisticated analysis of identity without mentioning caste, without mentioning Kashmir — the upholding of this nation as the land of Gandhi and yoga and nonviolence, when in fact there has not been a single day since August 15, 1947, when India was declared independent that the Indian Army has not been deployed “within its own borders, against its own people.” Whether it’s Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Punjab, Goa, Bastar, you know? It’s just a nation that is nailed together by military might, and we try to avoid thinking about it." Arundhati Roy on literature, India, Kashmir, violence, Ghandi, Dalits, resistance, Obama, Trump, and more

White do white people like what I write? The documentation in Coates’s essays is consistently impressive, especially in his writing about mass imprisonment and housing discrimination. But the chain of causality that can trace the complex process of exclusion in America to its grisly consequences – the election of a racist and serial groper – is missing from his book. Nor can we understand from his account of self-radicalisation why the words ‘socialism’ and ‘imperialism’ became meaningful to a young generation of Americans during what he calls ‘the most incredible of eras – the era of a black president’. There is a conspicuous analytical lacuna here, and it results from an overestimation, increasingly commonplace in the era of Trump, of the most incredible of eras, and an underestimation of its continuities with the past and present.  ‘Every white Trump voter is most certainly not a white supremacist,’ Coates writes in a bitter epilogue to  We Were Eight Years in Power . ‘But ever

And here is some narrative with some crap on the top A liberal is telling us how/why "the West" should have saved Syria. I know that amnesia is prevalent nowadays, but I personally remember well how "the West", "the international community" and "the free world" have "saved" Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rwanda before that. "Syria: the failure of our age" Also The boy who started the Syrian revolution, before it became a war

Obama says Libya was 'worst mistake' of his presidency Fuck you and your 'international community'

Labour movements and popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt Joel Beinin explains what happened. He begins with the dire situation in Egypt today.

Revolution, Counter-revolution, and Imperialism in Syria

Passing the baton

Destabilizing the Middle East (yet more)

The primary priority of the Egyptian military and general Sisi is not to fight terrorism or improve governance,” Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour from 2014 to 2017 said at the Senate hearing on 25 April. “It has been to make sure that what happened in 2011 in the Tahrir square uprising can never ever, ever, ever happen again.” US aid to Egypt

" At its inception, aerial bombardment was a weapon of empire deployed to subdue colonial populations. Soon, during the Second World War, civilians in Europe and Japan came into the bomber’s crosshairs, and ever since non-combatant targets have been at the heart of military strategy. It was a seismic shift in the relations of power: as the state justified the mass murder of civilians, individual combatants, flying high above their victims, were distanced from the act of killing as never before. The ascendance of drones as an instrument of military power is the latest stage in this cruel evolution, which has led to a perpetual low-intensity war on the global scene. As the technology enabling it spreads through the world, the borders of the conflict will grow in proportion." The militarization of everything

A product of the endless war of terror

The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution