Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Beyond Today Let's not forget what happened 10 years ago when Taliban militants landed on the Isle of Wight and the bravey of our men in defending our country from bearded monsters who wanted to spread their medieval values in Britain by force. On the deadliest day 5 commandos lost their lives in repelling the invaders. Prince Harry, expressing a steely face , made a resounding speech in which he stated:  "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." But the militants kept coming in and a guerrilla war dragged on for weeks. K. still remembers how he lost his comrades. He now suffers from post traumatic stress disorder that makes him smash things in the kitchen sometimes. A captured Taliban militant, Ahmed Masood, was quite determined: " We fought you four times now. We will keep fighting you until we convert you to our values....

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im...

Western imperialism, financed, supported and used some of them. Stalinism repressed them. They were, and still have been, part of the geo-political chess board. "How the USSR’s effort to destroy Islam created a generation of radicals" Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11 A Special Relationship "CIA roots of Islamic fundamentalism" I don't agree with the title though and everything in the analysis, but there is a good background.