Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The tragedies and political realities of Aleppo’s old red district

Homage to Aleppo

“Stealing” from the Saracens

The outcome of regional strategic calculus and "lesser evil" mentality, especially when "the lesser evil" is "secular". Sections of the left are still in denial. How chemical weapons helped bring Assad close to victory

Syria The picture drawn in this analysis precedes a recent major development: the beginning of an assault by the Syrian regimes and the militias allied to it, with Russian aid from the sky, on Idlib province, the stronghold of the opposition. That is more likely to change the facts on the ground as the opposition begins to lose areas which has controlled for the last two years. Resisting Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham

"How the Syrian civil war has transformed Hezbollah"

"You can spew your visceral hatred for Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Gert Wilders or other far-right “populists” – whom I prefer to call racists –  all you want, but an abandonment of the Syrian people using the age-old adage of “it’s all America’s doing” and absolving the crimes of such people puts you in cahoots with these very same bigots." That father

Syria Demonstrations on Friday 30 December 2016

Bare life in Aleppo and in the Mediterranean and "Demystifying the Syrian Conflict" At the time Erdogan receives a Syrian child who got out of Aleppo ...

Syria Massacring the arguments of those who have been supporting the Assad regime and Russia's intervention, orgasmically celebrating "the liberation of Aleppo". Justifying the unjustifiable Also,  Stop the War Coalition's failure to actively campaign against the wars crimes of Syrian and the Russian regimes " My friends in Aleppo would rather die than captured by Assad's militias." — Zeina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist Here are some of the arguments put by those who defend the Syrian regime: Apart from "the terrorists" of the armed rebel forces, "The Assad family belongs to the tolerant Islam of Alawid orientation. • Syrian women have the same rights as men to study, health and education. • Syria women are not forced to wear the burqa. The Sharia (Islamic law) is unconstitutional. • Syria is the only Arab country with a secular constitution and does not tolerate Islamic extremist movements. • Roughly 10% of the Syrian populat...

"As Hitchens said, those who secretly cheer Assad’s takeover of Aleppo don’t know what they are talking about. Or they forgot what it is like to live under a regime that kills and tortures in times of peace as it does when it is embattled. People in Syria rose up because they wanted their country to be free. What happened later, including the rise of extremism and lawlessness, was a product of the way the regime responded to the demands of young men and women." Note : Christopher Hitchens supported the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq thus he was the camp of "the liberal defence of murder".  Using Hitchens' argument for the Syrian situation excludes the fact that an uprising/a revolution aimed at overthrowing the regime. It also implies that there is no way for the Syrians, or any other people who rise up against dictatorship, to achieve anything without the help of the Western imperialism. The "Western states" should always do something. No t...

Aleppo by Alaa as-Sayyed

"Please help the people of Aleppo, just like we helped the people of Kobani. Oh, hang on, Aleppo? Kobani? Oh, that’s right. In Kobani they were Kurds. Civilised, secular, “progressive”, feminists, even green warriors apparently. They were like “us.” “We” (western imperialists and western … “anti-imperialists”) understand them. Therefore, they deserved to be saved from ISIS beasts, said the imperialist leaders, and their “anti-imperialist” echo in unison. Aleppo? Facing a fasc istic enemy that has massacred twenty times as many people as ISIS fascists could ever manage, is not full of Good Kurds. It is full of Arabs. And we all know what western imperialist leaders, the far-right, neo-Nazis, Trumpists, racists, and “left-wing anti-imperialists” think of Arabs, especially when they live in Syria. They are all backward, blood-thirsty, barbaric, “jihadis” and “head-choppers,” *all* of the above categories tell us, yes, the left-fascists just as emphatically as any of the others. So t...

The spectacle: Children in Aleppo do not get a million like because they don't hold teddy bears... In Spain, however, animal rights activists do Or ...

The spectacle consists of daily photographs and news items from a ten-time Guernica, Aleppo;  terrorist attacks in France, Egypt and Istanbul; countless refugees drowning in the sea; decades of a form of capitalism which have spawned more social dislocation, racism, Islamophobia, and far-right chauvinism, and more yet to come; Jennifer Lawrence's butt-scratching, which upset some viewers yearning for a merry Christmas.