Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...

“At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa .”

Rashid Khalidi: “What has been done to Gaza is far worse than what was done to any part of Palestine in 1948, and what is being done to Lebanon is far worse than what was done to Lebanon in 1982 or 2006. This is a war of extermination — it’s a genocide. I was reading a play by Marina Carr talking about the razing of Troy after the Trojan War. Quoting Hecuba, she says, ‘This is not war — in war there are rules, laws, codes. This is genocide. They’re wiping us out’.” “ I think there is a threat to the entire international legal order if this is allowed to continue, as it has been by the United States.”  Unfortunately, it seems that Khalidi, like a few other scholars, believe in international law. Unsurprisingly, the concept has been a powerful one and even sections of the left still believes in it. Khalidi: “ I do think that there has been a major, consequential shift in public opinion; I don’t think there are likely to be consequences on the political level in the short term. Whoeve...

Thank you Hatem Bazian for that article

Nowhere “ explores his turbulent history against a backdrop of seismic world events” Related The West's Favourite Afghan

‘How ancient India shaped the West’ Related The geopolitical origins of capitalism

“ Europe’s military arsenal is not well prepared for war  … because for the last thirty years we thought that war was not coming back to Europe.”  But has war ever left Europe?

The Tunisian-British partnership TuNur hopes to build one of the world’s largest thermodynamic solar plants here, on collective lands once home to nomadic groups. TuNur plans to fulfil this ambition by building the world’s largest solar plant. Behind the name are a handful of well-known investors from the City of London who have taken a lively interest in the promise of green finance With persistently high oil prices and mounting supply challenges, Europe has pragmatically tried to speed its transition to lower-cost renewables ‒ by outsourcing. It covets the bountiful sunlight of its southernmost Mediterranean neighbours whose solar potential is among the highest in the world. The country, ensnared in a financial crisis, is struggling to achieve its climate objectives. Many foreign investors are hungry for its solar supply – mostly for export to the North. The electricity-generating mirrors may look green, but they reek of an extractivist Europe greedy for its neighbours’ resources – a...

Excellent! Is there continuity? Useful artifacts for understanding the imperialist worldview

A very good piece by the historian Vincent Brown

What a razor-sharp letter!

Speaking over the radio from Cairo, Ben Barka issued a rousing declaration, denouncing the Moroccan government’s ‘grave treason, not only to the dynamic Algerian Revolution, but, in general, to all Arab revolutions in favor of liberty, socialism, and unity, and to the world national liberation movement in its entirety.’ He  called instead  for Moroccans to paralyze ‘the criminal hands that have appropriated power and that are armed, financed, and led by the imperialists.’ His murder by agents of the Moroccan king with help from France and Israel was a major blow to socialist forces throughout the Arab world . Successive French presidents from De Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron have persistently obstructed justice in the name of  secret défense , a perfectly legal and very effective means of covering up state crimes. By the end of the following decade [1970s], Che Guevara, Henri Curiel, and Amílcar Cabral, key figures in the development of the tricontinental movement, had all be...

At issue is not an accidental, negligible or ‘unfortunate’ streak of racism in the works of a stellar European philosopher.

“Far from being caused by personal rivalry, this conflict is rooted in the long history of the region and Sudan’s never-ending economic and social crisis. The conflict between the North and the South claimed between half a million and a million lives from 1955 to 2002. And herein lies the cause of the fighting tearing Sudan apart. To understand it requires going back to 2011. The secession of South Sudan and the rise of guerrilla movements within the North’s Muslim populations had weakened President Omar al-Bashir’s authority. His increasingly unpopular Islamist regime had been in power since the coup of June 1989 and was rotten with corruption. The regime sent the Janjaweed to fight in Yemen on behalf of the Saudis – who paid handsomely – and then tasked them with repressing the northern guerrillas of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), first in Darfur and then throughout the country. From the day after the coup, there were obvious tensions between the two forces, e...

“In The New Age of Empire: How Colonialism and Racism Still Rule the World , Kehinde Andrews explores how the intellectual, political and economic frameworks inherited from colonialism are still governing today’s world, resulting in a new age of empire that perpetuates racism, white supremacy and global economic inequalities.”

“My examination of the limitations of the racial binary of black vs. white as an analytical category to address the racialization of migrants in the North African context allows for a more nuanced approach to racial categorizations—one that challenges these simplified binaries without erasing the psychic violence of racial labeling or the historical stigmatization of blackness produced by the legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the project of nation-building. This approach is necessary to challenge the construction of migrants as the ‘racial other’ and to support their human right to mobility and belonging.” Contemporary notions of race in Morocco A photo by Chermiti Mohamed

An Israeli liberal: Only a few acknowledged that the father’s story of return, redemption and liberation was also a story of conquest, displacement, oppression and death. Yaron Ezrahi ,  Rubber Bullets, Power and Conscience in Modern Israel, 1996 I would say there is probably a mistranslation. Instead of ‘Only a few’ I think the author meant ‘Only few’. Related – from my radio show archive Occupied Minds - A Journey through the Israeli Psyche (Pluto Books, 2006). An interview with Arthur Neslen The impracticality of a two-state solution. Overcoming Zionism: an interview with Joel Kovel The Colonial Drama of Israel-Palestine The Myths of Zionism – an interview with John Rose in 2008

1.  On Saturday night, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was lit up with the Israeli flag. Careful observers noticed orange blotches on the column — these were leftovers from a  climate protest   several weeks ago. The Israeli flag appeared to have blood stains. The symbolism was perfect: While the German establishment project declares its unwavering support for the Israeli government, it can’t quite hide the fact that  colonialism and apartheid   are inherently bloody affairs. On Saturday, five parties in the Bundestag — CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and Greens — published a  joint statement  declaring their support for the State of Israel and its “right to self-defense.” The far-right AfD, for its part, made an almost identical declaration. Even the reformist left party DIE LINKE, represented by chairperson  Janine Wissler , issued a one-sided condemnation of “terrorism.” [ Just a few years ago, Wissler was part of a  post-Trotskyist organization  t...

It is a good revisit, and it always reminds me of a colleague who upon mentioning Orientalism and Edward Said in 2010/11, she said: “that a long time ago,” implying that it became outdated. She too was taken by ‘liberal globalisation’, ‘human rights’, etc.  I still prefer and recommend Vivek Chibber’s and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s approaches, for they show the limitations of Said’s analysis. Hamid Dabashi in his The End of Two Myths has also pinpointed what Said was unable to analyse and incorporate in Orientalism. Furthermore, we should not forget that today there is a whole literature on neo-Orientalism. Why Edward Saïd’s book still matters

Note that there is no reference to the genocide in Congo. The museum’s relationship with Congo Related Belgium’s Colonial Legacy Belgium’s role in Rwandan genocide