Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Abdourahmane Ridouane’s deportation is not an ancillary phenomenon. It is a logical part of the inner workings of a system developed long before 7 October and whose vindictive activities continue despite the present political crisis. The power structure uses all available means and finds new justifications in current political events, be it public security during the Olympics or the repression of anti-Semitism - both perfectly legitimate.” A state that has a monopoly on the use of violence and uses it at home and abroad (imperialistically), finds scapegoats in its rule and divide policy and in its distraction from the social, racial and class issues. It manufactures an ‘enemy within’ and nurtures the far-right ideology. It goes as far as passing legislations akin to ones passed by a police state - example: the ban on wearing of the headscarf. When a French student last year admitted that he would be complicit in oppression if after university he would be working with the IMF, whe...

Among those who propagated the ‘lesser evil’ argument were Noam Chomsky and socialist historian Howard Zinn.  Thanks to Joseph Massad for reminding me. Why US progressives back Biden Related Chomsky, Zinn and Obabma

Book review "War in Syria: Resolving a Global Conflict" I think Ms Helberg, or the reviewer, is wrong in saying people " took to the streets without ideological blinkers " and among them was Yassin al-Haj Salah. It seems there is a lack of familiarity with Al-Haj Saleh's writings and positions. He is in fact a very ideological Syrian leftist who fought the regime, imprisoned, and he is still ideological leftist and anti-dictatorhsip and anti-imperialist. Dismissing ideology is a phantasy. The question is which ideology and whose interests? Is it progressive or reactionary, or "antiquated" as al-Haj Salah calls it: "Overall, the fast-moving current of antiquation that is engulfing us all appears to be a result of three springs merging into one: the spring of religion, which offers legitimacy to existing and soon-to-exist despotic authorities; the spring of despotic states that receive assistance and legitimacy from a world system cente...

These Muslims who come to our country and don't like our way of life. These Muslims we went to their countries so that they adopt our way of doing things. The Real Trouble with Ilhan Omar

Absurdity The Stansted 15

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 . ...

"How the refugee crisis became invisible"