Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Marco D’Eramo is excellent as usual. ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’ —Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. [See, for instance, David Cameron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s tears] It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion , and has become an indispensable tool of politics. Perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, s...

“ No day of celebration with its mandatory collective rhythms , to share with all the strangers I don’t care about. Because our grandfathers’ grandfathers, and so on, celebrated, we too should feel the urge to celebrate. That is nauseating.” —Antonio Gramsci I celebrate every defeat or even a setback of American, British, French, Russian state violence and military adventure. I would celebrate a regime change in the U.S., UK, France, Russia … I celebrated the recent French defeat in ‘the Sahel’. I celebrated the American ‘defeat’ in Afghanistan. I celebrate any defeat, a toppling of or a setback for the Arab regimes.  I celebrate any setback for both NATO and Russia. I would celebrate any defeat or even a setback for the IDF and the reactionary Israeli state. I celebrate the birth of any Palestinian child. I celebrated the death of Henry Kissinger. I would celebrate the death of Hilary, George, Barack, Joe, Tony, Immanuel, Ursula, Vlad … I would celebrate any labour movement and an...

BBC: Hamas attack on Israel. Middle East Eye: Palestinian attack on Israel. That is expected from the BBC. Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term "Israeli retaliation ". —Jonathan Cook Related Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State   (Pluto Press 2006). Interview with Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, from Nazareth, Israel.   >>  Listen to Jonathan Cook . How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

“A demonstration for equality turned into an all-Jewish, Zionist demonstration advocating for Jewish supremacy in Israel. Once again, demonstrators said: don’t bother us about the occupation. We are dealing here with the judicial system; let’s not confuse the issues - as if the occupation does not overshadow everything and define the Israeli regime more than any of its other components. The hypocrisy and double standards of the Zionist left were once again revealed in all their ugliness.” Zionists only

It is no more a crowded country or there is no money. Some people are not put in detention centres, banned from work or sent to Rwanda. They are granted visas  and a three-year stay before even entering the country. Ukrainian refugees in the UK

“ Two tyrants, Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini focused on policing women’s bodies as the site of their respective ideologies of power and domination, with the bodies of women as the ideological battleground of their patriarchal practices. “What we are witnessing in Iran in the imposition of mandatory veiling is, of course, the reverse of what we see in much of Europe and North America where Muslim women are systematically harassed if they choose to wear the Muslim hijab.  For decades not a single day passes without a racist, misogynist, bigoted violent attack on Muslim women in Europe and the US.” How they became an ideological battleground

Fealty to Israel

National Executive Council statement

1. Whites refugees are welcome; others less so. 2. You can invade Iraq but not Ukraine. 3. Sometimes neo-Nazism can be tolerated. 4. Hitting high-rises is only a war crime in Europe. The four lessons from Ukraine

Palestine vs. Ukraine

Saudi’s war on Yemen and the ‘West’. Refugees. Sanctions. Myanmar. International oil companies and boycotts. Israel and the Palestinians. Blatant racism

Hypocrisy then, more hypocrisy now

Should Washington and Jefferson monuments come down? Yes, and should also Churchill, Havelock, "Clive of India", Thatcher statues and a few others 

" 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...

Executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Yes, both Iran and the Saudi Kingdom are barbaric and we know that. The difference, however, between their barbarism and the barbarism of the US, the British, the French, etc. is that Western modern babarism is carried out "democratically": there are meetings, debates and voting before deciding on the actions (invasions, occupations, air-strikes...), which, by the way, directly and indirectly, kill, maim, displace, etc far more people. One figure comes to mind: half a million Iraqi children killed by sanctions .  When they do it, it is barbarism and terrorism. When we do it, it is protecting "our way of life" because they are against freedom" and "democracy". Some people are exempt from being called barbaric and terrorists because they are our friends, they buy weapons from us, we helped them establish their Kingdom, they put money in our banks, they keep pumping enough oil which help us maintain "our ...