NM's blog

Resistance doesn’t follow electoral cycles or await the results of public opinion polls. Those who resist occupation do not ask whether their defiance is “appropriate” or “palatable”. That question itself reflects a deep ethical confusion — one that equates a subjugated people with the very power that oppresses them .

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...

Ireland-US-Israel-Palestine

The EU as a vassal of a hegemon. A hegemony that wants to satisfy both Israel’s desires and objectives and the ‘normalisers’ – the reactionary regimes in the region.  The argument ‘ the US’s standing in the Arab world’ is permanently damaged is misplaced. With whom has that decades-long standing taken place? Has it been with the people struggling against authoritarian regimes and the plunder of the resources of the region? Conjuring trick      

The story of one of the world’s major tax haven

The struggle for independence Available also en  Français

Central Banks as weapons

There is something in common. Irish children teasing British soldiers. Derry, Northern Ireland 1972 11-year-old Ahed Tamimi  tries to punch an Israeli soldier during a protest in Nabi Saleh, a Palestinian village in Ramallah. 02 November 2012. 

Taken together with its partly controlled territories overseas, Britain is instrumental in the worldwide concealment of cash and assets. It is, as a member of the ruling Conservative Party  said  last week, “the money laundering capital of the world.” And the City of London, its gilded financial center, is at the system’s core. The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money

Via Michael Roberts Notice that the two leading states of the neoliberal form of capitalism, US and UK, have the lowest corporate income tax.

 An act of British state violence

A good production. “The English have treated this country shamefully. And the rich—my father included have treated the poor worse. The worst slums in Europe, they say.” —Frances O’Flaherty - Frances: “My father says that socialism is the work of the devil.” - Elisabeth: “Sounds like mine. But if poverty is the work of God, I’m with the devil.” Rebellion  

 Bloody Sunday 1920

Robert Fisk, the revered foreign correspondent for The Independent, his knowledge and insight of the Middle East is perhaps unrivalled among contemporary commentators. Fisk, who has met Osama bin Laden three times, talks about his experience of covering conflict throughout the region, the Middle East's history and the possibilities for its future.  Here is part of a talk I recorded at the Institute of Education at the book launch of Fisk's  Wars for Civilization,  London 13 October 2005.  He was a vigorous opponent of the new-fangled concept of “embedded journalism”. Latterly, however, his own embedded reports on the continuing civil war in Syria, which tended to absolve the Assad regime of some of the worst crimes credited to it, provoked a backlash, even among his anti-imperialist acolytes. Obituary

 The history remembered, the history forgotten

Ireland 1916 The movie is available on putlockers.fm

"Snapshot data from varying official sources shows that in Italy, Spain, France,  Ireland  and Belgium between 42% and 57% of deaths from the virus have been happening in homes, according to the report by academics based at the London School of Economics (LSE)." Half of coronavirus deaths happen in care homes

Coca-Cola workers in Haiti, Indonesia, Ireland and the US

Abortion As Alabama, US, is passing a bill to ban abortion , it it useful to compare the US with other countries, especially "Muslim" countries. Bahrain, Tunisia and Turkey vs.  Latin American countries (except Mexico and Cuba), Poland and even the United Kingdom.

"We can only wonder what Marx might have thought or said to Jones. Four years earlier in the  Manifesto , he and Engels had considered Western imperialism as a progressive and beneficial force drawing underdeveloped societies into bourgeois civilization. He was now collaborating with someone who held the opposite opinion, a situation that pulled him toward what his Hegelian training would have recognized as a position of immanent criticism — that is, criticism that submits to and appropriates the very premises of a competing standpoint in order to transcend it dialectically." The evolution of Marx's thinking on colonialism Further reading Marxism Orientalism Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar