Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The soundtrack to London's murders

K is for Karl - Communism (episode 2)

Like that hypocritical discussion about whether the recent airstrikes on Syria were "legal" or "illegal", here is another hypocrisy. I remember that in early 2001 there were only a couple of brothels left in Soho. London. They had been made illegal.  But could you really make selling sex illegal in a society where everything is commodified and for sale? In fact, "brothels" and prostitution have been legal, but operating under other names and a lot of that is monopolised by "escort" agencies and other kind of agencies.  Louise is British, has a diploma in marine biology and £20,000 of student debt. Related In  Britain  In Sicily, Italy In  Germany

Edward Said London Lecture 2018 An event in one of the most expensive areas of London for some middle class intellectuals!

Rough sleepers in England rise for seventh year Who owns London?

Scotland Yard reopen the case of the assassination of Naji al-Ali

The buildng is not in Egypt or India.  The main causes are: - The developer - The cuts in the fire brigade services - People with authorities did not listen to the warnings of an action group in last November Playing with fire in London

Sex for rent? and London letting agents 'refuse black tenants'

Every word in this article could be mine. Violence: theirs and ours See also this letter by Vijay to a Syrian written in Sep 2013 "The light that shines alone in palaces, Steals away the people’s happiness. Feigns its strength from other’s weakness. That kind of system, Dawn without light, I refuse. I deny."

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the

London I have received an email saying that the attack, which took place yesterday, was "an attack on the values of democracy and openess".  Theresa May, the PM, has said that "the attacker was inspired by the Islamic faith". The intellectual disability (or the fundamentalist discourse) of some people are just disgusting. Has the PM said something else? Yes, she spoke about "the oldest democracy", "freedom", "forces of evil", and some other things of that nature. The ones we heard after the previous attacks. Update: the Prime Minister also said that "we saw the worst of humanity." She is not pretending to be ignorant; she is just a representative of an imperialist and chauvinistic regime for which the rhetoric of "humanity" is a PR for public comsumption. More than 200 people just drowned in the Miditerranean

Brexit means the end of single market access for London

Italy Striking the Startups Ukraine Transport workers face attcaks on rights

Pessimism and confusion of a social-democrat

In Chinatown, London: Swoop and rescue 

I love the English and their way of life The other day someone, an English, was telling how marvellous the American soldiers were in treating dogs in Afghanistan. One Syrian Photographer's Last Letter to the World

The City: London and the Global Power of Finance

London housing: the collusion between councils and capital Aysen  Dennis loves her flat. Two bedrooms, a neat kitchen-diner, a cosy living room, lots of light, a separate toilet and bathroom, and a much broader hallway than in the poky million-pound Victorian houses that surround her in south London – all for £110 a week, plus £30 heating and service charge. Her flat is warm, and no one can see into it. “I feel free in my home,” she told me recently. “I can take off my clothes without worrying about curtains.” She still has the original 1960s kitchen cupboards, miracles of space-saving and clever joinery. South  London  hipsters would love them. Dennis is not a hipster. She is 57, single, and has been unemployed for four years. She used to work in a women’s refuge.  Before that, three decades ago, she came to London from Turkey: a leftwing activist fleeing the aftermath of a military coup, during which she had been shot at and imprisoned, and some of her friends had been killed.

On BBC Radio 4

Leading Olympic expert Jules Boykoff takes the 2012 Olympics in London as a case study of corporate greed and popular resistance against Celebration Capitalism .