Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

In the ‘New World’ “deliberate genocidal bursts were more common among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases, we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators, the greater the genocide.” The organic nationalists such the young Austrians argued for an organic conception of the people and state. Conflict – be it conflict of interet or class conflict – was to be transcended, for the people are indivisible and united.  Thus “late-nineteenth-century minorities in the East came under increasing pressure, leading through induced to coerced assimilation and thence to coerced emigration. Jews took the brunt of the pressure “During the nineteenth century, every Ottoman Turkish defeat in Europe resulted in mass flight and many killings of Muslims.” Settlers and Their Victims I note two persistent features of the colonial dark side. First, the settlers often enjoyed de facto local self-rule—whatever the constitution said. For the period, these were distinctly...

“[T]he vilification of migrants and Muslims forms part of a primitive persecutory phantasy, shaped by the UK’s colonial history and by its entrenched material disparities.” “[I]t would be more accurate to view contemporary British bordering as a continuation of colonial violence: an attempt to police the nation’s last frontier, so that the wealth and status gained from imperial conquest is preserved, materially and symbolically – and withheld from former colonial subjects.” This goes with the rhetoric of politicians who stress that UK needs migrants, but they have to be skilled ones and the country ‘legally’. They did not mind before – in fact encouraged – the hundreds of thousands of Polish and others, many of whom were unskilled, when British capital needed cheap labour. During the ‘great boom’ of capitalism in the 1959s and 1960s liberal democracy could thrive at home without the need to scapegoat the Other. On the contrary, many workers from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean were e...

As ever, the ‘legitimate concerns’ brigade includes a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, such as Carole Malone, Matthew Goodwin, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. Notably, however, these ‘concerns’ aren’t about the ‘bread and butter’ issues that many leftists seem to think will defuse racist agitation: as I’ve said many times before, it isn’t the economy, stupid. What the two recent moral panics have in common is the coprological image of matter out of place: borders and boundaries eroding and people being were they ought not to be. As was proven when the court revealed that the suspect is a British minor and the riots persisted, it doesn’t matter what ‘the facts’ are: we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion. It would be instructive to ask one of these ‘whiteness’ or ‘Englishness’ rioters what they would have done had the suspect been white. One of the rationalisations of rioters claiming not to be racist was that, because the suspect killed children, he was not ...

We implement extremist policies at home and abroad. We support extremist regimes. We support an extremist super-power. We engage in extremist wars. We sell extremist weapons. We support an extremist genocidal regime. We normalise extremist salaries, extremist wealth, extremist financial sector …  As you know, it's all right to treat ’extremists’ extremely. It's the desire to normalise one’s extremism that makes regimes like the UK’s call their enemies ’extremists’ . When the next violent attack takes place in a Western city they will as usual tell us about ‘terrorism’ re-mobilising their massive media – public and private – to hide their massive state violence in its different forms and shapes – mainly their economic and military violence.

“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...

A wide-raging conversation with an esteemed historian Photo illustration: Elise Swain/The Intercept

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

“Both Hindutva and Zionism draw on ancient mythology to exert their statehood and entitlement to land and power. They both instrumentalise religion to justify their perspectives. Because it is in Palestine and Kashmir that the outcomes of Zionism and Hindutva are most visible. The Indian occupation and the Israeli occupation are not the same, but once again, they share many similarities.” The past and present of the Indian-Israeli relations

In 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, charges for domestic violence were filed with the Indian police every four minutes. Forced marriages involve nine couples out of ten and remain the norm. Since 2020, eleven States have adopted anti-conversion laws. Ironically, ‘Love Jihad’ was a reference first used in the socially and politically most progressive state in India. According to the India Spend Initiative, an independent research body, 90% of all crimes motivated by religious hatred perpetrated since 2009 have taken place during Modi’s term of office.  According to the statistics compiled by Hate Crime Watch, an independent database which was shut down in 2019, 74% of the victims are Muslims, who only constitute 14% of the population. A crusade against mixed marriages Related Arundhati Roy on religious nationalism and dissent 

 “ These are not the refugees we are used to…These people are Europeans…These people are intelligent, they are educated people…This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists." The limitations of humanity

The violence in Leicester Related The forsaken ones

So what if Putin likes Dostoyevsky? Related “ Lithuania - together with Latvia, Estonia and Poland - banned all Russian tourists , arguing they should not be enjoying democracy and freedom in Europe while their government attacks those very values in Ukraine.”

“The Inverted Consciousness of the World” The constitution of “Islam and the West” as a civilizational divide was a colonial concoction, an ideological chimera, a mode of false consciousness that centers “the West” (where capital is believed to have accumulated) and marginalizes “the Rest” (where cheap labor and raw material are thought to be located). Both capital and its abused labor and ravaged earth, however, are global and rapidly globalizing; neither has any center or periphery. This relatively recent ideological concoction, however, has been rooted in the material forces of capital, labor, raw material, and markets. At work has been the accumulated capital that required a normative center and correspondingly the dispersed labor and raw material that were at the service of that accumulated capital. “Islam and the West” was perhaps the most potent component of “the West and the Rest” that facilitated and enabled the operation of that relation of power. I have also put forward the ...

We have heard a lot the refrain “they hate us.” “In a landmark interview in 1965 Malcolm X was asked by his interlocutor why he preached “hate to meet hate.” Malcolm X denied having ever advocated hate. The white man questioning him persisted that he had. “No,” Malcolm interjects, “that is the guilt complex of the American White Man that is so profound that when you begin to analyze the real condition of the Black Man in America, instead of the American White Man eliminating the causes that create that condition, he tries to cover it up by accusing his accusers of teaching hate.” In that singular moment of rhetorical rebuttal, Malcolm X stages a condition of dialectical reversal, where a Muslim critical thinker reasserts agency and reclaims history, not just by confronting the White Man’s monological premise but by epistemically overcoming the limitations of his moral imagination.” Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi

There will be no limit to the number of Ukrainian refugees who can live with UK host families under a new visa scheme. The UK Health Secretary: "I'm pleased that we're doing this because as a country we have a very proud record of offering sanctuary to people from wars and from conflicts, When the bus driver dropped Vishnu and his friends off, they joined a throng of hundreds of people trying to pass through a gate at the border. Vishnu says only Ukrainians were being allowed through - and each time he got close to the crossing, guards would "drag" him to the back again. Suddenly UK homes are open to host refugees, a certain type of refugees An openly racist Europe defeats most of what we claim is at stake UK Home Secretary Priti Patel: “I have developed the Ukraine family scheme following discussions with the Ukrainian government and neighbouring countries and I am proud to have launched it within a matter of days,  enabling Ukrainians with family in the Unite...

How French politics has ended up being a politics of culture. Excerpts from Daniel Zamora’s article on Catalyst The shift is due to the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity. Politicians, media commentators, and scholars from both left and right all seem to agree that the French political debate has been contaminated… What they’ve been labeling ‘Americanization’ is a certain kind of identity politics they believe is threatening French republicanism.  Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. To understand this state of affairs, we need to look at the recent history of identity in France, a history that begins not with woke concepts colonizing French universities but rather with the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and ...

Different interpretations aside. The Quran says: "You [Muslims] are the best ummah [nation] brought out for Mankind.”  [3:110]. The Jews believe that they are the ‘chosen people’. The Torah says: “ Now therefore, if you will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then you shall be a peculiar treasure unto me from all the peoples, for all the earth is mine.” Exodus 19:5. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “ The British are special. The world knows it. In our innermost thoughts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.” Resignation speech , May 2007 The richest 1% alone capture nearly 25% of world GDP, according to the World Inequality Database.  That’s more than the GDP of 169 countries combined , including Norway, Argentina, all of the Middle East and the entire continent of Africa.  They are THE CHOSEN PEOPLE .

Published in June 2018. It is against amnesia and absolving this or that government. How we all colluded in Fortress Europe Related In reality, “there is a  striking discrepancy between the lack  of feeling aroused  by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. In that sense, the border regime is an extension of the history of colonialism and domination that Europe and the West have exercised over the rest of the world, and to which ‘the construction  of Europe’ now adds ...

The man who called black people “coons, referred to Muslim women as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, Jews as “stingy” and women as “hot totty”, demands politics be “civil and kind.”

Targeting minorities, again. The European Court of Justice bans kosher and halal slaughter