Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha...

A perspective on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar

Buying up chunks of Britain

The bigger picture in this article is not big enough. While nurses and other workers go on strike in Britain, for example, one has to compare the social value of a professional football player to a nurse and their incomes, and how such obscene injustice has become acceptable and normal. The world Cup and the champion leagues are a capitalist industry run on the 5 basis of competition and profit. The question of class, exploitation and ideology are also at play. Money’s chokehold on modern football Related “We are all complicit in the system” in one way or another. We clap and cheer. We succumb to amnesia. We fill in our day with hypocrisy.

Should it be cancelled to protect workers?

Between 1918 and 1998, US administrations restricted trade with sanctioned nations 115 times; 64 of these occasions were during the 1990s, and most of them were unilateral. By 1997, the equivalent of half the world’s population was living under some form of US sanction. Current debates within the EU over what to do about Russia have led to some rhetorical contortions. Commission president Ursula von der Leyen appeared to support the US position that ‘Nord Stream 2 could not be excluded a priori from the list of [preventive] sanctions’, adding, ‘We want to build the world of tomorrow as democracies with like-minded partners.’ But among the energy partners that might replace Russia, Von der Leyen cited an oil monarchy (Qatar), a dictatorship allied with authoritarian Turkey (Azerbaijan) and a country under military rule (Egypt)... Playing the white knight calls for spotlessly clean hands. You might think whistleblower Julian Assange, sought by the US and locked up in London, was a dream ...

Arms, aid and counter-revolution

A Tale of Hypocrisy

  How Bangladesh sold its future to the Gulf states

  At the crossroads?

 While football fans will be next year lying on the sofas and cheering in pubs and in front of outdoors giant screens ... More than 6,500 migrant workers have died  in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup  

Gaddafi’s prophecy comes true as foreign powers battle for Libya’s oil

A major improvement in workers' conditions Qatar dismantles kafala system of modern slavery Meanwhile, in a "democracy" it took a union more than a year to reach a collective bargaining agreement .

Qatar: Migrant Workers Strike Over Working Conditions

Why the Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain [and the US] 
A summary 
Anglo-American interest in the enormous hydrocarbon reserves of the Persian Gulf does not derive from a need to fuel Western consumption. 
The US has never imported more than a token amount from the Gulf and for much of  the postwar period has been a net oil exporter. Anglo-American  involvement in  the Middle East has always been principally about the strategic advantage gained from controlling Persian Gulf hydrocarbons, not Western oil needs. 
What remains a US strategy: the US and Britain would provide Saudi Arabia and  other key Gulf monarchies with  ‘sufficient military supplies to preserve internal security’. 
In a piece for the Atlantic a few months  after  9/11, Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne explained that  Washington 'assumes responsibility for stabilising the region’ because  China, Japan and  Europe  will  be dependent on its resource...

Gulf Cooperation Council arms race

The Saudi predicament

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

The tone of the article, almost explicitly, makes it sound that the Qatari regime is a force of progress. In fact, both the Saudis and the Qatari are theocracies and part of the rentier economies of the Gulf Council and part of the international financial system of oppression and inequality and at the service of the big powers. The level of Qatari investment in London alone is staggering, including 95% of Shard the new skycraper and Canary Warf, not to speak of investment and donations to universities, etc Saudi Arabia's attempt at a Qatari coup backfired

"The coming together of Qatar, Iran and Turkey against Saudi Arabia and its allies, showed that coalitions now forming to compete with each other are not strictly based on the Shi’a-Sunni divide.  The alliances currently confronting each other are fighting over the control of the region, its capital,  and aim  to repress any movements for social justice." The threat of wider wars in the Middle East