Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

As a world, you told us to endure the worst terrors and humiliations of the occupation, without turning to violence. You told us to teach our children love and science, even if Israel has bombed every school. You told us to sing and smile and cook through our suffering. You told us not to be beggars, nor to starve in silence. You told us to resist, but without any weapons. To count on your “eyes” to defend us. Chef Mahmoud did all of those things. And was assassinated by drone strike. Are we your perfect victims now?  In memory of  Mahmoud Almadhoun

Indian-made drones on their way to Israel Related The Palestine Laboratory

‘Israel has the right to defend itself against such heinous attacks,’ 

A couple of points need updating–the death toll of the sanctions on Iraq, for example–but it is still accurate and prophetic. Arundhati Roy in September 2001: Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place. Operation Enduring Freedom is ostensibly being fought to uphold the American Way of Life. It'll probably end up undermining it completely. It will spawn more anger and more terror across the world. For ordinary people in America, it will mean lives lived in a climate of sickening uncertainty: will my child be safe in school? Will there be nerve gas in the subway? A bomb in the cinema hall? The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence i...

In the postcolony, wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious. One reason why is that the postcolony is a relatively specific form of capture and emasculation of the desire for revolt and the will to struggle.  The enthusiasm for origins thrives by provoking an affect of fear of encountering the other—an encounter that is not always material but is certainly always phantasmatic, and in general traumatic. Indeed, many are concerned that they have preferred others over themselves for a long time. They deem that the matter can no longer be to prefer such others to ourselves. Everything is now about preferring ourselves to others, who, in any case, are scarcely worthy of us, and last, it is about making our object choices settle on those who are like us. The era is therefore one of strong narcissistic bonds. In t...

  “Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – a settlement of that hoary debt in proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would be remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery co...

Capitalism, democracy, climate, war, “globalism” and “national statehood” are off the agenda while purists ineffectually worry about the “niceties of national and international asylum law”. Reinventing the Anti-Immigrant Wheel

"The label 'terrorist' works to identify a little enclave of evil, a sub-population of evil-doers, from whom the rest of humanity distinct. It works to hypocritically stratify global violence, so that we know who is entitled to its use, and whose rustiest weapon is an outrage." When the ANC were "terrorists"

It looks an interesting book. The Violent American Century

The Metamorphosis at 100

“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” — Hannah Arendt

Trudeau's double game is interesting to follow ... Meanwhile he presides over a government that is now the second arms supplier to the Middle East. Six months after assuming office, his government signed a $12 billion arms sales to Saudi Arabia .

Warned us about the shock doctrine then he was assassinated

A 9/11 Retrospective: Washington's 15-Year Air War The Coup in Chile: 11 September 1973