Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 On the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah Gary Stodel One of the best anti terror strategies ever employed. The stuff of Hollywood films. Ned Ma Gary Stodel  It is called state terror by scholars of terrorism. There is state violence and non-state violence. Jamus Fundi Ned Ma  it's the best actors who invented today's technology playing and toying with the old technology, and the keepers thinking they are safe. Ned Ma Jamus Fundi  That's not related to my comment. I am speaking about 'terrorism' academically, i.e. sociologically, historically, politically, etc. The key word is scholars who have written about violence and forms of violence. Jim Braiden Ned Ma Terrorism is violence directed at civilians for political purposes. This was not terrorism. Ned Ma Jim Braiden  narrowed the definition and ignored who were killled in the attack. That suits his ideological stance towards a state that has used state terror for decades. “Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: '...

Not really news, but good to see it on the BBC “The Yoorrook Justice Commission found violence and disease reduced the local Indigenous population by three quarters in the 20 years after the state was colonised, in the early 1830s.”

“The reasons for this devastation lie in structural factors shaping the country’s economy and demography , as well as the accumulated harms caused by decades of intermittent war. “The extreme underdevelopment in peripheral regions has logically bred grievances among local populations that, when combined with the central state’s violent suppression of dissent, creates fertile ground for the rise of armed groups. The atrocities committed by the RSF, SAF, and allied militias on both sides merely continue long-established patterns of violence.

I watched Papillon. A fantastic movie. “The penal colony was the setting of French writer Henri Charrière's book Papillon, which was later made into a Hollywood film starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.” A high security prison in Amazon jungle

“If MSF [ Médecins Sans Frontières]  secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. “What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity an...

“If Baran was silent, the real Barans of today are being forced into a silence that is far more violent. And I wonder what kind of country tells a child: you can die building it, but you can never live in it .” Related Majidi in context

The German court logic: if you can survive by working illegally, then you don’t need rights . If your suffering is managed by another member state, then the system has done its job. “Europe’s asylum system is no longer about protection, if it ever was. It’s about containment, outsourcing, and denial.”

“Adolescence was made by liberals, is being watched by liberals and praised by them– and yet, as I’ll argue, its politics are authoritarian .”

—Siyavash Shahabi  on  March 26, 2025 Recommended  Liberalism – A Counter-History by Domenico Lesurdo

As anthropologist Giorgio Gristina  argues ,  there is a  more dark, disturbed, militaristic or violent tone that can be found in Israeli psytrance, in the names of albums, artists or events like Expression of Rage, Psycho Sonic, Deeply Disturbed, Becoming Insane, Smashing the Opponent, Conquering the Israeli Desert, Groove Attack, We’re Dangerous, We Must Evacuate, Ground Zero, NuClear Visions of Israel and so on. “The reality is that  psytrance  is the soundtrack to Israel’s genocide. “Australian doofs have a very different political aesthetic, which reflects the more progressive outlook of most organizers and participants. Most doofs begin with a welcome to country or smoking ceremony given by the traditional indigenous owners of the land on which the festival is held. Festival organizers draw on indigenous Australian practices and traditions to impress upon patrons a connection to the land and support for Aboriginal sovereignty, to encourage respectful behav...

Journalist : M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people? Ben M'Hidi :  And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. — The Battle of Algiers ,  a 1966 movie   Related The Rebel’s Clinic

  France responsible for ‘extreme violence’ in Cameroon independence war, report says

It is telling that the BBC puts this in Business section rather than Society. The can afford ir or the cannot. They simply want more.

In the eyes of the contemporary bourgeoisie everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle class desire to die in peace – after them the deluge. —Geroges Sorel, Reflections on Violence , 1908.

Necropolitics: The Taxonomies of Death in Syria (1) The silence of slippers is more dangerous than the sound of boots. —French priest Martin Niemöller It’s not a civil war. It’s a genocide. Leave us die but do not lie. —Kafranbel banner, November 2, 2012 This chapter explores the taxonomies of death and technologies of violence that the Syrian regime has deployed over the past eight years to crush the uprising. It argues that the current politics of death would not have been possible without the imposition of a state of emergency in Syria. Emergency was a vital political tool that allowed the regime to maintain power for several decades. It would not have been consequential, however, without the prison system and state terror that enforce it. The chapter begins with a brief history of the state of emergency and how Assad used it to eliminate his political opponents and consolidate state power. It explores the significance of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” in the Syrian context....