Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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....

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

It is a long article. “These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.” “Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe ...

A liberal view that reflects liberal anxiety of a phenomenon of their own creation  The author’s profile says it all. Note that there is not a single word about Palestine and Germany’s complicity in a genocidal war.  “While in the Weimar Republic a century ago, demagogues and populists thrived on “othering” German Jews, today this “other” is the migrant - more specifically,  those with Muslim backgrounds .”

One wants to break free of the past: rightly, because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive.    —Theodor W. Adorno

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 ...

“The violence of the last week has been unusually vicious and frightening, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Fourteen years of Conservative rule have seen minority communities used as a scapegoat for worsening inequality time and time again. The history of institutional racism in Britain goes back much further, but you could begin the most recent version of this story at the introduction of the Hostile Environment, a set of policies that aimed to make Britain feel inhospitable… Labour right must also take its share of responsibility. New Labour helped to embed the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 years, with new, stronger powers of policing and surveillance and campaign literature that demonized asylum seekers. Keir Starmer appears to be taking up this mantle… Just this week, Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, referred to the town’s Holiday Inn as an “asylum hotel” and said that the town’s people wanted “their hotel back.” Days later it was set alight by the far rig...

A list of demands by students has been circulated in an underground press release. Shahidul Alam puts the demands in a broader context and assess their validity and effectiveness.

  'Justice?' The colonel was astounded. 'What is justice?' 'Justice, sir –' 'That's not what justice is,' the colonel jeered, and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. 'That's what Karl Marx is. I'll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garrotting. That's what justice is when we've all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Perolle. From the hip. Get it? —Joseph Heller,  Catch-22

For this a leading American professor has been placed in leave. “Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it. Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a...

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.

Verbal gymnastics

  Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact. Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it f...

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido...

So many Germans did ignore the genocide against the Jews. So many stood by when the Rwanda genocide was taking place. So many have ignored the Rohingya genocide. Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like .

“ The threat of violence and instability impels the Chinese state to absorb and resolve disputes through legal and bureaucratic channels in which the state has a monopoly on decision-making and space for interest representation. The criminalisation of yinao reflects such state efforts to maintain social stability. However, the adverse impact of this criminalisation [...] suggests that the inability of formal institutions (for example, laws, courts, dispute mediation commissions) to resolve disputes could give rise to more social unrest.”

“There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure.” A good and stimulating interview . Contrary to the title though, the treatment of the relevance of Malcolm X’s ideas in the exchange between Yancy and Sawyer are marginal.  

 But why a British actor as Fanon? Related A review of Concerning Violence

Frédéric Lordon : «   Terrorisme   » est un mot impasse. Concéder «   terrorisme   », c’est annuler que ce qui se passe en Israël-Palestine est politique. Au plus haut point. Même si cette politique prend la forme de la guerre, se poursuivant ainsi par d’autres moyens selon le mot de Clausewitz. Le peuple palestinien est en guerre – on ne lui a pas trop laissé le choix. L’acharnement à faire dire «   terrorisme   » ne satisfait que des besoins passionnels – et aucune exigence intellectuelle. «   Terrorisme   » a une irremplaçable vertu : donner une violence pour dépourvue de sens. Et de causes Les tragédies israéliennes sont incarnées en témoignages poignants, les tragédies palestiniennes sont agglomérées en statistiques. Le bloc bourgeois quand il fait bloc derrière Israël à l’extérieur saisit surtout l’occasion de faire bloc contre ses ennemis à l’intérieur. Le bloc bourgeois français est plus israélien que les Israéliens : il refuse q...

“I used to want peace. I don’t want peace anymore