Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...

“The issue with Iranian capitalism is not economic; it is political, ideological, and governmental .”  You cannot separate the economy from the other three or make secondsry: They are all in the same bundle and in interaction. 

Achieving objectives: Four Israeli lives worth hundreds of Palestinian ones.  Western complicity in crime continues

The cross-categorization of “Islam and the West” … survived [Edward] Saïd’s intervention, first and foremost because the material basis of its continued validity persisted… Saïd, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world.   The West” coinvented an “Islam” best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining the illusion of its own civilizational superiority. This dual false consciousness was not merely a product of a sense of racial superiority; it was also a requirement of the economics of robbing continents of their wealth and wherewithal. Any and all acts of decolonization are entirely contingent on dismantling all such civilizational divides as “Islam and the West,” “the First and the Third World,” “the West and the Rest,” in all of which the ruling ideological powers of the world have robbed continents of their material and labor resources an...

"[I]n large measure," as Geoffrey Parker has observed, " 'the rise of the West' de­pended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former;. . . [T]he key to the Westerners' success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution.' " The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution.  The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or  religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. W...

BBC: Hamas attack on Israel. Middle East Eye: Palestinian attack on Israel. That is expected from the BBC. Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term "Israeli retaliation ". —Jonathan Cook Related Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State   (Pluto Press 2006). Interview with Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, from Nazareth, Israel.   >>  Listen to Jonathan Cook . How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has...

Denying the inevitable

Alain Gresh removes Political Economy from History. He also separates the "Enlightenment" from barbarism (e.g. slavery, colonialism, etc) that co-existed with it. The West's selective reading of history

Yes, I am a terrorist أنا إرهابي (na’am ana' irha'bii) The West cries in fear when I make a toy from a matchbox While they [the West] make a gallows of my body using my nerves for rope  The West panics when I announce one day that they have torn my galabia   While it is they who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture  And to announce my joy and my utmost delight when they violate me! The West is sorely grieved when I worship One God in the stillness of the prayer niche. While from the hair of their coattails and the dirt of their shoes  They knead a thousand idols that they set atop the dung heaps made of the titled ones  So that I become their slave and perform amongst them the rituals of flies.  And he, they will beat me if I announce my refusal.  If I mention among them the fragrance of flowers and grass  They crucify me, accusing me of terrorism!  Admirable are all the deeds of the West, and of its tails  As for m...

Russia When autarky becomes the only solution

Orientalism

Ports and roads mean China is 'winning in Africa' (FT)

Islamism and the contemporary Arab world

An animated introduction to Said's Orientalism  and beyond Said's Orientalism Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

"I'm uncomfortable with how close the mainstream LGBTQ movement in the West has aligned itself with both capitalism and the military. For example, as an Arab man, how can I celebrate legislative changes in the United States that allow gay men and women to serve in the military, when this same institution is responsible for things like the Abu Ghraib prison torture, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continued drone strikes? But there’s hope. There are queer Arab movements, both in the Arab world and in the Western world, who are working to make a space for themselves within the mainstream LGBTQI movement—Qaws, a queer Palestinian movement, is one that comes to mind in its efforts to challenge the Israeli government’s pinkwashing of the occupation, while building positive bridges of solidarity between movements in the West and the East."  — Saleem Haddad , author of Guapa

How did the West usurp the rest? Abstract: Traditional explanations of the “ rise of the West ” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the con- junctural and contingent aspects of Europe ’ s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European develop- ment, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “ West ” and “ East ” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the short- comings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists ’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these proble...

“Toward the end of 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson formed a special committee on the Arab world under the chairmanship of Kermit Roosevelt, from the newly established CIA. The committee suggested the need for “an Arab leader who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision’ … one who deeply desires to have power, and who desires to have it primarily for the mere sake of power.” This recommendation was made more explicit in a British Foreign Office minute on December 3, 1951, which described the joint American-British view as follows: “the only sort of Government with which we can hope to get an accommodation is a frankly authoritarian government … both ruthless and efficient … We need another Mustafa Kemal [the Turkish officer who led a modernizing coup in 1921, and assumed the title Atatürk, the father of the Turks], to secularize and Westernize his country … Even though Egyptians are not Turks, and men like...

Still relevant "The uses of Al-Qaeda"

The neo-Nazi murder trial revealing Germany's darkest secret