Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A realistic stance ‘An effective way to protect prosperity’  where the birthrate is among the lowest in Europe.

The dish “is in the crosshairs of certain city dwellers who look upon shawarma vendors with a jaundiced eye, as forerunners of a foreign invasion. Their reactions speak volumes about the crises in the Middle East and their repercussions in Cairo, but also about regional geopolitics, migratory streams, the refugee problem, the economic crisis plaguing the country and the fervent nationalism which is surfacing again as a result. Shawarma “has become a symbol of xenophobia and rampant nationalism. ”

 “ These are not the refugees we are used to…These people are Europeans…These people are intelligent, they are educated people…This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists." The limitations of humanity

The Apocalypse and the End of History and An interview with the author

More than 1,000 UK doctors want to quit NHS

By someone with a career in the IMF Ten reasons why a 'Greater Depression' for the 2020s is inevitable

Blaming China

What whould have happened if it was some Muslims/Muslim refugees who smuggled the coronavirus into Europe? List of incidents related to coronavirus

Without a global orientation, we risk reinforcing the ways that the virus has seamlessly fed into the discursive  political rhetoric  of nativist and xenophobic movements – a politics deeply seeped in authoritarianism, an obsession with border controls, and a ‘my-country first’ national patriotism. This a global pandemic—let's treat it as such

A Part of Denmark

Britain "Nine months after Blair was elected, indie band Cornershop were No 1 in the singles charts with “Brimful of Asha”, a song about a female Bollywood singer. The old certainties seemed to be giving way to exciting new possibilities. By the time  Greetings from Bury Park  was published, I was convinced that the arc of British history was bending towards tolerance... I was wrong"

"And as polling shows, public attitudes on migration are softening markedly." Are they? Labour must make a principled case for free movement

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul " As anti-foreigner sentiment, particularly during the migrant crisis, continues to plague Germany and the rest of Europe, Fear Eats the Soul has never seemed more relevant. Made around the midpoint of his career, Fear Eats the Soul is a powerful and accessible introduction to Fassbinder’s work. It’s one of his very best films. It stars  Brigitte Mira  as Emmi, an elderly cleaner who falls in love with Ali ( El Hedi ben Salem , Fassbinder’s lover), a much younger Moroccan immigrant. The couple face prejudice from their neighbours, and the strain threatens their relationship. Racism and xenophobia were fiercely damned by Fassbinder previously in  Katzelmacher  (1969) and  Whity  (1971), but the use of melodrama to tell this very moving love story adds a painfully human dimension to the tale." — BFI

What, then, explains Brexit? Mass immigration is another fear across the EU, and it was whipped up in the UK by the Leave campaign, in which Nigel Farage was a conspicuous speaker and organiser, alongside prominent Conservatives. But xenophobia on its own is by no means enough to outweigh fear of economic meltdown. In England, as elsewhere, it has been growing as one government after another has lied about the scale of immigration. But if the referendum on the EU had just been a contest between these fears, as the political establishment sought to make it, Remain would have no doubt won by a handsome margin, as it did in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. There were further factors. After Maastricht, the British political class declined the straitjacket of the euro, only to pursue a native neoliberalism more drastic than any on the continent: first, the financialised hubris of New Labour, plunging Britain into a banking crisis before any other European country, then a Con...

"... the strongest evidence that Trump’s electoral victory was not an uprising of the forgotten working class against economic distress brought about by neoliberalism and globalization is the evidence that  Trumpism is a pre-existing condition.  It has unfortunately been with us all along, as the resurgence of atavistic  revanchist white supremacism helps to make clear." Well, this piece has made me question a few things. Trumpism: A Pre-Existing Condition, Not a Response to Neoliberalism and Globalisation

" Since today the workers’ movement is very much weakened and the revolutionary threat non-existent, big capital has no interest in supporting far-right movements and thus the risk of a brown offensive is non-existent. This is, once again, an economistic reading that does not take account of the autonomy of any political phenomenon – electors can, indeed, choose a party that does not have the big bourgeoisie’s backing – and one that seems to ignore the fact that big capital can accommodate to all sorts of political regimes without too much soul-searching. " Ten theses on the far-right in Europe

Why the Western philosophical canon is xenophobic and racist

Germany "Perhaps due to the academic, middle-class milieu from which many Die Linke radicals emerge, its younger activists in particular tend to accept a false dichotomy of either ignoring people’s concerns or engaging with them at the price of adopting a “right-wing” language and accept an inherently racist framework. That they are immediately repulsed by the slightest sentiments perceived as racist reflects their commitment to a better world, of course. But that commitment has no practical value if it means shutting themselves off from those who do not distinguish antiracism from “political correctness,” or internationalist solidarity from the undemocratic regime of an increasingly cohesive global ruling class." The Wagenknecht Question

" Trump and Berlusconi are both men who came to power from business rather than politics, and both have presented their inexperience with the political establishment as a mark of purity. They have both insisted on their entrepreneurial success as the most evident proof of their qualification to rule the country. Like Plato’s tyrant, they both exhibit an ethos based on a dream of continuous and unlimited jouissance and an aggressive and hubristic eros (though Berlusconi prefers to think of himself as an irresistible seducer rather than a rapist). They both indulge in gross misogynistic and racist jokes and have reshaped public language by legitimizing insult and political incorrectness as acceptable forms of political communication and by embodying an exhilarating return of the repressed. They both revel in kitschy aesthetics and don the orange hue of artificial tanning. And they both allied with the far right in order to advance a political project of authoritarian neolib...

Shlomo Sand: ‘There’s no more great thinkers in France’