Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Atif, 14 years old. Stonemasonry worker in Shaq Al-Thüban area south of Cairo, he takes a salary that varies between 10 to 15 EGP per day.  Atif is cutting stones since he was almost 8, he was seriously injured more than once like hundreds of other children who are doing this dangerous job. Source: Everyday Egypt on Facebook

I wrote this article on 11 September 2006 9/11 saw thousands of innocent people killed in cold blood by an act of terrorism. Yet the impulse to retaliate has already shown us why a ‘war on terror' cannot be won. "Why would other people," asks David Kean, "not feel similar emotions and impulses when  they  are attacked, when  their  innocent people are bombed or shot in the name of somebody else's ‘justice'?" In the words of Shylock, in Shakespeare's  The Merchant of Venice , "He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses ... scorned my nation, and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" ( The Merchant of Venice , Act 3, Scene 1) The article in full 

The Iraq Legacies and the Roots of the 'Islamic State'

"Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. The police officer in charge was Maurice Papon, who worked for Petain’s collaborationist Vichy police in the Second World War, deporting more than a thousand Jews to their deaths."  Robert Fisk, the Independent , 17 November 2015 Related Are We ISIS? Flag Down

France Returns to the State of Exception Gilbert Achcar Human rights? "...  What you call the ‘predominance of human rights’ is an ideological phenomenon that certainly is of symptomatic value, but is not enough to change social structures. There are even ways of using it that hide the varieties of racism that are now developing, paradoxically by way of a ‘humanitarian’ or ‘philanthropic’ discourse that serves to keep populations or categories of individuals in the condition of recipients of help rather than as bearers of equal rights. Differences or incapacities are presented as essential properties, though they are in fact the result of historical conditions and of relations of domination." Étienne Babilbar

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound. Deny the British Empire Crimes?  No, We Ignore Them.

" I'm so sick of seeing the endless debate about "if you care about Paris you don't care about Beirut/Metrojet/now Nigeria" et cetera. The reality is this: Paris, like any American city, is in the first-world protected zone.  Ever since WWII the overall consensus strategy on the part of everyone in the ruling elite of the global North, from the most far-right capitalist to the most left-wing Politb uro member, has been to export conflict from the North into all kinds of global peripheries. We EXPECT to see violence in Beirut because we put it there. Our security states protect us from the blowback of whatever neocolonialist policies we might care to pursue on those peripheries. So what if we fail at nation-building? We'll never have to "fight them over here," not really. ( The attached map , although badly out of date, expresses some of this concept.) So of course when there's a terrorist attack in a core northern city like Paris or New York ...

Beware the Extremists

"Aren't Arabs terrified? Aren't Iraqis terrified? Don't Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die?  "What fools we are to live in a generation for which war is a computer game for our children and just an interesting little Channel 4 news item." Tony Benn, 1998

By Imad Abu Shtayya

Are We ISIS? France Escalates Its Already Aggressive Foreign Policy Terreur partout, humanité nulle part La « guerre mondiale contre le terrorisme » a tué au moins 1,3 million de civils

Joseph Needham:  Extrapolation, not Acceleration

In War For OpenDemocracy,  Étienne Balibar  writes in response to the Paris attacks about how populations on 'both shores' of the Mediterranean are taken hostage—and Europe has a nearly irreplaceable function. "Yes, we are at war. Or rather, henceforth, we are all  in  war. We deal blows, and we take blows in turn. We are in mourning, suffering the consequences of these terrible events, in the sad knowledge that others will occur. Each person killed is irreplaceable. But  which war  are we talking about? It is not an easy war to define because it is formed of various types which have been pushed together over time and which today appear inextricable. Wars between states (even a pseudo state like 'ISIS'). National and international civil wars. Wars of 'civilisation' (or something that sees itself as such). Wars of interest and of imperialist patronage. Wars of religions and sects (or justified as such). This is the great  sta...

Youssef here is really expressing my  plight in Britain. I have been openly told not to express what I think in class. In society in general I have learnt not to offend people by refraining from saying what I think.  My Censorship, Your Bigotry

" When Arabs or Muslims die in the hands of the selfsame criminal Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) gangs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon, they are reduced to their lowest common denominator and presumed sectarian denominations, overcoming and camouflaging our humanity. But when French or British or US citizens are murdered, they are raised to their highest common abstractions and become the universal icons of humanity at large. Why? Are we Muslims not human? Does the murder of one of us not constitute harm to the entire body of humanity?" Hamid Dabashi

Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters ISIS: The Inside Story حكاية الدولة الإسلامية من الداخل Are We ISIS? Madeleine  Albright  ... I think this is a very hard choice, but the price —  we think the price is worth it . Stated on CBS's  60 Minutes  (May 12, 1996) in reply to Lesley Stahl's question "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" Albright was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time. Hundreds of Civilians Killed in US-Led Strikes on ISIS " I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because citizens have been sent to war and not come back, which is rather the case with the victims of the attack on  Charlie Hebdo . The attack is part of a war declared on France, but can also be seen in the light of the wars France has got itself involved in: conflic...

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“We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.”  ― Bertolt Brecht How to Politicize a Tragedy

"Only when we recognize the war criminals in our midst, will the blood begin to dry." John Pilger "ISIS in Paris" by Tariq Ali

On barbarism "Under these circumstances of social and political disintegration, we should expect a decline in civility in any case, and a growth in barbarism. And yet what has made things worse, what will undoubtedly make them worse in future, is that steady dismantling of the defences which the civilization of the Enlightenment had erected against barbarism... For the worst of it is that we have got used to the inhuman. We have learned to tolerate the intolerable. "Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money. "Barbarity is a by-product of life in a particular social and historical context." Eric Hobsbawm, On History, 2013 .