Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A mild, defensive article by Stop the War Coalition

On Naguib Mahfouz "No corner of Egyptian life was foreign to him: his characters are pharaohs and whores, shopkeepers and bureaucrats, peasants and presidents. Part of Mahfouz’s achievement is its sheer extent, its superabundant precision, a kind of indigenous update of the Encyclopedists’  Description de l’Egypt . It is the size of his ambitions that make it so natural to compare him with the giants of the nineteenth century—Balzac, Dickens and Zola..."

Occupation with a Human Face

Israel's barbarism

رسائل ماركس وأنجلز حول الديانة الإسلامية

"David Halberstam wrote  The Best and the Brightest  out of genuine puzzlement at how highly educated academics, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and businessmen fell victim in Vietnam to their own myths of moral supremacy and military firepower. In our own time, the power of the technocratic elite has multiplied, helped by lavish funding from insecure politicians and self-seeking businessmen, the delegitimation of dissent in the mainstream media and universities, and broad-spectrum depoliticization." Read the article in full

Jacques Rancière: The Front National’s useful idiots "Les idéaux républicains sont devenus des armes de discrimination et de mépris"

I Saw a Man Beheaded "I want to share this account* as a small intervention to re-frame ideas and experiences of violence and terror. I was an ambulance volunteer during Israel's Operation Cast Lead. It was a 22 day war on the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 that killed 1409 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. It was the heaviest Israeli attack on Palestinian territory since 1967. The 2014 Gaza War has since eclipsed this in terms of deaths, injury and destruction in Gaza. On the afternoon of Friday the 16 th  of January we picked up the body of a man who had just been decapitated by an Israeli air strike. Dominant cultural narratives on violence in the global north now only see beheading as a terrorist act by ISIS or Al Qaeda or similar groups. The perpetrator is a Muslim. The colonial fantasy of the savage is coming back in to focus.   The role of the state, armed with heavy aerial power – drones, F16s, Apache Helicopters, MIG jets – is not part of the story of beheading. I th...

Niall Ferguson, a reactionary historian Watch this man He was already arguing in  The Cash Nexus , published a few months before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, that ‘the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy’ – if necessary by military force. ‘Let me come clean,’ he wrote in the  New York Times Magazine  in April 2003, a few weeks after the shock-and-awe campaign began in Iraq, ‘I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang.’

In an interview in 1986 Maxime Rodinson said: " Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty years — I don’t know how long. Where fundamentalism isn’t in power it will continue to be an ideal, as long as the basic frustration and discontent persist that lead people to take extreme positions. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe! Islamic fundamentalists will continue to dominate the period for a long time to come."

How the National Front Changed France Read also France and Its War on Terror and Intellectuals From Left Bank to Left Behind: Where Have the Great Frenceh Thinkers Gone?

Mercenaries in Yemen: the US Connection

The Forgotten Alliance

Pakistan’s Contrary Years (1971-1977): A Cultural History of the Bhutto Era

"We" are still striving to cvilize those " recalcitrant Arabs " and Muslims. Today we do it in a better way. Not only do we use better weapons, NGOs, monarchies as allies, etc, but "we" do it "democratically": we debate it, we vote for it and the public knows about it. Shock and Awe

Via Stathis Kouvelakis  After Tsipras's "historic" visit to Israël and his previous one to Egypt, now it's the turn for Egypt's dictator El Sissi to visit Athens. Tsipras has totally aligned himself with most reactionary forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. “Your visit inaugurates a new period of close cooperation between the two countries,” Tsipras told the Egyptian leader. “You have sincerely conveyed Egypt’s voice to our European friends,” said El-Sissi."

Syria and the Left

Militarized Neoliberalism: Jeff Halper's War Against the People Also, My interview with Jeff Halper (London, June 2008)

The generalised picture of the Arab World portrayed by Albert Hourani looks gloomy but accurate. “The link between the regime and the dominant social groups,” writes Hourani, “might also turn out to be fragile. What could be observed was a recurrent pattern in Middle Eastern history. The classes which dominated the structure of wealth and social power in the cities wanted peace, order and freedom of economic activity, and would support a regime as long as it seemed to be giving them what they wanted; but they would not lift a finger to save it, and would accept its successor if it seemed likely to follow a similar policy."  Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples , Faber and Faber Ltd, United Kingdom, 1991, p 454

The Myth of Leftist Academia The ideological control of the university is intimately related to the economics of “higher education” in the neoliberal era.  Professors who profess too much in ways that might offend concentrated power are easily dispensed with when they are hired only by the course, semester, or academic year.  Department chairs and deans can avoid headaches merely by not renewing the troublemakers’ contracts. Adjuncts and temporary instructors (glorified “Assistant Professors” at many universities) who wish to keep a foothold in academia are well advised not to rock doctrinal boats. As the AAUP notes, “The insecure relationship between contingent faculty members and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom…Contingent faculty may be less likely to take risks in the classroom or in scholarly and service work….The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances.” This content was orig...