Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Headline on foreinpolicy.com, 19 August 2016 " The most disturbing thing about notorious British hate preacher Anjem Choudary is that his terrorism conviction is for something he said, not something he did." How can I be safe from persecution from what I say on this blog? After all, I have been blocked by the Economist comments admin and seen my comments removed by the liberal Guardian! Beware the Extremists

To understand where the so-called liberal democracy stands since ots inception and why the BB has just called one Islamist preacher "one of the most dangerous men in Britain", one should read a historical account. "From the 1970s, however, liberal revolution revived on an unprecedented scale. With the collapse of communism, bourgeois liberty once again became a crusading, force, but now on a global scale. In the twenty-first century, the armed forces of the United States, Britain, and NATO became instruments of 'regime change', seeking to destroy dictatorship and build free-market democracies. President George W. Bush called the invasion of Iraq in 2003 a 'watershed event in the global democratic revolution'. This was an extraordinary turn-around, with the middle classes now hailed as the truly universal class which, in emancipating itself, emancipates all society. The debacle in Iraq, and the Great Recession from 2008, revealed all too clearly that hu...

"The Worst Place on Earth": Inside Assad's Saydnaya Prison The liberals have again 'discovered' a new torture compound. They want to raise awareness. Where were they when people like me, and thousands of others were tortured, deprived of their rights, and even killed in the jails of their allies? Is it only when an ally is no longer an ally that we 'discover' their brutality? “For years Russia has used its UN security council veto to shield its ally, the Syrian government,” says Amnesty’s Philip Luther..." Yes, like what the US, Britain, France, etc have done in Tunisia, Egypt, Latin America, Indonesia, Greece, Uzbekistan, etc. They shielded, and still do, their allies. And like how the US using the UN security council veto to shield the Israeli state barbaric actions. Amnesty, according to Aljazeera Arabic website, is an independent organisation and away from any idelology! What about the Amnesty's support of one of the biggest criminal or...

Between 'Sultanism' and Liberal Democracy: The Peculiarities of a Failed Coup in Turkey

It is not the first time, but it always makes me laugh "The evidence now shows that Anjem Choudary is one of the most dangerous men in Britain." When we do it it is fighting for "freedom and democracy", when they do it is radicalism and terrorism. We advocate and impose economic and political policies on backward people, in an alliance with the Saddams, Assads and Ben Alis, championing it as "freedom, democracy, way of life, etc" in order to maintain stability so that capital thrives and our geopolitical interests and preserved.  We organise wars and mobilize Muslim and non-Muslim leaders who we define as moderates because they work for our interests and the interests of their respective classes at home an globally, we mobolize our resources and troops to spread our way of life by dismantling the social fabric of fragile societies, causing the deaths and dislocation of millions,  and when those very same economic policies, social relations of powe...

China through Abassid eyes

Poppies, patriots and pro-Brexit propaganda: Revisiting the myths of Britain's past

Since the beginning of the Arab uprising the defenders of the status quo helped co-opt and domesticate the uprisings. Here they have twisted marxist and socialist ideas/ideals to try to absolve themselves and the criminal role they have played in aborting a meaningful change in the region.  In the case of Egypt we have seen how the US, a fact this article unsurprisingly ignores, supported a power-sharing between Mubarak's regime without Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood and how later, when the latters were ousted, the US regime continued its financial and military support of the Egyptian army and the Egyptian regime.  We also saw how the leadership of the MB, like its sister Al-Nahdha in Tunisia, hurried to Washington to kiss the hands of US imperialism and show that they could be reliant upon in maintaining the status quo: new faces, the army in the background, elections, but no changes in the fundamentals, i.e. the socio-economic structure that determines the daily bre...

I have read the Preface of this long piece and I have found it revolting, disgusting and sickening to say the least.

Furore over Black Lives' support of Palestine reveals movement's true allies

Indonesia Gotta Catch all the Communists "A red scare is sweeping Indonesia, digging up the ghosts of the 1965-1966 mass killings, and threatening a fragile democracy." Looks interesting, but access requires subscription

Labour's Red Scare

The War on Syria's Doctors

Britain: A report Evidence suggested the biggest cause of the "acute" disadvantage felt by Muslim women is their religion, it said.  "The impact of Islamophobia on Muslim women should not be underestimated," it went on.  "They are 71% more likely than white Christian women to be unemployed, even when they have the same educational level and language skills."  They face particular issues of discrimination when applying for jobs because of the clothes some of them they wear because of their religion or culture, the MPs suggest. Married women in Muslim communities are often expected to be home-makers while their husbands are the breadwinners, the committee heard from expert witnesses.  "The impact of the very real inequality, discrimination and Islamophobia that Muslim women experience is exacerbated by the pressures that some women feel from parts of their communities to fulfil a more traditional role," the committee said. ( source: t...

" Infiltrating the Labour Party" Everyone wondering what Trotskyists do all day Victory in Defeat

Will it really hurt? Stephen Hawking's boycott hits Israel where it hurts: science

" A careful assessment of the  Bolivarian Revolution  reveals that Chávez’s socialism only ever manifested itself rhetorically: real gains like income redistribution proved compatible with the global capitalist order." Why Twenty-First Century Socialism Failed

"But for every Syria or Iraq there is a Singapore, Malaysia or Tanzania, getting along okay despite having several “national” groups. Immigrant states in Australia and the Americas, meanwhile, forged single nations out of massive initial diversity. What makes the difference? It turns out that while ethnicity and language are important, what really matters is bureaucracy. This is clear in the varying fates of the independent states that emerged as Europe’s overseas empires fell apart after the second world war. According to the mythology of nationalism, all they needed was a territory, a flag, a national government and UN recognition. In fact what they really needed was complex bureaucracy." Is there an alternative to countries?

Arabic literature I haven't read Zaat , but it souns a good novel.  " Zaat  by Sonallah Ibrahim Sonallah was born in Cairo, became a Marxist in his youth, and spent several years in prison during the 1960s for his views. His novel  Zaat  tells the tale of modern Egypt though the eyes of its heroine, Zaat, during the periods of the three presidents Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. It goes from the optimism of the early years following the revolution to the full-blown capitalisation and corruption of Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s of the last century. Expertly crafted, each of the chapters narrating Zaat’s life, marriage, work and social life is interspersed with a series of newspaper clippings and photograph captions detailing the political and economic events of the day – corruption cases, financial scandals, torture, foreign debt – that graphically lay open the banal thuggery of the rulers and the greed and stupidity of the nouveau-riche. Poignant, yet...

The Top 10 Philosophers's Fictions