Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those...

Islam and Modernity: Can We be Muslims in the West? Islam et modernitë: peut-on être Musulmans en Occident? See also Feminists are failing Muslim women by supporting racist French laws

The Scientific Assassination of a Sexual Revolutionary: How America Interrupted Wilhelm Reich's Orgasmic Utopia

A Brief History of Scientology

"When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem." — Arundhati Roy ( see extract from her book here )

Racism, Pure and Simple

Capitalism On productivity, growth, investment and profit

Egypt This is how a Chatham House fellow reminds us of Rabaa's massacre. No mention of the military and financial support of the Egyptian regime. No mention of the Muslim Brotherhood role in working with the regime and especially with the US and the SCAF from days one so that Mubarak goes, but the regime stays. And calling those criminals in the imperialist camp as "a democratic club" that Egypt is far from is just adding insult to injury.

This is generally a good summary, but I think the author is wrong on the class nature of Trump's supporters. The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics

Economic performance in two dimensions: How Europe beats the US

Domenico Losurdo: Ernst Nolte and the Development of Revisionism

Sometimes you find surprises in the gutter press " But not every part of the resistance was grateful. De Gaulle’s supporters in Paris  feared either a communist seizure of power or a mirror of the bloodbath that was befalling the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Through the Swedish consul they negotiated a truce with the German military governor on 20 August, but this was not observed by the insurgents who threw up barricades in a revolutionary reflex and continued guerrilla warfare, seizing weapons from the panicking Germans." The forgotten heroes of Paris, 1945

You see, it's not about whether you are a Muslim or a Roman Catholic or nomally Socialist, but what class interests you represent/defend in maintaining the status quo. "Sadiq Khan urges Labour to ditch Corbyn"

That media of "our liberal democratic society" Sounds of Blairite Silence

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