Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

UK Economists are warning that this decade is set to be the worst in more than 200 years for British pay packets . (FT)

"Revival of Iraqi communism among youth alarms Shiite militias"

The American way of war is a budget-breaker

" Ferocious oppression by the Egyptian and Israeli authorities has produced a new generation of fighters, motivated more by a thirst for revenge than by ideology." Egypt: Sinai's undeclared war

"We are not the dirt we clean"

Mahmoud Darwish: Mural

"For forty years the Israelites wandered in the Sinai wilderness before reaching the Canaanite border, where Moses died, but his lieutenant, Joshua, led the Israelites to victory in the Promised Land, destroying all the Canaanite cities and killing their inhabitants.
  The archaeological record, however, does not confirm this story. There is no evidence of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a powerful foreign invasion. But this  narrative was not written to satisfy a modern historian; it is a national epic that helped Israel create a cultural identity distinct from her neighbors."  — Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood - Religion and the History of Violence , 2014, pp. 104-5 The role of "myth" in nation creation?

A review of Ilan Pappe's new book and from the archive my interview with Ilan Pappe about his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (audio format) Part 1 , Part 2

Les origines patronales du fascisme italien

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

"To call for "peace" with Assad is itself an indication of  failure  – not the military or moral failure of embattled rebels who are mostly made up of civilian volunteers, but the collective failure of the world, particularly those with the means to have acted, to stop Assad from carrying out genocide." The pisonous 'peace process' is an insult to Syrians

A murderous history of Korea

Guido Mazzoni on late capitalism and the theory of the novel

الرأسمالية ونظرية الرواية

The National Front isn't dead

Behind China's $1tr plan to shake up the economic order

The Gulf's 'Little Sparta'

The primary priority of the Egyptian military and general Sisi is not to fight terrorism or improve governance,” Tom Malinowski, assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour from 2014 to 2017 said at the Senate hearing on 25 April. “It has been to make sure that what happened in 2011 in the Tahrir square uprising can never ever, ever, ever happen again.” US aid to Egypt

Tunisie: la résistance du sud se radicalise malgre l'intimidation

I read some Marx (and I liked it) By Richard Seymour On The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, the host asked Shadow chancellor John McDonnell if he is a Marxist. Obligingly, he said “no”—but admitted that he  had read Marx and learned from him alongside traditional Labour economists like R H Tawney and G D H Cole. Jeremy Corbyn has since leapt to his colleague’s aid, describing Marx as a “great economist.” In philistine, managerial British politics, McDonnell’s comments felt like a blushing confession: “ I read some Marx and I liked it .” Predictably, senior Tories have in response warned darkly of an “ Islington cabal ” of revolutionaries. But what exactly in McDonnell’s agenda is Marxist? A tax freeze for the 95 per cent doesn’t need the labour theory of value to stand it up. Borrowing only to invest doesn’t depend on Marx’s theory of the commodity form. Renationalising the railway is as close to common sense as it gets in politics. If McDonnell is a Marxist, so is...