Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It is a sin to link to the Daily Mail, but it is good to know one more example of how a criminal regime apologises for its crimes by putting the blame on three or four individuals .

Why Israel is picking up a fight with Iran The writer forgot to mention that Israel is backed by the strongest military power on earth.

Those who would doubt Marx's commitment to a truly democratic society should study his eloquent (second in literary brilliance only to his  The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ) description of the 1871 Paris Commune. The Commune abolished rents and debts, equalized wages, hailed culture and education, made leaders subject to immediate recall by the people, destroyed the guillotine. Women played a crucial role in all of its activities (see Gay Gullickson,  The Unruly Women of Paris ). It was, Marx said, “the most glorious achievement of our time. Howard Zinn on how Karl Marx predicted our world of today

US teachers strike New polls  show that 78 percent of Americans think teacher pay is too low, while more than half are supportive of the strikes. A Field Guide to the New Red-Baiting

Spain's feminist strike

"Reasons include the United States' interest in maintaining lucrative arms deals with the Gulf states – primarily Saudi Arabia – and the fact that many U.S. politicians support bombing Iran (as demanded by the  right-wing Israeli leadership)." Middle East nightmare – made in Washington

Exploitation and robbery "London was the least affordable region in England and Wales, with city-dwellers spending 41.1% of their annual salaries on rent in 2017."

"In reality, there was never any golden age of liberalization under Erdoğan. The praise he attracted from Western elites as a ‘moderate’ and a ‘reformer’ was motivated above all by the  AKP ’s staunchly pro-American foreign policy and readiness to maintain good relations with Israel (the same criteria that earn the Saudi regime its ludicrous plaudits as a moderating force in the region). It also helped that  NATO ’s favourite Islamists had taken up the neoliberal agenda with gusto, privatizing state assets into the hands of  AKP  cronies—including Erdoğan’s close relatives." Erdogan's cesspit

Here is what John Bolton wrote in May 2015 " The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran." "To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran"

Which country works the longest hours ?

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'. — Talal Asad, Conscripts of Western Civilization , 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2

Calculus of Power

K for Karl — Exploitation (episode 4)

Marx and Keynes in Berlin

Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production . The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. No democracy has ever been destabilised by terrorism Marx and 'capitalism' by John Lanchester

After Obregón founded the modern Mexican state, back in 1920, his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, established the ruling elite’s political party, which eventually became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. For decades the PRI won all the elections for every office, from president to mayor of the smallest town. This was done through fear and favors, clientelism and patronage, fraud and, when necessary, murder. Will the Mexican elite and its foreigner allies tolerate a social democrat, a "populist"? Last time they used fraud. Even if Obrador wins, cooptation and betrayal might do the work. The recent examples in Latin America, Venezuela being the most obvious case, has showed that if the economic power of the elite is not attacked, local and international capital would not let a social democratic movement succeed in instilling small changes. The plot against López Obrador

"I want to argue, however, that we cannot understand science or speak of its limits or boundlessness in the abstract. To speak of “science for science’s sake” — as if, to paraphrase Samuel Butler on art, science had a “sake,” is to mystify what science is and what scientists do. This mystification, still often on the lips of the ideologues of science, serves to justify specific interests and privileges. Instead, we have to consider this science in this society. I shall argue that it is indeed limited, and that its limits are provided by a combination of two major factors. The first is material, the second ideological. I will consider each in turn." Limits to Science

Happy birthday, Karl Marx In Opinion section on the New York Times By a professor at a South Korean university

"But this week was also the week that Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of China’s Alibaba and a high-tech icon on par with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, visited Israel. On Friday, the first leg of the Giro d’Italia bicycle race begins in Jerusalem (carefully skirting east Jerusalem). There were at least three major cross-border mergers and acquisition deals this week involving Israeli companies totaling a billion-plus dollars." On the recently-discovered Israel's "bad behaviour", "Western human rights", "Western democracies", business interests and other beautiful things

Ghani's statistics on armed groups show that most of them also involve cases of violence against women – and the Syrian government heads that list. Women are deliberately targeted, he says, because they always played an important role in the opposition against Assad. The regime sees torture and sexual abuse of women as a war strategy, Ghani argues. "Break the women and you break the family – and with it opposition in society. That's the goal." Syrian women in Assad's prisons