Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

by Khaled El-Rouayheb, University of Chicago Press 2005 Excerpts "My central contention is that Arab-Islamic culture on the eve of modernity lacked the concept of 'homosexuality,' and that writings from the period [1500-1800] do not evince the same attitude toward all aspects of what we might be inclined to call homosexuality today. The Arab literature of the early Ottoman period (1516-1798) is replete with casual and sometimes sympathetic references to homosexual love." p. 1 "Homosexuality is condemned and forbidden by the holy law of Islam, but there are times and places in Islamic history when the ban on homosexual love seems no stronger than the ban on adultery in, say, Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. Some [classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish] poems are openly homosexual; some poets, in their collected poems, even have separate sections for love poems addressed to males and females." — Bernard Lewis, Music from a Distant Drum,

Spanish "democracy" The challenge for Sanchez

Reading about the horrors of the British rule/Raj in India, in Inglorious Empire , one cannot help but relate to such a conclusion made by "the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Raj:  'The British are not a spiritual people. They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.' The British tended to base their refusal to intervene in famines with adequate government measures on a combination of three sets of considerations: free trade principles (do not interfere with market forces), Malthusian doctrine (growth in population beyond the ability of the land to sustain it would inevitably lead to deaths) and financial prudence (don't spend money we haven't budgeted for). On these grounds, Britain had not intervened to save lives in Ire

The best political magazines, according to socialists

Capitalist criminality and imperialist philanthropy: the two sides of the same coin Like USAID, Gates Foundation, and others, the aim is to portray the capitalist system as having a "human face, "defender of human rights, propagator of "liberal values," and like NATO, IMF and the World Bank, they are tools of Western imperialist domination through debt, exploitation, plunder and military power. Anyone who opposes this global mission, is labelled "nationalist" and "infected by populism." George Soros

Here is an antidote to those missionaries like Soros, Jolie and Gates  "If anticapitalist revolution is where identity politics began, it has since become something quite different, and is now invoked by certain liberals and leftists to serve distinctly non-revolutionary ends, Haider argues. It involves members of marginalised groups demanding inclusion, recognition, or restitution from above – a seat at the table. These demands are made in response to very real injuries endured by those groups. But their method, he says, ends up strengthening the structures that produced those injuries in the first place." Asad Haider And in the comments on the review I like this one by Nada89:  " ID [identity politics] helped people turn a blind eye to the fact Clinton is a corrupt political figure. Same with Obama - people cut him slack for being 'the first black American president' yet he was complicit with the usual pattern of international crimes inherent in US f

Lithuania and Romania complict in CIA toture? So what? Haven't they helping the West protect its way of life from "Islam and its war on us?" Haven't they helping us keep those barbarians away so that they don't blow us in our cities? Look how successful "the war on terror" has been. And these two states, like others, have probably got some handouts from the US.

Is capital or labor winning at your favorite company? The New York Times

"I despair at the way American and British movie-makers feel they have every right to play fast and loose with the facts, yet have the arrogance to imply that their version is as good as the truth. Continental film-makers are on the whole far more scrupulous. People are more likely to want [made to want] to see something they think is very close to the truth, so they can feel they are learning as well as being entertained. In a post-literate society, the moving image is king, and most people’s knowledge of history is regrettably based more on cinematic fiction than archival fact. The real problem is that the needs of history and the needs of the movie industry are fundamentally incompatible. Even movies ostensibly showing corruption and criminality in the heart of the CIA and the Pentagon have to end on a nationalistic note, with a tiny group of clean, upstanding American liberals saving democracy." "The greatest war movie ever, and the ones I can't bear&qu

In “Mistaken Identity,” Asad Haider argues that contemporary identity politics is a “neutralization of movements against racial oppression” rather than a progression of the grassroots struggle against racism. Haider, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, puts the work of radical black activists and scholars in conversation with his personal experiences with racism and political organizing. He charts out the process through which the revolutionary visions of the black freedom movement — which understood racism and capitalism as two sides of the same coin — have been largely replaced with a narrow and limited understanding of identity. How identity politics has divided the Left

What does Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson have in common? Very little and a lot. "Churchill had strong views on Gandhi. Commenting on the Mahatma's meeting with the viceroy of Indian, 1931, he had notoriously decalred: 'It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay in equal terms with the represnetative of the Emperor-King.' (Gandhi had nothing in common with fakirs, Muslim spiritual mendicants, but Churchill was rarely accurate about India.) 'Ghandi-ism and all what it stands for,' declared Churchill, 'will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and finally crushed.' In such matters Churchill was the most reactionary of Englishmen, with views so extreme they cannot be excused as being reflective of their time

Novecento, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic Part 1 Part 2

British capital: productivity and profitability 

Yet abortion rights in Ireland and Poland, for example, are still fewer than those in Tunisia!

A guide to the Jewish billionaires in Trump-Russia probe

What kind of political discourse, with what social and po­ litical effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States? What readings of the discourses of liberalism, colonialism, and impe­rialism circulating through Western democracies can analytical scru­ tiny of this talk provide? The following chapters aim to track the so­ cial and political work of tolerance discourse by comprehending how this discourse constructs and positions liberal and nonliberal subjects, cultures, and regimes; how it figures conflict, stratification, and dif­ ference; how it operates normatively; and how its normativity is ren­dered oblique almost to the point of invisibility. Part of the project of this book, then, is to analyze tolerance, espe­ cially in its recently resurgent form, as a strand of depoliticization in liberal democracies. Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and

England Why are so many young mums struggling with depression?

After Obama has "liberated" Malala Angelina Jolie, a woman coming from the heartland of the West and imperialism, is on a mission to "save and rescue" girls and women who are "unfit and cannot help themselves". She is also urging young people to "promote tolerance ." Tolerance ? Where was that "tolerance" when US imperilaism was invading Iraq and Afghanistan, and droning weddings, using torture and rendition, and orphaning girls and women?  Didn't she and her ilk tolerate those criminal actions?

The political economy of a long depression

Pinker is, after all, an intellectual darling of the most powerful echelons of global society. He  spoke to the world’s elite  this year at the World’s Economic Forum in Davos on the perils of what he calls “political correctness,” and has been named one of  Time  magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”  His new book is Bill Gates' favourite book of all time! Pinker claims to respect science, yet he blithely ignores fifteen thousand scientists’ desperate warning to humanity.  It should be added that Pinker is an apologist of the US imperialist violence and he is Islamophobic. The grim takeaway ... is that racist violence against African Americans has not declined at all, as Pinker suggests. Instead, it has become institutionalized into U.S. national policy in  what is known as  the school-to-prison pipeline. Pinker  unquestioningly propagates one of the great neoliberal myths of the past several decades: that “a rising tide lifts all the boats”—a phr