Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Syrian refugees in neighbouring countries: is it safe to return?

Centrists won't save Britain

I feel sad for David Beckham , that hero, icon for millions of British and non-British, a charming prince for many ladies, who missed a knighthood, for tax avoidance. What a horrific punishment!  Let's not question the income of a celebrity or a footballer. They are more important than teachers who are deserting the profession or nurses. How boring Britain would be without celebrities!

Is Iraq steering towards post-sectarianism? I think there is some intellectual laziness in describing some non-traditional/governing parties as "populist". This is the adjective that has been (mis/ab) used in Europe as well. I also think that the support of the protests by the highest Shi'a authority is indicative. It aims at absorbing the anger, but also a move that is aware of the growth of the Sadrist movement. After all, this same authority has been generally complicit for more than a decade and has not mobilised the Shi'a (the majority) for  economic and social rights.

Israeli weapons used against Rohingya Muslims

Midle East Monitor , which the bbc says it is pro-Hamas, is trying to tarnish "our British values", spreading hatred of "our democracy and freedoms"!  "UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported that British intelligence officers have been involved in human rights abuses on hundreds of occasions. According to government lawyers, there are concerns that some potential human rights abuses took place within international armed conflict and could amount to war crimes."

Then as now I align myself with Orwell's pessimism. "To the British working class, Orwell argued, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, or Madrid had seemed less worthy of their consideration than 'yesterday’s football match.' Even more disappointing to him was the total lack of solidarity that the English working class had shown for “colored” workers in the colonies." Today, despite a tremendous global flow of information of what is happening elsewhere, Orwell's pessimism has an echo when one looks at the extent of the working classes passivity in the "West" before the plunder, inequality, exploitation and ‘Islamophobia’ at home and people's struggle during the Arab uprisings or barbarism in Syrian and Myanmar. " Orwell’s late collaboration with the propaganda apparatus of Western imperialism is a sad, regrettable, and inexcusable fact." I think the following is a good assessment of Orwell. Geroge Orwell and the ...

Then as now, the question still stands: "Which side are you on?" In Dubious Battle (a movie) (close a few pop up windows and select 'openload')

The coffee shop chain Costa has been bought by Coca Cola   " I will never drink Costa coffee again! Oh boycot them, its a disgrace. I will never set foor in there again! Yes you will.  After all it will be like everything else in this country.  You know, five minutes of frothing at the mouth, righteous indignation and bluster. Then its back to our normal apathetic, lie down and be used as a doormat status quo ante. Nothing changes, sad but true." — a comment on the bbc article The previous owner of Costa,  Whitbread, reported the bbc in 2015 ,  "no longer recognises trade unions. Whitbread has always paid above the national minimum wage, but otherwise pay in the company is set by supply and demand ." Why do you need trade unions in the land of milk and honey and where workers rights are guranteed by the free market? Over to you, Coca Cola! Google "Coca Cola human rights" and you'll get an idea. 

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri...

Very good! The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza/Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that exploits them, appropriating their productive powers while granting them less and less control. On labour and human bo...

Business first Billions of pounds and jobs "The British government has no British values" You British women who want to liberate backward Muslim women from oppression, what are you up to these days?

The disappeared and the dead at the hands of the Syrian regime

From the history of 'liberalism' or things my American professors at university never told me The famous French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) who is known for his major work Democracy in America. "In May 1847, noting that the 'Bey of Tunisia' had already abolished the 'odious institution' [of slavery]—which in Muslim countries, by the French liberal's admission, took a 'milder' form—de Tocqueville expressed the opinion that 'we should doubtless only proceed to the abolition of slavery with care and moderation'. De Tocqueville seemed to be ready to accept a compromise even more favourable to the slaveholding South [of the U.S.]. 'As for the policy permitting slavery to develop in a whole portion of the territory where it was hitherto unknown, I will concede ... that one can do nothing but tolerate this existence in the special, current interests of the Union.' [A letter of 13 April 1857]...

Whenever you do something stupid, just remember that Roman emperor Caligula waged a war on Poseidon [the Greek god of the seas and other waters]. He had his army march to the beach and told them to start stabbing the water.

The Islamophobe Dutch politician Geert Wilders is organising a cartoon competition to depict the prophet Mohammed. Here is what Alain Badiou wrote in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo : "Here and there, people say that  Charlie Hebdo ’s cartoons aren’t attacking Muslims as such, but rather the fundamentalists’ terrorist activity. That is objectively false. Let’s take a typical example of their cartoons: we see two naked buttocks and the caption ‘Et le cul de Mahomet, on a le droit?’ (‘And what about Mohammed’s arse – can we use that?’). So is the Muslim faithful’s Prophet, a constant target for such stupidity, a contemporary terrorist? No, that’s not any kind of politics. It’s got nothing to do with the solemn defence of ‘freedom of expression’. It is a ridiculous, provocative obscenity targeting Islam itself – and that’s all. And it’s nothing more than third-rate cultural racism, a ‘joke’ to amuse the local pissed-up Front National supporter.  It may be amusi...

The tip of an iceberg - Honour bound .. - To defend freedom. Those two of my favourite lines in this film Camp X Ray (a movie) (close the three or four pop-up windows)

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

Iraq Protests and anger of Shia men diretced at Shia politicians? I tought it was fundamentally, inherently and eternally a Sunni-Shia war! "Sunni and Shia politicians sat in the parliament and built fortunes with the blood of the people who massacred each other in the street." Oil flows freely, but corruption fuels growing anger You see, there is no hope in these people. We "liberated them", we "helped them having democracy" after 2003, but it seems they are not fit to catch up with "the civilised world".

The burka and handshaking, and other personal freedoms "Everyone should be able to attend their religious as well as their bodily needs without the police sticking its nose in". — K. M.  But today is not only the state or a company that might repress your freedoms, but also people who disagree with you; they avoid you, marginalise you, or even side with the state in repressing you in the name of "integration" and "our values". You are the Other, the threat, the radical, the non-conformist, etc.