Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It was good to see the man who had no qualms about dropping "the mother of all bombs" (MOAB) on  Afghanistan  or arming Saudi Arabia to the teeth to slaughter Yemenis had suddenly developed a gentle soul and felt he could not handle hearing the suffering of  a single person being strangled . How do Arabs scream in Arabic ?

Budapest: Anti-Orbán protests

Iran "A wave of killings that shook a nation"

"Pretending that Trump is some grand aberration, some radical departure from U.S. history and values, is simply a deceitful way of whitewashing what we have collectively endorsed and allowed." —Glenn Greenwald, January 2018 So is the rise of the far-right in Europe. So is the huge and obscene global inequality (p. 9). So is the gender pay gap. So is the uprising in France. So is austerity. So is the wars, Islamophibia, racism, proxy-war and migration. So is climate change. So is corruption. So is sexualisation and commodification of women (and men).  They are not aberrations; they are part and parcel of the very same system that builds rockets and high speeds trains and creates I.A. and invents new cures. A certain propagtion of an "economic fact" help perpetuate acceptance. " The number of millionaires in a country and its trend over time is often seen as a sign of a country’s economic health and its ability to generate opportunities for wealth creation....

Revolution and Arab Existentialism in the Era of Decolonization

Books as Revolutionary Objects in Iran

"Ms. Merkel, for all her power and influence, is just one politician. Germany’s new political crisis runs much deeper. It stems from an economic system that has resulted in stagnant wages and insecure jobs. The erosion of Germany’s postwar settlement — a strong welfare state, full-time employment, the opportunity to move up in the world — has created a populace open to messages and movements previously banished to the fringes." It doesn't matter who replaces Merkel. Germany is broken. A background analysis German capitalism

How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain Koch Foundation and Spiked magazine

Ibrahim Nasrallah on life and literature

Good! Unsurprisingly, one of the most significant impacts of the  Guardian ’ s series is to reaffirm the laziest tenet in the liberal worldview: horseshoe theory. Its adherents hold that the further one drifts on the spectrum, left or right, one is bound to end up at a point which converges with the other extreme. What other conclusion could you draw from this treatment of “populism,” a singular phenomenon that sees in the anti-Roma marches of Hungarian post-fascists Jobbik and the anti-gender violence demonstrations of Spanish leftists Podemos essentially the same thing? The Guardian's Populism Panic

What the liberal BBC and the Guardian call "riots" "If capitalism was not relatively stagnant in the historic Euro-American core, and if capitalist states had not haemhorraged political authority in recent years, and if austerity was not the dominant policy response, it is unlikely that meatspace shitstorms would occur in exactly this format. The scale of street violence -- even to the extent of defacing Marianne, to gasps of liberal horror -- reflects the scale of systemic violence ." France: the undead centre meets the shitstorm

France A good analysis by Frédéric Lordon. I think it is the best take (so far) on what is happening. In English In the original French

Postmodernism Some Virgin Atlantic pilots will strike from 22 December to Christmas Day in a dispute over union recognition, reports the BBC. "Union recognition"? What do you need for in the land of milk and honey? In a society of "our values" and (exportable) "liberal democracy", class struggle is outdated and unions mean socialism and communism! After all, our priority is to invest money in space tourism, Richard Branson and Co wanted to say.

Civilisation "The death comes after it was revealed earlier this year that the Harmondsworth site - the largest detention centre in Europe - had  the highest number of self-harm cases  in the UK." An Algerian man "dies" in a detention centre

Isabelle, 41, a single mother, had never taken part in a protest movement before. She works at a sandwich stand at Toulouse airport for the minimum wage – less than €1,200 a month – and her daily shifts begin at 3am. She was among many who had deliberately spoiled her ballot paper in last year’s presidential election final round, unwilling to choose between Macron or the far-right Marine Le Pen. “This is now about so much more than fuel tax,” she said. “We seem to live in a world gone mad where the rich pay next to nothing and the poor are constantly taxed. We’ve had enough of the elite." – Céline: "He [Macron] gave good speeches and I really believed his promises that he would change  France . But not any more.” – L:   "People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, decla...

This piece suffers from some problems, in particular the narrow bourgeois definition of democracy in regards to the "Tunisian exception", but it is worth a read, especially the first part of it that deals with the historical background. Failed dream of political Islam 

A glimpse of the sexualisation of women in Egypt Example: the actress Rania Youssef Cairo Film Festival

The "#BloodSausageGate" A bit of sarcasm: Germany's Interior Ministry has apologised for serving pork sausage at an Islam conference in Berlin last week.  These intolerant Muslims, who keep pouring into our country,  cannot even tolerate a piece of pork! How are they supposed to integrate? As a tolerant white English woman said to a Muslim beggar on a London high street yesterday, "Go back home!"

Our values At these universities, the data showed average salaries of: £52,000 for white academics £38,000 for black academics  £37,000 for academics from an Arab background This means that black and Arab academics at the UK's top universities earn an average 26% less than white colleagues. Ethnic minority academics pay These are universities which claim they are defending "equal rights" and "democracy" (even helping others establish democractic institutions and "democratic values").

France "Populism"? Avoid this word and focus on the processes that have led to revolt. "Populism is the liberals, and some leftists, buzzword.  A reaction to the explosion of inequalities between the super-rich and middle classes