Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Jordan New labour law must recognise workers' rights

The prophet perverted

Britain "I find it hard to believe that the government would have made the decision to strip a British born subject of their citizenship and the media and public being so supportive of the decision if Shamima Begum had been a 15 year-old impressionable white girl who had made the same foolish and immature decisions. If this was a young BRITISH white girl she would be sitting on a Breakfast TV sofa recounting her traumatic adventurous experience with book deals and film scripts piling up at her door and with Newsnight and Dispatches competing for an exclusive interview. Such is the subtlety of society’s unspoken racism, the nature of our warped reality and the power of the state to manufacture and manipulate public opinion to serve their own nefarious desires."   —Ishmahil  Blagrove, 22 February 2019 "I think that she should be returned to face an investigation and for justice. That a court of law should decide what happens from there, rather than a court of Fac...

Venezuela A disaster caused by  - the economic policies of the government,  - the sanctions imposed by the US,  - and the control of what is left of food and foreign aid by the "mafia" food. ويرجع عدد من التقارير المتخصصة أسباب هذه الأزمات إلى سياسات الحكومة الاقتصادية، إلى جانب الحصار الاقتصادي الذي فرضته الولايات المتحدة على فنزويلا، إضافة إلى سيطرة "مافيا" الغذاء والدواء  على ما تبقى من مواد غذائية أو ما يصل من مساعدات خارجية. ماذا خلف المساعادات الإنسانية لفنزويلا "Aid groups on the ground worry, however, that a political operation thinly padded with humanitarian objectives could send a precarious situation down an even worse path—disastrous American efforts to intervene in Latin America from decades past serve as a reminder of how badly things can go. Even some liberals tell us that The examples are numerous. The United States  sought to overthrow  Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende in the 1970s, a move that eventuall...

In 2002, Abrams  reportedly  “gave a nod” to the military coup that attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to remove the democratically elected Hugo Chavez from power. The Observer, which broke the story, called Abrams “the crucial figure around the coup.” Abrams has had his eye on toppling Venezuela’s government for some time. When Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, Abrams, then the point man for George W. Bush’s Middle East policy,  helped implement a scheme  to nullify the results by fomenting a Palestinian civil war which, they hoped, would remove Hamas from power. When the plan backfired, with Hamas emerging victorious and in full control of Gaza, Abrams accused Hamas of staging a “coup.” Elliott Abrams: a criminal record

The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.  There is another version of cosmopolitanism abroad today, which places at the centre of its conception of a new world order the notion of a democratic global polity. This comes in a number of different editions, some scarcely distinguishable from liberal cosmopolitanism save for more voluble democratic piety. But in its most generous version, exemplified by Daniele Archibugi’s essay in these pages, this is a programme with the great merit of seeking to subordinate the rich minority of states and social groups to the will of a global majority, in conditions where the bulk of the world’s population remains trapped in poverty and powerlessness. Yet even its best proposals suffer from two crippling weaknesses. ...

"[T]he extraordinary support for Israel among the U.S. political class isn’t all about the Benjamins. If AIPAC and the dozens of political action committees (PACs) whose contributions it coordinates were trying to convince politicians to adopt a policy that did not contribute to maintaining and expanding the American empire in the Middle East and beyond, then we would be hearing comments like Kevin McCarthy’s truly antisemitic tweet quoted above with great regularity from across the political spectrum. It’s the confluence of imperial interests, political money and the popular Jewish and non-Jewish understanding of Israel as the moral legatee of the victims of Nazi mass murder that have combined to shut down debate on US Middle East policy." — Joel Beinin, merip, 18 February 2019

The Sicilian

He caused the killings of hundreds of thousands of people, more than what Pinochet, Mubarak, Suharto or Al-Assad did. He overthrew an ally of the free world. He imposed a decades-long embargo on his own country and starved his own people, driving them to drown in the ocean. He tried to invade Miami many times in order to establish a system against human nature in the United States, but failed. He established an illegal prisoner where he held his enemies without charge, torturing them and depriving them of fair trials, because they were against his way of life. He supported dictators in many countries, providing them with hundreds of doctors in order to spread his evil ideology all over the globe and help friendly regimes maintain their authoritarian powers.  He poured them with arms and financial assistance. More fundamentally, he outlived 10 U.S. presidents, without being democratically elected once. For that the CIA made many attempts to assassinate him . 

A historian asks: "Should Britain apologise for Amritsar massacre?" (the BBC Viewpoint) That is a dangerous question that might open a floodgate: Should Britain apologize for massacres against those who resisted or rose up against British rule: -the Mau Mau in Kenya) -the Zulu in South Africa -the Mahdists in Sudan -the Arabs in Iraq Should Britain apologize to -the Irish -the Bengalis (the engineered famine) - the Iraqis (1990 to the present) -the Greek resistance -the Palestinians (for her long support of Israel) -the Egyptians (for her long support of Mubarak and El-Sisi) -the Saudis (for her long support of the monarchy) -the Yemenis (for her supply of weapons to the Saudis) -'Third World' countries (for her IMF-backed restructural adjustment programme and its consequnces, debt enslavement, etc) ... I am sure I have missed a few more. The massacre in context

Arab Cinema Ahla'm Al-Medina (Dreams of the City) See also Middle Eastern Cinemas

An interesting, but timid analysis that is afraid of calling global capitalist policies (from inequality and wars to underdevolopment and imperialist designs), the breeding ground of reaction against state violence, as extremists and radical. "The Chinese detention centers’ goal of ideological transformation is also central to CVE [Countering Violent Extremism]. CVE began in Britain in the early 2000s and has since spread to  innumerable countries, including the United States, the UK, and various Muslim majority states. It’s also been uncritically embraced by multilateral and intergovernmental institutions, like the UN . CVE is based on a theory of “radicalization” that holds that in order to become  ”terrorists,” individuals must first embrace a way of thinking inclining them toward violence; that this “radicalization” can be predicted, in part, by theological and cultural factors; and that identifying these factors can help governments prevent terrorism . According to thi...

UK "Campaigners estimate that last year, at least 58 veterans took their own lives .  The Ministry of Defence spends £22 million pounds a year on mental health for veterans, while the NHS has dedicated around £6m annually since 2016." But it is worth it. They have died as heroes, "defending our values" and stopping "terrorists" from coming to our country.

Venezuela and disaster capitalism

"As a university lecturer I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to convince people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. But today this assumption comes ready- made; it’s in the water, part of the common -sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. It has not always been this way, however. Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is not natural or inevitable, but rather that it is new , that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests."  —Jason Hickel, 2012 Hickel is a lecturer at the ...

A book review  "In one of No Enough's most important insights, Moyn suggests that the gradual abandonment of equality in favour of a minimalist focus on securing a basic minimum has made human rights unthreatening in a neoliberal age. Moyn’s account of the compatibility of human rights and neoliberalism is powerful and astute. Human rights did little to alter the course of neoliberal reform, offered no real alternative to it, and did not demand egalitarian distribution either at the national or transnational level, he argues. Moreover, human rights and what he terms their “economic rival” shared the same moral individualism and the same suspicion of collectivist projects such as nationalism and socialism. Consequently, even social and economic rights became adjuncts to humanitarian philanthropy, which viewed global poverty through the lens of humanitarian suffering, not structural inequality.  
Moyn provides a strikingly original account of the ways in which demands for a...

Inside China's crackdown on young Marxists The Financial Times

Venezuela What Vice-President Pence could not say in public when he spoke about helping the Venezuelan "people" get their "freedom". "There is no room for any outside influence other than ours in this region [Latin America]. We could not tolerate auch a thing... Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall."— Robert Olds Quoted in Peter Baofu's The Rise of Authoritarian Liberal Democracy , Cambridge 2007, p. 85 Recent interventions aside, Mark Rosenfelder (1996) counted, for instance, that between 1846 and 1996 alone, there were more than "79 U.S. military interventions in Latin America and Haiti..."

Iran 1979-2018 "The obvious difference between present-day populism in the United States and in Iran is that while the former is a threat to the whole planet, the latter is a detriment mostly to its own people." —Ervand Abrahamian, a historian Iran: Past and Present

Gender and Empire Essential readings