Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Macron and co. " If any anti-Jewish expression in the world always worries me, I feel a certain disgust at the flood of hypocrisy and manipulation orchestrated by those who now want to criminalize anyone who criticizes Zionism." —Shlomo Sand Semites, Anti-Semites, Zionists, Anti-Zionists

Demographic demise

"Strategical partners" German arms feeding the Yemen conflict

"All citizens are supposed to be equal but citizens from minority ethnic communities are, in fact, less equal than others." When do you become "British enough"?

An alternative to Emmeline Pankhurst , a defender of the British Empire, celebrated by the London School of Economics and Manchester City Council. Freda Bedi

"Human Rights" in Tunisia Context: it was during an era the Tunisian regime was hailed as "the best student" by the IMF and a "liberal secular" regime under Bourgiba (1956-1987), and was in good relations with the US, France, Britain, Italy and others while torture, repression and plunder went on. Now any complicity is forgotten. From the liberal   Guardian to the Financial Times and the Economist , the talk now is about a "nascent though weak democracy" and "transitional justice". Meanwhile, the international financial institutions carry on with their debt enslavement programme and "restructuring". 

From the archive We tried to help the "Libyans" get rid of a mad man and organise  the first 'free' elections. But, they didn't understand what 'democracy' mean. So, they started killing each other in a civil war. The disaster in Libya and Who said Gaddafi had to go? Book Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya

"There is a powerful impulse within the electorates of the NATO states for their governments to give a lead to the world and really help the less fortunate overwhelming majority of humanity to improve their lives and strengthen their security and welfare. But we must bear in mind two unfortunate facts: first, that the NATO states have been and are hell-bent on exacerbating the inequalities of power and wealth in the world, on destroying all challenges to their overwhelming military and economic power and on subordinating almost all other considerations to these goals; and second, the NATO states are finding it extraordinarily easy to manipulate their domestic electorates into believing that these states are indeed leading the world’s population towards a more just and humane future when, in reality, they are doing no such thing."  —Peter Gowan, NLR, March-April 1999

British researcher Alex de Waal has written the following about the famine in Yemen: 
"Yemen, however, stands out. A UN report published last month estimated that 80 per cent of the population – 24 million people – required some sort of humanitarian assistance. The number in ‘acute’ need is now estimated at 14.3 million, 27 per cent higher than in 2018. The famine is the world’s worst since North Korea in the 1990s and the one in which Western responsibility is clearest. Even before the war, Yemen was poor, dependent on food imports and suffering from water scarcity. Coalition aircraft now strike military and civilian targets, including agricultural project offices, irrigated farms and terraces, fishing ports and fishing boats, clinics and hospitals, busy markets teeming with vendors and shoppers. Fishing on the Red Sea coast, formerly a major livelihood – fish exports were Yemen’s second biggest earner after oil – is almost at a standstill. The coalition blockade extends to th...

What is common in these two stories? 1. Canadian PM " Trudeau has denied wrongdoing and says any lobbying by him or his inner circle for engineering giant SNC-Lavalin was done to protect jobs. SNC-Lavalin is one of the world's largest engineering and construction companies. The company faces fraud and corruption charges in relation to approximately C$48m ($36m; £28m) in bribes it is alleged to have offered to Libyan officials between 2001 and 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was in power." In 2016 Canada was the second provider of weapons to the Middle East.  2. " UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia ruled lawful . Equipment sold to Saudi Arabia includes Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets, as well as precision-guided bombs. The sales contribute to thousands of engineering jobs in the UK, and have provided billions of pounds of revenue for the British arms trade."

"Fittingly for the fact that Assad has maintained his firm grip on power, an emotionally charged story of a child and his fate satiates the middle-class, very white desire to carry the weight of the evil world on our shoulders, albeit without consequences or responsibility. Oh what a dreadful place the rest of the world is!" The white perspective

Breaking news We have never been so close to equality, global justice, development and prosperity for all. Now both the IMF and the World Bank are headed by women! That will certainly make a radical change in the operation of global capitalism. 

"The British never had the capacity to reshape coercively the internal arrangements of other capitalist  states. Their speciality was taking over and reshaping pre-capitalist societies, defeating traditionalist forces of resistance within them. So the principle of absolute states’ rights and non-interference was perfectly acceptable to the British, once they had reached the limits of their empire.  But Washington had a different and more advanced agenda: first, to penetrate existing capitalist states and reorganize their internal arrangements to suit US  purposes; and second, to defeat any social forces there that rejected the American path to modernity in the name, not of traditionalism, but of an alternative modernity. The UN model simply did not address these issues which were so central for Washington. Indeed, it offered a notional defence against American interference in its emphasis on national sovereignty. As a result, the UN politico-legal order was a cumbersom...

Anti-union harassment and victimization escalate at AB InBev Sonepat India

A liberal account of 'humanitarian intervention' The Liberal Defense of Murder

Tureky's position on Venezuela I wouldn't describe the current Brazilian regime as fascist though. It is a racist, far right regime with fascistic tendencies, but it is not fascist .

The nurses in Bulgaria are rising up!

Making the Economic Political in Jordan's Tax Revolt

Yugoslavia, Argentina, Egypt, Tunisia, Greece ... Venezuela How to depen a crisis and accelerate conflict or how to make a killing The example of Yugoslavia Basil Davidson's review of Susan Woodward's The Balkan Tragedy

Venezuela The liberal BBC is not only putting the blame mainly on Maduro, but ignores any alternative.  If it is not about a regime change to replace the current regime with a pliant U.S. ally and open the country to privatisation for more local and foreign capital, why don't other countries (which are not subordinate the the American hegemony), or international agencies negotiate with the Venezuelan government to create a "humanitarian zone" to provide aid in both Venezuela and Colombia? What the U.S. and  the opposition are trying to do now is to split the Venezuelan army or push a faction in it to overthrow Maduro. And we all know what that might lead to. One does not have to look at Syria and how army defectors did not tilt the balance for those who rose up against al-assad's repressive machine. Worse, this is not an uprising or a revolution in Venezuela.  We have been here before. The day the current situation escalates to an armed conflict, more media a...