Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Meaning of Israel's Massive House Demolition in East Jerusalem Related: My interview with Jeff Halper in June 2008

In Russia, the Fight is Alive

Stray Dogs By Tsai Ming-Liang

" A pact between M5s and the PD carries all manner of dangers for Italy. Should a deal between them prove impossible, the country faces early elections and a likely huge mandate for Salvini. This would finalise the Lega’s capture of the conservative middle classes, while reducing Berlusconi’s old party, Forza Italia, to a mere rump entity after its quarter-century domination of the right. Victory would also propel the Lega’s march into the once hostile southern regions." Oh, those "middle classes", the engine of progress!    Why Italy is heading for crisis once more

2019 presidential elections in Tunisia The lines below are from Reuters (21 August 2019) and what is between brackets is mine. The struggling economy is at the top of many voters' priorities and Ennahda [the Islamist Party usually dubbed "moderate" in the Western mainstream media which defines what "democracy" is and where it exists and doesn't exist] and other secularists [whatever that means] support market-oriented reforms urged on Tunisia by the International Monetary Fund [in order to industrialise the country and make it propserous and competitive with South Korea, Italy and Taiwan] but strongly resisted by unions and the population [who think they know their interests better than the IMF and World Bank men and women do]. And [Nabil] Karoui [a media tycoon, "Tunisian's Berlusconi"], backed by his Nesma TV station, has positioned himself as champion of the poor in the neglected hinterland outside the capital -- Ennahda's strongh...

Vassal States "So Macron is worried that Britain might become a vassal state of the US. Which planet has he been on these last four decades and more? A process that began in 1956 after the Suez debacle was lovingly completed by Thatcher and Blair. Britain has been a fully-fledged vassal for a long time. And France, especially under Jospin and Hollande, was/is moving in the same way. Militarily, ideologically, culturally the US dominates most of Europe. Britain's vassal status is enshrined on many levels and partially explains the hysteria that greeted Corbyn's election as Leader of the Labour Party and the non-stop attempts to denigrate and defeat him, of which the 'anti-semitism' campaign is the most recent. Even Corbyn will find it very difficult to break the shackles." —Tariq Ali, 22 August 2019

"In September 2017 a YouGov poll commissioned by the Arab News and the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding illustrated worrying attitudes and misunderstandings of Arabs and Muslims in Britain. Of the 2142 British voters polled in the survey, 63% stated that they believe Arabs have failed to integrate themselves into British Society, and 41% believed that their presence has not been beneficial. Despite these strong opinions, 81% admitted that they knew little or nothing about the region." (The British Arab Centre) 
Is it surprising? 
To my life experience in Britain, it is not. The sheer level of prejudice and lack of knowledge is horrifying. One begins with "oh, you don't look Arab!" Arabs are only brown-skinned people she thought. Another was when an educated person who told me in 2010, when I mentioned Edward Said and Orientalist views, "that was long time ago." Presumably because she felt we were living in a triumphing lib...

Arab cinema In Papisha soon the "high energy wears off, as the story descends into repugnant cliches and orientalist pigeonholes. Meddour's world view is black and white: all men are bad, nearly all religious people are blood-thirsty monsters, and all the liberal-minded girls are valiant heroines. There is no subtlety in her characterisations nor hint of intelligence in how she tackles Islamic radicalism, which is personified by a bunch of liberal men-hating women and women obsessed with having every girl in the country veiled.  On the evidence of   Papicha , Meddou's world view comes over as little different from the average white Western film-maker in its antagonistic stance against non-white masculinity, a toxic feminist stance which frowns down on anyone who does not share its ideals. By a long margin,   Papicha  was the low point of the Arab selection at Cannes this year." Review of seven new Arab films " Cannes, after all, is an awfully c...

"More migrants are threatening to jump overboard" This should be considered use of violence by migrants who are terrorising the emotions of Europeans in order to force the latter to take them in. This use of blackmailing and arm twisting is not the method of a civilised people but a stronger race invading our shores.

Like the World Bank, the IMF and others, Google is deepening its involvement with Egypt's repressive regime

"Israel illegal arms trade in South Sudan" It would be interesting to find a study about which has been more destructive and criminal, "legal" or "illegal" arms trade .

The Financial Times calls it "free market liberal democracy" Costa Coffee is just one example. Two facts not mentioned in the article are: Costa is owned by Coca Cola and it does not allow trade unions. Not allowing trade union in some businesses to represent workers and defend their rights, etc has been going on for a long time in Britain, since the Maasricht Treaty in fact. That means EU labour rules have been applied differently in Britain. The zero-hour contract is another example. Related: What happens in order to maintain a minimum rate of profit and when productivity is not high enough. Ungrateful Costa workers, many of them are foreigners who came to our country and gave them jobs, but they dare complain, saying that " they are not treated like humans ."

Last week's most read post

"The Arab Spring" Lives on in Algeria

In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them. "The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the economic powers. These powers are taking society’s domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them. The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is reflected in the hypoc...

Capitalism's violence The profoundest moments of iniquity are not performed by psychopaths, but by ordinary people as they come to accept the premises of the existing order.  "Within neoliberalism’s vision of a prosperous global village, what remains unsaid is the desire for homogeneity, an compulsion to remake the ‘Other’ in ‘our’ image, whereby the space of ‘the peculiar’, ‘the exotic’, ‘the bizarre’ is repeatedly (re)produced through the relation of the ban in order to create a world with a single trajectory. Blaming ‘others’ for neoliberalism’s failures and for its violence consequently becomes a primary mechanism in the articulation of power.  Although violence is of course fragmented by variations and irregularities as part of its complex and unfolding nature, within the current moment of neoliberalism, violence is all too frequently imbued within the chaotic landscapes of globalized capitalism. In the case of Operation ...

How convenient for the liberal pundits to attack the far-right and the ideology of hatred. They tend to ignore the role of "identity politics" that has been used to plague the minds. This was uttered by a liberal columnist in the Financial Times in 2009: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.” This was uttered by the perpetrator of the attack in El Paso, US, in August 2019:  “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the inst...

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crises." —Dante Alighieri, The Devine Comedy

Al-Jazarī الجزري With English subtitles

Libya A good beginning in putting the situation in a big picture of "civilisational" context. However, I always wonder why most writers do not qualify "democracy" as if everybody agrees with the existing order. The socio-economic formation in which this "democracy" functions is rarely questioned, especially in today's "neoliberal" form of capitalism that even liberal sccholars have attacked as a source of violence and destruction. The social groups/strata that formed the former Libyan regime and how the regime came about and why it took the features it took is fundamental in understanding why Libya could not have a capitalist democracy. Neither Egypt, Syria or China. The focus on individuals doesn't help that much because the individuals themselves work within the trappings they found before them. There is a difference between structure and moment. Furthermore, one should not conflate the ideals of the French revolution and how capit...