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Good News From the BBC

The BBC has confirmed it received 109,741 complaints from the public over its coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh's death. The figure makes the coverage of Prince Philip's death the most complained-about piece of programming in BBC history. I have seen the floods of headlines on the BBC front page, but I have never read a single article about the death of a prince. Nor did I bother to send a complaint. 
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Reflections on Exile

“Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony, wrote these hauntingly beautiful lines: It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. ” Quoted in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays , p. 190.
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When Neoliberalism Hijacked Human Rights

By blending historical inquiry with theoretical critique, Whyte’s account clarifies that neoliberal human rights did not emerge “from nowhere” but, rather, flowed from a long-standing, self-conscious, neoliberal tradition of forging rhetorical links between market morals and human rights. The Morals of the Market
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A Novel Written by a 12th Century Arab Writer

At school we were barely introduced to such a valuable novel by Ibn Tufayl. “Ibn Tufayl’s message was clear — and for its times, quite bold: Religion was a path to truth, but it was not the only path. Man was blessed with divine revelation, and with reason and conscience from within. People could be wise and virtuous without religion or a different religion.“ “ When there was a conflict between these two, Ibn Rushd argued, written laws of religion should be reinterpreted because they were inevitably bound with context.” Speaking of context, the liberal writer forgot to mention the current context in end of his article. The Muslim who inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe
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France: Class and Identity

Beaud and Noiriel have no problem with the concept of race. They merely feel that it must remain in its proper place and be dealt with only as a  “variable or special case, understood as part of a broader scientific problem”  (p. 192). We are in complete disagreement with this, but we do agree with the authors when they assert that there is no such thing as pure racism, independent of inter-class domination. But this is also true of class relations, which never exclude racial or gender domination, which inclines us to  “conceive both the irreducibility of the racial question and its inextricable link with relations of class and gender.” Now while race and class are closely associated, the injustices and wrongs suffered by racial minorities can nonetheless not be reduced to class relations, to capitalist domination. To reduce everything to class locks us into an interpretive framework which is both Eurocentric and economistic (precisely the one used in Race et science...
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Egypt: Pharaohs on Parade

“In the past, identification with the pharaohs – symbols of biblical and Quranic despotism – was always ambivalent. But now under Sisi it has been fully embraced: with armoured chariots, laser beams and fireworks. In the country with arguably the highest number of political prisoners and torture victims in the world, even the dead cannot be left undisturbed.” The Pharaoh is dead! Long live the Pharaoh!
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