Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A massacre and a cover up

  Obituary

Eminent historian S Irfan Habib called the project a "corporatisation of monuments," that has been done "at the cost of history, cost of heritage". Indian outrage over a revamp of memorial Related Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

while my country was being ripped apart by coronavirus

A meeker approach and false parity

“Because of the polarity between the left and the right, I don’t feel I have an identity with politicians on either side. The left wing have abandoned the working classes, and with a lot of the left – I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan when I say this – I feel like there is too much nitpicking and stupid fights, especially online. But I hate the Tories with a passion. I was raised to hate them, I still hate them, and I always will. They clearly know who they stand for and they don’t represent people like us. A quarter of the kids in working families in my region are in poverty. Nobody sticks their neck out for the north-east. The line in Aye – “I don’t have time for the very few” – that’s the one thing that always going to be my main gripe on this planet, the sheer disparity between the 1% and the rest of the world. These culture wars are valid wars that need to be fought – there’s a lot of bigotry, a lot of racism and homophobia. But in order to get the Tories out, you’ve got to ...

Why are people so terrified of socialism?

10 selected films

When one interpreter asked me a few days ago, ‘Why is my five-year-old worth less than a dog?’ I didn’t have an answer.” I have a business idea for Farthing even Alan Sugar, the greatest Brit to ever live, would never think of it: put the dogs on ebay. As of Johnson and Patel, it is sheer hypocrisy. They have been pursuing a hostile environment policy towards refugees, restricting their entry, confining them in detention centres, etc. and now they want to show the world that they care. Britain values dogs more than Aghan people

 A good summary —John Molineux, 28 August 2021

A social-democratic view. The pandemic-induced global slump is just part of a 20-year financial crisis

“ A former British soldier who helped dozens of people leave Kabul after the Taliban’s invasion is stranded in Afghanistan after the Foreign Office bungled the paperwork necessary to evacuate him.” The ‘Taliban’s invasion’? According to Tony Diver and propably The Telegraph itself, Taliban carried out an invasion. I scratched my head: Are Taliban from China or Russia? Or maybe the Taliban have just invaded themselves! No, it is their country you like or not, as it is the country of many who have just fled it.  And it is just a small example of the narrative of the corporate media. 

Afghanistan 1978-2021: A brief summary

A very modest attempt by me. Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t even liberate Afghanistan .. Oh George! Oh Barack! Why did you leave it to Biden? Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t liberate Afghanistan .. Oh Hilary! Oh Hilary! Who would have had a laugh  Other than Bin Laden? Oh man! Oh man! Who will liberate the Afghan If not the Americaaan?* * Plural pronunciation of Americans in Arabic. —Nèdeem Mahjoub

“The PA found itself naked after losing the internal sources of legitimacy - revolutionary legitimacy, the legitimacy of resistance and national consensus, the legitimacy of ballot boxes and the legitimacy of achievement,” he said. “It only had external sources of legitimacy - the legitimacy of power and security - after its political project failed and it did not adopt a new project.” Watch what the corporate Western media would say if Palestinians started a mini civil war. Palestinian Authority loosing control of West Bank

“The situation is very different today as the official oil workers have not staged strikes, the contract workers have mainly socio-economic demands and an organized mass revolutionary movement is absent. Political and economic crisis in Iran has obviously influenced the current strikes, and the protests could involve the official workers and spread to other sectors as well in the future. It is, therefore, important to appreciate the contingent and fluid nature of these strikes, rather than conceiving them as repetitions of the past or project on them particular political objectives in an act of wishful thinking.” Labour organising is on the rise among Iranian oil workers

It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent  estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around  17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated   total of   desaparecidos   was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around  27 million   at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who  vanish  inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed  the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on f...

  التناقض في الإسلام هو بين أتباع السلطة وبين الخارجين عنها

An interesting historical background followed by a couple of good comments “As the United States emerges from one of the greatest employment crises in a century, Roosevelt’s progressive economic platform is salient once again, and for good reason. Today, the need to enact ambitious economic programs is compelling on its own merits. To justify these programs with the specious argument that taking care of white Americans’ material interests will miraculously displace a well-tended reservoir of anti-immigrant sentiment is borne out neither in contemporary political science data nor in history. After all, nine years after the enactment of the New Deal, Japanese Americans found no such relief from California’s white mob and their powerful representatives. Much as we wish it otherwise, it was the New Dealer Roosevelt who was far more effective than Trump in enacting an extremist program of race-based exclusion to cater to white animus.” Roots of today’s anti-Asian hate violence