Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Surprise! Surprise! Related “The U.S. Army School of the Americas is a school that has run more dictators than any other school in the history of the world.” —  Congressman   Joseph P. Kennedy II The School of Latin America’s dictators

There was a time when the French press lauded the mujahideen

“ Syria, virtually alone among major Arab states, blocks the entry of other Arab [comic] strips, creating its own monopoly of images. […] Nowhere in the Arab world does a government so effectively control the comic strips as in the Syrian Arab Republic.”  “Committed to freedom and dignity, [our] aim is to document events during the revolution as well as the catastrophic consequences of rupture, displacement and dislocation in its aftermath. […] As the name indicates, the comic is the medium of choice to record everything from brutality in prisons, activities at demonstrations and the violence of military interventions.” The short comic strips below portray a complex image of the way the war translates into everyday life. As I see it, this is where one of Comic4 Syria’s major strengths lies: in their conscious decision to avoid a Manichean view by refusing to rely on easy dichotomies of good and evil.  Archiving Syria’s hopes and despairs

“There is enough empty property in China to house over 90m people, says Logan Wright, a Hong Kong-based director at Rhodium Group, a consultancy. To put that into perspective: there are five G7 countries — France, Germany, Italy, the UK and Canada — that could each fit their entire population into those empty Chinese apartments with room to spare… The Chinese state owns almost all of the country’s large financial institutions , meaning that if Beijing orders them to bail out Evergrande or other distressed property companies, they will follow orders “Unless China’s regulators seriously mismanage the situation, a systemic crisis in the country’s financial sector is not on the cards,” says He Wei, an analyst at Gavekal, a research company. “The context of the Evergrande crisis is entirely different from Lehman Bros in 2008. Most obviously, Lehman operated in a free market; Evergrande does not. Lehman’s fate was sealed when banks would no longer lend to it. The bulk of Evergrande’s liabili...

“A leftwing radical in some things, she was a time-server and opportunist in others; she made a late return to Islam but she also admitted to 14 husbands (there may have been a few more) and had a carefully cultivated reputation for debauchery.” In memory of Tahia

“As the Israelis and the Americans understand very well, the ongoing discourse on terrorism is not about the victims of ‘terrorism’ but about the ‘perpetrators’. The fact that state armies more regularly target the very same victims that ‘terrorists’ target, yet are not referred to as ‘terrorists’, clarifies that it is not the act of ‘terrorism’ that defines the actor as ‘terrorist’ but rather the opposite: it is the perpetrator’s conferred identity as ‘terrorist’ that defines his/her actions as ‘terrorist’ in nature. “The binary world of terrorists and anti-terrorists”

"Maometto"-Mohammed-turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno, He is located in the eighth of the nine circles of Hell, in the ninth of the ten Bolgias of Malebolge, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan's stronghold in Hell. Thus before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal, the blasphemous. After Mohammed there are only the falsifiers and the treacherous (who include Judas, Brutus, and Cassius) before one arrives at the very bottom of Hell, which is where Satan himself is to be found. Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, in the category of what Dante calls seminator di scandalo e di scisma. Mohammed's punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante's...

According to a research by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a right-wing think-tank, 67 per cent of young people polled would like to live in a socialist economic system.  Scary! 

‘What a wonderful world!’ A ‘Trojan horse’ in Congo

“ Currently none of Starbucks' 8,000 US cafes is unionised, meaning the world's biggest coffee house chain is under no obligation to negotiate with staff over pay and conditions. But the baristas hope to change that at five cafes in Buffalo, setting a precedent that could disrupt the firm's business practices much more widely.” One Starbucks at a time Related

  “The essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook.”          Raymond Williams He made his mission to reclaim culture from the literary elite

A lot of propaganda have been pouring, hailing women in high position from Christine Lagarde of the IMF to Angela Merkel of Germany. All in the belief that capitalist power relations, inequality, exploitation, the profit motive, imperialism, etc. can be done away with if more women led governments and other positions of power.  Leaving her support of  Israel and the suppression of BDS aside, as a woman who headed a rich capitalist country for 16 years she  has done almost nothing to address the gender pay gap, one of the worst in Europe.  Women made between 19% less in wages than men in 2019, compared to 20% in 2018. It was 21% in 2020 according to this website .  It was still higher than the European Union average. Or has she ever questioned, for example, the pay gap between a nurse and a footballer?

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore,   it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."          Antonio Gramsci,  Prison Notebooks, Volume 2: 1930-1932

And this is only one example. It is a con more than a scandal. It is a smokescreen, a cover, employed by a an imperialist state as an ideological tool: “we are good people and we show compassion.”  It is a deception. British aid is a scandal Related Aid in the case of Palestine

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Somebody Blew Up America?

Very interesting and useful approach. Why did Islamist movements begin to genuinely challenge their political establishments only after the 1970s?  Why do we see such a great variety in the socio-economic policies and programs among different Islamist governments and movements?  Why have Islamist movements become more successful in industrializing countries?  why is it the small industrialist and not the Islamist businessman that is at the heart of the rise of Islamism?  Uktu Balaban discusses  the case of Turkey

A collection of articles

“ Subsidizing Apartheid : How the Canada Revenue Agency Contributes to Palestinian Dispossession”

Europe’s reputation as a cosmopolitan haven has been exposed as a mirage Related A bigger picture was captured by Peter Gowan more than 20 years ago: “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.” The New Liberal Cosmopolitanism