Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Painting the unrenewable

You have not yet been defeated

A left-winger author on a left-wing website.  ‘Foreign policy’ instead of imperialism is used twice in a topic highly charged with imperialist power and domination.  Our daily sanctions

The French Senate has voted to ban hijab in sports competitions in a bid to ‘uphold religious  neutrality in sport’. “Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars — a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity.” – Daniel Zamora, Catalyst Journal No 3, 2021

Unwelcome to the ‘civilised’ nation state! “ When we moved into our room on Fitzjohn’s Avenue four years later, it was with the promise that we were finally safe. It had been a devastating journey and here we were in London about to begin a new life. But our expectations of London were impossible. We imagined a life that was easier – that somehow as soon as we arrived here we would put all that had happened behind us and move on – that the uncertainty we felt would evaporate as soon as we landed. So much depended on this fantasy. To survive the journey, we needed stories of hope. For us, that story was safety in London, but the reality was very different. To survive, we needed not only to speak a different language, but to learn new gestures, new stories and, most important, understand the currency that gave you access to society. In a country where your social capital is bound up in class and race, learning the social codes could determine the trajectory of your life.” What it’s reall...

Nazism and socialism

An autocratic post-Soviet state, repression, and foreign capital

A liberal view

Present failure lies in past designs

Revered activist killed by Israeli tow truck

“ Whoever controls the institutions that distribute wealth in the world economy controls who gets what.” The pandemic is very bad. Yes, but not for everybody.

I highly recommend Sami Zubaida’s book Beyond Islam from which I have chosen these passages: Islamism, the cosmopolitan and the transnational We have seen how the leading Muslim modernist reformers were in many senses ‘cosmopolitan’. They formed part of the elite circles of intellectuals, aristocrats and politicians, and focused their efforts mostly within these elites. A subsequent generation of Muslim leaders turned to populism and mass mobilization, deploying a much more puritanical and nativist Islam – notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt under Hassan al-Banna, which emerged in 1928; these were the ‘fundamentalists’. Their ideology was one of a return to the purity of early Islam and the first generations – hence ‘Salafi’ ( salaf means ‘ancestors’); but their politics were essentially those of modern populist mass mobilization. Their appeal was largely that of national liberation from foreign rule, but also, essentially, from foreign customs and lifestyles; they rejected not o...

Punish Palestinians, embrace Israel

Lobbying to fire local staff despite Covid-19 protection law

This piece requires a long breath and focus. “A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy. In the Sahel, the French state has settled on ‘Islamist terrorists’, a sequence of adjectives that denote elusive subjects surging out of horizons of pure violence. The inability is compounded by the fact that terrorists must be picked out in terrains unknowable to the West, because the West has long considered them—still considers them—to be outside of history: Afghanistan, a redoubt against empires, those makers of history; the Sahel, a land somewhere in the continent that Hegel banished from history. “The Sahel of [Serge] Michailof and other Western experts epitomizes the trifecta of alien  demographic vitality, Islamic fanaticism and pauper migration that is the new spectre haunting the West.”

“ Western governments don’t have to do much to make the world a better place — in fact, all they have to do is stop what they’re doing.” I wonder why though one has to conclude an article with an indirect appeal to those very same regimes they condemn. US sanctions killing Afghans

Italy, France, England – and even Japan – are below OECD average

Homage to Aleppo

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

‘The extremist media has tried to destroy me’