Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

What comes next? Related News we don’t want to hear (full article requires subscription)

“In the beginning, everyone we met was really helpful – and then the reality set in. I am grateful to them for saving our lives, but in this bargain, I’ve lost my dignity, my home and I’m very depressed,” says Rias. Reflecting on the racism they’ve faced in their first year in Europe

First full report on the regime’s massacre

In English En français بالعربية

ترجمة عربية لمقال  درشانا نارايانان

‘People are much angrier now’

The crisis of development: uneveness, polarization and contestation

“Approaching each other with a clear and direct agenda, mostly revolving around the mutual benefits of boosting trade, investment, and business in a win-win situation, was determinant. The power fatigue resulting from following highly contrasting geopolitical and ideological agendas and the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the post-2011 era encouraged the conflicting regional players to follow pragmatic behaviour and prioritise the economy, business, trade, and interest-based agendas rather than ideological ones. The regional and international dynamics that have led to this rare moment of de-escalation and reconciliation among the different regional players, in particular, are not constant and subject to sudden changes. Besides Egypt, several Arab countries are severely exposed. If the war is set to prolong, then one should not rule out that a looming food crisis coupled with skyrocketing food prices would trigger uprisings. Despite the very positive regional atmosphere resulting ...

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”  Fatma Aliye

 

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has...

Since the 2000s, there has been a shift in France’s media and among its politicians. While the media landscape had evolved in the 1970s and ’80s, with many supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination and the need to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which Israel and the US denounced as a terrorist group), the consensus position has since shifted dramatically. Some now see Palestine through the lens of the “war on terror” and the “Islamist menace”. Any condemnation of Zionism is presented as a form of antisemitism. This reflects the position of European governments, especially France, which have aligned themselves with Israel and adopted - what many consider to be - Islamophobic positions in recent years. “How French media censored my views”

The story of one of the world’s major tax haven

“The Inverted Consciousness of the World” The constitution of “Islam and the West” as a civilizational divide was a colonial concoction, an ideological chimera, a mode of false consciousness that centers “the West” (where capital is believed to have accumulated) and marginalizes “the Rest” (where cheap labor and raw material are thought to be located). Both capital and its abused labor and ravaged earth, however, are global and rapidly globalizing; neither has any center or periphery. This relatively recent ideological concoction, however, has been rooted in the material forces of capital, labor, raw material, and markets. At work has been the accumulated capital that required a normative center and correspondingly the dispersed labor and raw material that were at the service of that accumulated capital. “Islam and the West” was perhaps the most potent component of “the West and the Rest” that facilitated and enabled the operation of that relation of power. I have also put forward the ...

Dear Priti, Rwanda is not deterring ‘aliens’ . What are you gonna do about it? Related A couple of figures in the article below are not inaccurate.  There isn’t a single mention of the stark hypocrisy, racism and double standard in migration policies. “Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit.” Not true. A few people benefit of cheap labour and driving wages down, and others use restrictions on migration to win elections. The century of climate migration

Saying that Lewis was a historian of “vast erudition” and “ a usually very good author” is very arguable.  The review though is good. Note that on the demographic ‘problem’ the current fertility rate in countries like Iran, Turkey, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia is similar to France’s (see fertility rates of each country on wikipedia). The question remains: it is about the form of economic development.  What Went Wrong

“ The oil world I inhabited brought together geopolitics and the everyday. It was material and dirty, and bloody and wracked by wars, coups d’état and revolutions. It was a world wrought by political struggle on the streets and at the diplomatic table. Corporations, universities and security apparatuses all had a finger in the pie. And along with the people who worked the oilfields and filled the streets during demonstrations they changed the world in perceptible ways, sometimes suddenly and monumentally, as when Middle East and Latin American leaders negotiated better oil deals for their countries; sometimes gradually, through a series of unintended consequences.” A review of Disorder : Hard Times in the 21st Century by Helen Thompson Laleh Khalili’s critique highlights good missing points in Thompsons’ book. However, Khalili never mentions capital and profit and their role in shaping geopolitics. We blitzed it Related Carbon Democracy

More admission that capitalist production, i.e. the way the global capitalist system has been producing food and the way it is consumed is the main cause of environmental degradation, not the myth of over population is the cause of climate change. Related One-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally .  This amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year, worth approximately  US$1 trillion . All the food  produced but never eaten would be sufficient to feed  two billion people . That's more than twice the number of undernourished people across the globe.

I think this is the best part in Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm’s essay The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie : The self-enclosed universes of Hijab and The Grand Balcony exist and function against the background of a revolution taking place in the outside world. In both instances, the revolution forms a threat to the very existence of the bordello. In The Balcony , the revolution fails after destroying the Queen, the Archbishop's palace, the law courts, and the army headquarters. As the Chief of Police becomes the master of the new counter-revolutionary order, Genet transports Madam Irma and her clients out of the "house of illusions" to become the Queen, the Archbishop etc. in support of the new regime of repression. In the Hijab episode the revolution succeeds after destroying the old centers and symbols of Jahilian power. As its chief, Mahound, becomes the master of the new revolutionary order, Rushdie transports him and his "queens" into the "house ...

It all happened in, you know, “other places.”  So it doesn’t count.