Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A review of A Hitch in Time Related Hitchens when he was good

“ Two tyrants, Reza Shah and Ayatollah Khomeini focused on policing women’s bodies as the site of their respective ideologies of power and domination, with the bodies of women as the ideological battleground of their patriarchal practices. “What we are witnessing in Iran in the imposition of mandatory veiling is, of course, the reverse of what we see in much of Europe and North America where Muslim women are systematically harassed if they choose to wear the Muslim hijab.  For decades not a single day passes without a racist, misogynist, bigoted violent attack on Muslim women in Europe and the US.” How they became an ideological battleground

Artist Samson Kambalu

  قلتُ للحاكمِ : هلْ أنتَ الذي أنجبتنا؟ قال : لا … لستُ أنا قلتُ : هلْ صيَّركَ اللهُ إلهاً فوقنا؟ قال : حاشا ربنا قلتُ : هلْ نحنُ طلبنا منكَ أنْ تحكمنا؟ قال : كلا قلت : هلْ كانت لنا عشرة أوطانٍ وفيها وطنٌ مُستعملٌ زادَ عنْ حاجتنا فوهبنا لكَ هذا الوطنا؟ قال : لم يحدثْ، ولا أحسبُ هذا مُمكنا قلتُ : هل أقرضتنا شيئاً على أن تخسفَ الأرضَ بنا إنْ لمْ نُسدد دَينَنَا؟ قال : كلا قلتُ : ما دمتَ إذن لستَ إلهاً أو أبا أو حاكماً مُنتخبا أو مالكاً أو دائناً فلماذا لمْ تَزلْ يا ابنَ الكذا تركبنا؟؟ … وانتهى الحُلمُ هنا أيقظتني طرقاتٌ فوقَ بابي : افتحِ البابَ لنا يا ابنَ الزنى افتحِ البابَ لنا إنَّ في بيتكَ حُلماً خائنا !!!!!!

Sayeh incarnait une génération d’intellectuels aux voix libres et populaires A big hit with an iconic song

  What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify. Popular literature and films often depict the opposite — policymakers as the helpless tools of intelligence experts. In the real world, intelligence assessments more often follow than guide policy decisions.   —Henry Kissinger  A mild take on two women complicit in an imperialist crime 

Her country brutalised Africans

“ It seems that today’s Tories – even (or perhaps especially) their most committed ideologues – are once again prepared to ‘pay up’ if it allows them to win a class fight. And let’s not delude ourselves: Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget … shows that a class fight is underway.” Sound money? “Class war is traditionally a term levelled at the left – typically when arguing for radical things such as housing or food – but it is clearer than ever that it is the Tories who wage it.” The class war is upon us

I, too, am the daughter of an “honour crime ”   مقال سردي وليس تحليليا، ولكن القصة تعبر عن ظاهرة اجتماعية مهمة. مصر: أنا أيضا ابنة "جريمة شرف" حين احتفل أخوالي بقتل أمي Related   “France's 1810 Penal Code Article 324 also inspired the 1858 Ottoman Penal Code's Article 188, both the French Article 324 and Ottoman article 188 were drawn on to create Jordan's Article 340 which was retained even after a 1944 revision of Jordan's laws which did not touch public conduct and family law;  article 340 still applies to this day in a modified form.  France's Mandate over Lebanon resulted in its penal code being imposed there in 1943–1944, with the French-inspired Lebanese law for adultery allowing the mere accusation of adultery against women resulting in a maximum punishment of two years in prison while men have to be caught in the act and not merely accused, and are punished with only one year in prison.” The phenomenon persists today in same areas of the world bec...

The question remains a question of class.

Palestinian-Syrian refugee opens Iraq’s first cat and dog hotel I wonder how many English would like this. Dozens of migrants killed as boats sinks off Syrian coast Good that ‘killed’, not ‘died’, has been used in the headline.

I like d’Eramo. “ while we pursue such extravagant schemes, we are simultaneously condemning this small, singular, fabulous planet of ours to destruction.” Exploiting the cosmos

  Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others. ―  Simone Weil

Thrashed for theorising

 

 

“Could we say … that the prioritization of form is detrimental—almost hostile—to the recollection of context? If we did, we would not be the first. Indeed, formal analysis has often been taken as an anti-political distraction or bourgeois salve for psyches incapable of grasping larger, more worldly contradictions: the small, beautiful thing has always been pitted by critical voices against the forgotten social reality. Still, it seems important to note that form is able to reduce and disarm our awareness of context only because awareness of context is so difficult to maintain; it depends on the comprehension of something intangible and hulking in the background, of that which necessarily exists outside the lines. And the rub: any overarching network of conditions—but especially those of global capitalism—is one we ourselves are implicated in and shaped by. We live and move in the same context that produces the forms we espy. No wonder we would rather see the form by itself. Isolated, i...

“We paid the price twice” for Bashir’s dictatorship, says Amjed Farid, the opposition activist. “We got rid of the tyrant who was supporting terror, through a popular revolution that we paid for with our blood. And now we are paying the price for this tyrant, even though we were his first victims.” “Is this justice?”

The violence in Leicester Related The forsaken ones