Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

By Serge Halimi

Note that it should be Fatah, not El Fatah. I wonder why ‘Arab Springs’ in the plural form? “ Turkey will answer present.” I don’t think that is a correct English. When Turkey comes to terms again with Israel Also available in French, Arabic and Farsi

“In the mainstream media Russia is a blank screen on which the West gazes transfixed at its own visions.” How the country ended up with Vladimir  Putin

The figure of the half a million Iraqi children killed by the sanctions, and which goes back to a 1995 study carried out under Saddam Hussein regime, is an arguable figure. Massad and a few others still repeat it without backing it with recent studies and sources.  A game of capitalist greed

Buying up chunks of Britain

Qatar World Cup 2022

Growing utopian crack

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.   The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly. — Albert Einstein

The bigger picture in this article is not big enough. While nurses and other workers go on strike in Britain, for example, one has to compare the social value of a professional football player to a nurse and their incomes, and how such obscene injustice has become acceptable and normal. The world Cup and the champion leagues are a capitalist industry run on the 5 basis of competition and profit. The question of class, exploitation and ideology are also at play. Money’s chokehold on modern football Related “We are all complicit in the system” in one way or another. We clap and cheer. We succumb to amnesia. We fill in our day with hypocrisy.

“ The most reactionary Knesset in history.” On the new Netanyahu government

The battle for Ukraine

 

 كلاب الليل في باريس

A long but must read piece by Göran Therborn

I have sought not to make amends between “Islam and the West”, but to dismantle altogether this illusory binary, a solid byproduct of European modernity - or what they call “Enlightenment”, and the rest of the world knows as the darkest chapters of predatory colonialism.  I … propose that we read the fetishised concept of “the West” as an ideological commodity and civilisational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicentre for the rise of globalised capitalist modernity.   —Hamid Dabashi The entire binary is false Related Excerpts from The End of Two Illusions

A liberal reformist view Related Debt, the IMF and the World Bank (a book)

The energy transition in North Africa: neocolonialism again! التصدي للاستعمار الجديد في الانتقال الطاقي بشمال أفريقيا

The British colonisers caused the Bengal famine Related The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means. —Whisky Sisodia, in Salman Rushdie,  The Satanic Verses

A disappointing piece by Naomi Klein , I think. Klein, the critic of ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, fails in a long piece to include a couple of paragraphs analysing the political economy of Egypt in the broader regional and global capitalist relations. Instead, ‘human rights’, ‘civil society’ and the authoritarian regime occupy her analysis. The piece should have been ‘In solidarity with Alaa’.  The interactions of geopolitical powers and capitalist interests are completely absent. There is only a passing mention of ‘anti-capitalist politics’, but not the functioning of capital in Egypt, Israel, the UAE, the US, France, the UK, etc. Klein, who in  No Logo  ushered in a new generational critique of commodity culture, and who in  The Shock Doctrine  established herself as perhaps the most prominent North American critic of neoliberal disaster capitalism , signals that she has now, in  William Morris 's famous metaphor, crossed "the river of fire" to become a...

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