Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

On 1 January 1804, the Republic of Haiti declared independence. “Haiti offered asylum to enslaved people who could reach its shores. The Haitian Revolution inaugurated an independent Haitian trade, which sent free Haitians on business around the Caribbean and encouraged enslaved sailors to desert to freedom. Enslaved people also escaped to Haiti by other means. For example, in the Bahamas in 1822, slaveholders complained that more than 100 enslaved men and women from the island of Grand Caicos had overwhelmed their drivers and overseers, taken their children with them, and stolen open boats to flee to Haiti. Once on land in the Black republic, any person of African descent was free and eligible for citizenship. It was Haitian policy never to permit the re-enslavement of Haitian citizens or refugees. Robin Blackburn writes that ‘Haiti had saved the honor of the New World revolutions’, coming closer to realising the universal rights proclaimed by American revolutionaries than American fo...

Where I reacquired the volumes of a masterpiece that I had been unable to carry with me when I moved country. London’s famed bookshop closes its doors

The perpetrators are not Muslims and the victims are Westerners or Ukrainians . Therefore, the story – like broader conflict in Congo – will not be ‘hyped’, followed everyday and religion blamed, for ‘our values’ have not been attacked. According to the BBC , “ War has ravaged the east of the country for the past 20 years. Five million people have died as a result of conflict. Related Africa's Leaky Giant

The book still speaks about today’s America

Mike Davis on the 2003 bird flu outbreak in Thailand

Verso Books’ new Spanish language publishing partnership

British colonialism in India between 1880 to 1920

I could have written the comment below reflecting on a conversation I had with an English man when the British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigned. It was part of a very short exchange in a coffeeshop in north London. The English man said that Boris Johnson was better after all. I jumped in saying that he was a racist, and that the problems in Britain were not about one man, but about the form of the political economic policies. classes, etc. The man disagreed with me, saying : “But everybody wants to come to this country. You, where do you come from?”  I asked him to stick to the argument rather than speaking about where I come from. He refused. Our short conversation ended abruptly there. *** “Where are you from?” is not necessarily a racist question, but for those of us with brown skin, it’s a loaded one. We answer it uneasily, unsure if the conversation is going to unravel into something more distressing, as the encounter between Lady Susan Hussey and Ngozi Fulani did on Tuesday ...

A must read account with historical background and focus on the women’s movement

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