Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“A demonstration for equality turned into an all-Jewish, Zionist demonstration advocating for Jewish supremacy in Israel. Once again, demonstrators said: don’t bother us about the occupation. We are dealing here with the judicial system; let’s not confuse the issues - as if the occupation does not overshadow everything and define the Israeli regime more than any of its other components. The hypocrisy and double standards of the Zionist left were once again revealed in all their ugliness.” Zionists only

In an era of “consume and move on”, culture, ‘comfort zone’, avoidance of ‘controversial’ statements and topics, etc.,  Socrates can help

هناك فرق بين الصور الكاريكاتورية المسيئة للنبي والمنمنمات الفارسية عن نشوء الإسلام Muslim activists misunderstand Islam  (only part of the article)

What happens with thinkers who operate outside the European philosophical ‘pedigree’?

An associate professor based in Qatar does not include Qatar as a dictatorship and does not even hint to any of Qatar’s involvement in the 2011 uprisings, for example.

Mapping the Sahel Background analysis The redeployment of French imperialism in Africa

Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis

“The aggressive transmutation of ruling regimes into warring garrison states presiding over competitive military industrial complexes has degenerated all these states into alien powers treating entire nations as their military bases.” The rise of Iran’s military-industrial complex

 “He was only Isis because he had to accept the reality,” said Ayad of the herder who had pointed him to an underground bonanza. “He wanted a cut too. The spoils of war are fair game.” The search of IS’s hidden loot

“The problem of the Reformists was—and is—that they want to create a series of changes with little danger while also preserving and boosting the system. But the hope-giving movement of today is free from the shrapnel of political Islam, and this is clear from its slogans. In order to explain what it wants and does not want, this generation of protestors has not resorted to any concept that has a religious or even quasi-religious pedigree, and this is a great accomplishment. This method and path were completely intuitive and arose out of the protestor’s collective wisdom.” And that is not an exception. Whether in Tunisia and Egypt or Libya and Syria, the 2011 uprisings, and later the 2019 uprisings in Sudan and Algeria, did not resort to religious slogans and concepts. “ One of the reasons for this accomplishment is that the current movement, in a completely self-motivated fashion, did not seek any coalition with the present political structure, because fundamentally, it had no relation...

A must read. The debt of Tunisia and Egypt in the 19th century and the colonisation of the two countries by France and Britain The analysis includes a critique of  Ali Coşkun Tunçer‘s chapter  in  Sovereign Debt Diplomacies: Rethinking Sovereign Debt from Colonial Empires to Hegemony.

 تحليل منظمة "الديمقراطية الآن للعالم العربي"

The UK has the oldest, draughtiest and least energy-efficient homes in Europe yet they are ‘fetishised’, says the philosopher Julian Baggini. I like the emphasis on class in an article by the FT.

David Graeber vs Yuval Harari Related The Daw of Everything — a review

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha...

 Humanity’s longer war against darkness

“My wish, perhaps like the wishes of millions of Iranians, is to see that these neglected demands of the diverse social groups and classes in this country are fulfilled, with the least cost to human lives and their material infrastructure and without any interference of foreign powers.” An interview with Asef Bayat

A review of Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

Overview Legacies

by Dilar Dirik