Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sir John Saunders, the chair of the inquiry, said the mosque had displayed "weak leadership" in failing t  address what an expert witness to the inquiry described as a "very toxic political environment" fuelled by conflict and unrest in Libya. Tracey Pook, the Didsbury Mosque's community engagement coordinator, has been monitoring the number of threats the centre has received and said they had been growing by the hour.  "Having compiled the threats and attacks, I've seen people say the mosque should be demolished, that extremists live here, and that the centre is somehow responsible for the murder of children," Pook told Middle East Eye . Words like ‘extremism’, ‘radicalism’ and ‘terrorism’ apply only to describe violence committed by individuals or organisations. Those who monopolise definitions - when they exist – and concepts throughout history are crucial in manufacturing ‘public opinion’ and producing emotive reaction, and therefore, opinions ...

‘Neoliberal’ orthodoxy and authoritarian degradation of public institutions

Trivialising class struggle

How to blow up a pipeline Related Russian navy ships were near the blast

 How $2.5 billion of public money evaporated ‘Heist of the century’ ‘Theft of the century’ Related The story behind Saddam Hussein’s massive bank robbery

Critics of Marx have accused him of imposing a European model of historical development on the rest of the world.

Yemen in crisis Related “Made in France” war in Yemen Yemen in purgatory The Road to War

“ Gurnah’s novels consider the deliberate erasure of African narratives and perspectives as one major consequence of European colonialism.”

“Jacobin, a radical left wing website, uses ‘international community’ and ‘international law’ without even putting them in inverted commas. Israel’s prison system forms an oft-overlooked dimension of its apartheid rule. The treatment of Palestinian prisoners can involve arbitrary detainment, administrative detention without trial, and conditions that the international human rights community has said constitute “cruel and blatant” and even “ sadistic ”  violations  of international law.”

“ A meticulous examination of the messages coming from the spokespersons for and participants in these demonstrations, however, reveals that their true purpose is to turn the clock back far enough so that the apartheid regime in Israel can once again be  marketed as a functioning democracy , allowing the international community to continue turning a blind eye to the crimes it commits.” —  Orly Noy, the chair of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.

A practice that exists in ‘peripheral’ as well as in ‘advanced’ capitalist power relations. Sexual abuse on Kenyan tea farms Related Italy: raped, beaten and exploited Spain: ‘If you don’t want to work like a slave, you’re out’

Main points in this very illuminating piece . To what extent are Nairn’s argument and dissection relevant to today’s Britain?  Britain is … a description of the projection of imperial power out of a core whose boundaries remain misty, miasmic, and amorphous. There is, therefore, something very anachronistic about Britain: it is a nation which seems to exist with one foot in modernity and another in a mutant feudal-imperial past. Scotland had been forced to share an admittedly rather cramped first-class carriage dominated by England — it had  not,  however, been kicked into the luggage hold. The Scottish historian Tom Nairn (1932-2023) proclaimed  that: “Scotland will be free when the last minister is strangled by the last copy of the  Sunday Post .” For Nairn, there was no guarantee of justice in independence, only the possibility. Indeed, the current dominance of a Conservative, rather than a progressive, opposition in the devolved parliament supports this conc...

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“The question is whether the welcome justice mobilization around the horrors he [Putin] has visited on Ukraine will also be applied to crimes committed by powerful Western actors.” Here are the limitations of Reed Brody’s analysis : “ Any state could find a basis in law for almost any action, because ‘for every claim there is a counter-claim, and legalist opposition to war is therefore ultimately toothless ’.” Realists see the basis of global relations in the clash of state power. They are sceptical of ideas like globalisation and sceptical of the idea of international society. For them international law is no more than ‘a moralistic gloss on power politics’. It plays a useful role in obscuring the extent to which power is still the central determinant of how the world works. The US wants and needs international law – consider the issue of patent protection or intellectual property rights, and so on. Yet it also needs its own freedom of manoeuvre. Because the US is the world’s most pow...

British newspapers fall dramatically short Related Barcelona freezes ties with Israel

“A History of California, Capitalism, and the World”?  Even the review does tell us almost nothing about how much Malcolm Harris incorporates ‘the world’ in his book. “ Malcolm Harris’s new book shows how Californian capitalism has thrived by exploiting an unequal world.” Which world? the world from Mexico to China and from Congo to India? Not a world about how the title relates to this world. The review informs us that the book is about California and capitalism. Nick Burns: “Most glaring is the mismatch between the book’s stated purpose and its actual content.  For most of its 700 frustrating pages,  Palo Alto  refuses to be the very thing it insists that it is: a history of capitalism. A “fitting bookend to Harris’s opening, equally earnest assertion that Palo Alto is “haunted” not only by the spectre of communism but also by supernatural forces – hardly suits the sober realism that the book’s subject demands.”

Although many countries rushed to offer co-operation and aid to Turkey and Syria in the immediate aftermath of the quakes, Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London was not optimistic. His research on “disaster diplomacy” suggested that natural disasters did not create peace. “Aside from the logistical challenges of humanitarian aid amid places of violence, experience demonstrates that, sadly, previous enmity tends to supersede saving lives and stopping war over the long term,” Kelman said . ‘Natural’ disasters are not wholly natural and the word natural should be in inverted commas. Disaster-related activities do and do not influence conflict and cooperation

A revolutionary movement without a revolutionary change

‘Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe’

“Then, as now, there’s something particularly vile – if you’ll permit the term – about the US telling its proxy warriors: we must be united in the defence of democracy and freedom against authoritarianism; we’ll arm you, but you do the dying. Oh, and your country will be pulverised in the process. (‘ Armiamoci e partite ’ was a popular early twentieth-century riposte to such militarism.) The similarities don’t stop there. The strongest resemblance between past and present lies in the elite somnambulism bringing us to the brink of world war and nuclear holocaust. It’s simply not the case that if one side is wrong, the other must be right; the negation of a falsehood is not by definition true. Everyone can be in the wrong, everyone can be lying.” Sleepwalking elites