Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

المصدر :  الشارع   المغاربي  -  العدد   263 تونس   13   يونيو / جوان   2023

Note that there is no reference to the genocide in Congo. The museum’s relationship with Congo Related Belgium’s Colonial Legacy Belgium’s role in Rwandan genocide

Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression . Related Longing for crusades Sleepwalking elites

The CIA does not know (?)

Companies are scared to sell medicine to Iran

This is very stimulating and requires focus, and the exchanges are also very engaging. I couldn’t read everything although the topic is so important to most of us. 

The ideologization of war

“The world has done very little to help the Rohingya”

Precious words written more than four decades ago, but they are still relevant. “So, if I may bring to bear upon your problems the opinion of a foreigner – a foreigner who knows your history and the social and cultural structures of your countries well, but a foreigner nonetheless, however sympathetic to your aspirations – I would like to make an appeal. Firstly, I appeal for lucidity. Myths may be useful for certain mobilizations, but they end up by mystifying, blinding and misleading the very people who manipulate them. To retreat into myths, especially the use of the past to elucidate today’s problems, is another sign of weakness. If forceful ideas are needed to guide action, let them be as close to reality as possible. Secondly, I appeal for open-mindedness. I have already said that societies which turn in on themselves and on their particular problems are dying, static societies. Living, progressive, dynamic societies are not afraid to borrow in order to get down to the task of fo...

“The regime’s endurance is not simply a result of its authoritarianism; its popularity runs much deeper than that. To understand it, we must grasp three major factors that most commentators and opposition politicians refuse to recognize.” On the Turkish elections

The key to China’s  development since 1949 lies in the vast countryside, but the country’s rulers are still reluctant to discuss the darker side of the land reform.

“ The key to understanding ‘what Putin really wants’ is not cherry-picking obscure phrases from his speeches and articles that fit observers’ preconceived biases, but rather conducting a systematic analysis of the structurally determined material interests, political organisation, and ideological legitimation of the social class he represents.” Related Political capitalism of the US

Saudi Arabia  was Canada’s  top customer for military goods after the  United States  in 2022

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world

  Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

  من أول الروايات التي قرأتُها وأثرت في تفكيري كثيرا، خاصة أنني شخصيا تعرضتُ لبعض التعذيب بعد سنوات قليلة من قرائتها،  كانت رواية منيف "شرق المتوسط". للأسف لم أقرأ "مدن الملح" بعد. عبد الرحمان منيف

“Although the film cannot be simply categorised as working-class cinema - it is, after all, a commercial film intended primarily for a comparatively bourgeois international audience and international festivals - it is not bourgeois either. It clearly centres on the perspective of the urban, struggling poor, and it successfully imposes this viewpoint, rather than making a plea for it. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with Ali, but Ali is not rehabilitated for the bourgeois eye.” A man whose burning anger suggests little has changed for ordinary Tunisians

Algeria: Primary schools to teach English in 'overdue' move away from 'colonial' French French is on the verge of disappearing in Morocco “Algerian children will be left unable to academically master a single language due to the lack of provisions for this transition into English in schools.”  Moving from French to English won't resolve the country's problems

Accessing the full review requires a subscription – an institutional subscription, for example. Apart from what is available, I have added the following: A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”). T...