Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The  set of attitudes, values, ways of knowing, and power structures upheld as normative by western colonizing societies and serving to rationalize and perpetuate western dominance:  The end of colonial administrations in the modern world was not the end of coloniality. — dictionary.com

The Internet is not your friend

“While French news corporations have been historically controlled by entrepreneurs in the luxury, defence and telecommunications sectors, they are now being bought by fossil capitalists and  Françafrique  investors. What explains this shift? For one thing, these sectors have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. The fact that the public considers them somewhat passé has not made them any less lucrative. Capitalists like Bolloré have compelling motives to engage in this struggle over public opinion. Since losing his parliamentary majority in 2022, the President has adopted an approach of strategic ambiguity towards the far right, alternately condemning and embracing its ideas.” Fossil media

John Gray is considered an English philosopher.  According to the British journalist Francis Wheen, Gray “has published dozens of increasingly apocalyptic books and articles on the need to end the Enlightenment project forthwith.” Excerpts from ‘ The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses?’ The New Statesman, July 28-August 17, 2023 “The West yearns for Putin to fall. But what happens if the Russian state collapses? If Ukrainian forces nonetheless fail to break through Russian positions, a frozen conflict becomes a realistic outcome. Western support is nearing exhaustion. Deindustrialised societies cannot sustain a protracted conflict when Russia is operating as a fully fledged war economy. The West is staking its endgame on regime change. What if that has the same result as it did in Iraq and Libya?” In the Russian Civil War of 1917-1921 “ Western military intervention involving British and other foreign troops exacerbated the bloodshed. As...

إسرائيل:  قانون السكن الجديد

“When someone questions the virtues of Western liberal democracy, back comes the riposte: ‘Why don’t you try North Korea then?’” “On average, [South] Koreans work 1,910 hours a year, one of the highest rates in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), where the average is 1,716 (1,490 in France, 1,349 in Germany). 60% of Korean employees do not take their full holiday allowance as it is, often because they fear for their jobs “ Being a union leader means at some point going to prison,’ said Yang Kyeung-soo, president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), who received a one-year sentence for organising a strike during the pandemic. His union was set up in 1995, and all 12 of his predecessors have also been jailed. In Korea, the official retirement age is 60, but the state pension is only paid from 65 Over-65s make up half the country’s poor. At Seoul airport, US citizens have their own designated immigration channel. The country ‘hosts’  the US...

A good summary by Hossam el-Hamalawy . I think though that the MEE restricted how much Hossam could write and elaborate. “[Unlike his predecessor Mubarak,] Sisi does not manage dissent; he eradicates it. Rabaa was not just a massacre. It was the founding social contract of Sisi’s new republic.” As of the ‘Western’ support of the Egyptian regime revolves around 1. Israel. 2. We supported Morsi and ‘a democratic process’, but the Muslim Brotherhood was unable to guarantee stability. So, we support whoever can guarantee stability and protect our interests.  More importantly, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces in Egypt had already led the counterrevolution at a very early stage. The Muslim Brotherhood merely accepted the ‘new’ framework, including Morsi’s immediate submission to the American’s imperialism . As Adam Hanieh wrote  in 2012 : “ Many commentators portrayed Morsi’s victory as a significant challenge to SCAF’s domination and an electoral rejection of the Mubarak reg...

D’Eramo is good as usual.  As far as I remember the constant emphasis on your role as an individual in mitigating the environmental crisis has been on for at least 15 years. I was bombarded by the likes of the BBC and the areas where I have worked and lived of messages urging us to take individual actions. Here is the latest example, but it is a French one. Climate crisis and the ‘political class’

  “…the numbers typically attributed to the Tiananmen massacre or the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan were, say, 400 to 800. Here, Human Rights Watch has the names of 817 victims in Rabaa Square, and we say that the likely total count number is above a thousand.” — Kenneth Roth ,  executive director of Human Rights Watch. Documentary on Egypt’s Ra’baa crackdown premiers at Bafta

“ La France est géographiquement comme moralement un pays de fusion et de contraste dans l’unité. […] Elle-même n’est plus qu’une grande mêlée de races, de sang, de langues, de mœurs, de législations, de cultes, qui fond tout ce qu’elle a de divers dans une lente et laborieuse unité. […] La diversité est donc le caractère essentiel et fondamental de la France nationale. […] C’est la pauvreté des autres races nationales de l’Europe, de n’avoir qu’un caractère national   ; c’est le génie, c’est l’aptitude, c’est la grandeur, c’est la gloire de la France, d’en avoir plusieurs.” —Alphonse de Lamartine,  Cours familier de littérature,   volume 2, entretien  VIII , Paris, chez l’auteur, 1856   ; p. 105 sq. “Je suis de la couleur de ceux qu’on persécute   ! Sans aimer, sans haïr les drapeaux différents, Partout où l’homme souffre, il me voit dans ses rangs. Plus une race humaine est vaincue et flétrie, Plus elle m’est sacrée et devient ma patrie.” —Touss...

It can be hard to understand, from the outside, what drives a person to risk their life on a rudder or a rickety boat across the Mediterranean. But the decision comes easy when you have already lost hope, Friday said. Perched on a ship’s rudder

Norman Solomon, a longtime peace activist, explains the magician’s trick.

A secret Pakistan cable

An analysis of related words in 161 languages suggests their shared roots lie in the Middle East – a conclusion that also fits with DNA evidence By  Jason Arunn Murugesu 27 July 2023 The common ancestor of Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by close to half the world’s population, was spoken in the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 years ago, according to an analysis of related words. Indo-European languages, spanning from English to Sanskrit, have long been thought to share a common ancestor. The first linguist to make this link, William Jones, said in a lecture in 1786 that no linguist could examine Greek, Latin and Sanskrit together “without believing them to have sprung” from some common ancestor. But researchers have struggled to agree on the origin story of this so-called proto-Indo-European language, says  Paul Heggarty , who is now at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. There are two main hypotheses, he says. The first suggests that the language orig...

“The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong. In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California,  released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies. Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 leve...

I am not a follower of Arabic pop, but it is good to have an idea of what is produced and what sections of ‘the masses’ watch and listen to.  The article dates back to 2020.  Rotana, youtube, new ‘urban music’ and more

Danny Katch: “Socialism is a society whose top priority is meeting all of its people’s needs, ranging from food, shelter, and health care, to art, culture, and companionship. In contrast, capitalism only cares about any of that basic human necessities stuff to the extent that money can be made of it.” Nathan J. Robinson: “ Because it’s not that capitalism never produces food—you can go to the grocery store—it’s not that capitalism never produces any kind of shelter—you can rent an apartment—it is that it provides it to the extent that money can be made off it, and the moment those human imperatives of the basic needs conflict with the money being made, the money will come above basic needs.” I do not think that is a full explanation; I think it is partially accurate because it forgets that capitalism also provides certain things and maintains others – erosion but not the dismantling of the welfare system, for example – to keep the social peace, and thus the system protects itself from ...

“So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.” ( “Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les sur-passons en toute sorte de barbarité.”) —Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Of Cannibals And that was before ‘the Enlightenment’, the guillotine, colonialism, the genocide of the red Indians, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations, the American civil war, the Russian gulag, the British gulag in Kenya, the Holocaust, the two world wars, 

Expensive submarine sea crossing service  Related Al-Hudood and free speech in Jordan

 ” إن   الناس   يصنعون   تاريخهم   بأيديهم،   ولكن   لا   يصنعونه   على   هواهم .  إنهم   لا   يصنعونه   في   ظروف   يختارونها   هم بأنفسهم   بل   في   ظروفٍ  يُواجَهونَ   بها  ومُعطاة   ومنقولة   لهم   مباشرةً   من   الماضي .  إن   تقاليد   جميع   الأجيال   الغابرة تجثم  كالكابوس   في   أدمغة   الأحياء .  وعندما   يبدو   هؤلاء   منشغلين   فقط   بتغيير   أنفسهم   والأشياء   المحيطة   بهم،   في خلق   شيء   لم   يكن   له   وجود   من   قبل،   عند   ذلك   بالضبط،   في   فترات   الأزمات   الثورية   كهذه   على   وجه   التحديد،  نراهم يلجؤون   في   وجل   وسحر   إلى   استحضار   أرواح   الماضي   لتخدم   مقاصدهم،   ويس...