Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“As a historian of the Ottoman Empire with Palestinian and Lebanese roots, I truly believe it is no less than a crime to keep millions of people disconnected from their own recent past , from the stories of their ancestors, villages, town, and cities in the name of protecting an unstable conglomeration of nation-state formations. The people of the region have been uprooted from their historical reality and left vulnerable to the false narratives of politicians and nationalist historians. It is … important to understand why, more than 100 years since the end of the empire, the erasure of the deeply rooted and intimate connections between the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Europe continues, and who benefits from this erasure.”

“At its peak, the uprising attracted global media coverage, which tended to reduce it to a liberal feminist struggle for legal rights already enjoyed by middle-class white women in the Western world.” “ Over 90 percent of national industries have been sold to the private sector…” “80 percent of workers’ employment contracts have become temporary.” According to the  the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA)  report of 2022 , 95 percent of workers in Iran are on fixed-term contracts. “At this point, state intervention is limited to repression aimed at protecting the interests of the capitalists closely tied to the regime.” “Iran ranks 102 in the world in workers’ safety.” The reason Workers at Crouse manufacturer of car parts are on “extremely low wages lies in the fact that women make up 70 percent of the company’s labor force.  They must work on their feet for 10 hours per day, and the use of cell phones is prohibited..” Protest and labour struggle Related Protesting Clerical ...

“Both Hindutva and Zionism draw on ancient mythology to exert their statehood and entitlement to land and power. They both instrumentalise religion to justify their perspectives. Because it is in Palestine and Kashmir that the outcomes of Zionism and Hindutva are most visible. The Indian occupation and the Israeli occupation are not the same, but once again, they share many similarities.” The past and present of the Indian-Israeli relations

ما زال الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام Related ‘Go, go, Assad’: Protests in Syria’s Suwayda الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام

I don’t expect from Andrew Harding and the BBC’s international editor to add a bit of historical context, mainly the working of political economy of the 200 years that emerged in Western Europe then imposed on the rest of the world.  “ After all, Western nations have, for decades, devoted significant energy and cash towards supporting health services, businesses and governments across the continent.”  Putting aside the difference between nation and state and who really did what they did in particular contexts and conjunctures, the obvious is that why then Africa is still in a dire situation. The explanation, people like Harding would like us to put forward, is the same we have heard hundreds of times before: ‘It is their fault, those Africans’, ‘it is in their culture’, ‘they don’t know how to implement the right capitalism’… Harding would be more satisfied if he added NGOs, ‘aid’, ‘free market’, ‘human rights’, etc. Note also how in the title both China and Russia already hav...

“The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.” —Tony Blair Iraq at twenty

An interview with the editor of the book Samer S. Shehata

HRW:  the violence is part of a 'widespread and systematic pattern of attacks'

 Why I support the ban

 هل هي معاداة للحب أم معاداة للجنس كمحرم من المحرمات؟  أليس القمع الجنسي أداة من أدوات السلطتين السياسية والدينية في ديمومة العلاقات السلطوية في المجتمع الجزائري مثلا؟ ألا يتشابك القمع الجنسي  وتقنينه  بقمع الدولة؟  ألا يتشابك القمع الجنسي بتحريم نقد الدين؟ من سخرية الواقع أن كاتب المقال أو القدس العربي أو ربما كلاهما لا يملكان جرأة الكاتب والباحث السوري  بو علي ياسين قبل خمسين سنة.

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...