Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Earlier this year, we noticed something strange about our website traffic:  The number of people coming to The Intercept from stories shared on Facebook had fallen off a cliff. In a single year, our Facebook traffic dropped by a whopping 53 percent. The number of visitors  from our own Facebook page  dropped by 83 percent. This drop-off is being felt across the industry, confirming what we’ve long suspected:  Facebook has changed its news feed algorithm to suppress links to legitimate news sources like The Intercept.  Fewer readers means fewer donations — and for a nonprofit news outlet like us, that’s a serious issue. Our ongoing investigations of corporate corruption, government malfeasance, and the dark money pouring into 2024 elections simply depend on reader support… Facebook has been gradually throttling hard news for a while — replacing it with content that’s upbeat and advertiser-friendly.  But what we’ve seen this year is unprecedented.  In th...

Does Kissinger require rehabilitation? Related Henry Kissinger in the Middle East

Priorities of a ‘neoliberal’ regime

Nobody in Fass Boye seemed to blame the migrants for taking the risk. More than a third of the country lives in poverty, according to the World Bank. The young see few opportunities at home. "Macky Sall sold the ocean," said Assane Niang, a 23-year-old fishing captain, referring to the Senegalese president. Fishermen in Fass Boye say the government has granted too many licences to foreign trawlers, which overfish their waters and deplete the catch. “Barcelona or death”

I have not read any Kenyan novel. This account is illuminating and encouraging to explore “East Africa’s leading novelist.” Sarah Jilani on Ngũgĩ’s vision

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “ the Melilla massacre ”. “I suppose we weren’t human any more, we were just like animals.” —Basir, a 24-year-old Sudanese man

A failed attempt to boost Israeli propaganda

Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution

“Speaking to the BBC, the city's health director, Hatem Al-Sharif, said more than 700 unidentified people, including young children, have been buried in unmarked graves on the outskirts of Sfax since the beginning of this year.” a Sudanese man, Adel Adbullah, said: "I fled from war. I don't think I will see any worse at sea than I already have. I have nothing to lose ."

   قصيدة للشاعر المصري أمل دنقل

Pertinent. “This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postul...

“Sparking increased profits and growing inequality, sanctions facilitated a structural transformation of the Iranian economy that favoured those who control capital.” The poor are hurt most, the richest get richer

One has to wonder whether CLR James’s critical essay/talk has anything relevant to the uprisings since 2010-2011. The essay was originally published in 1982

 Excerpts According to Will Lloyd , The director is a mass entertainer with an elitist disdain for the masses. In his films, order and hierarchy reign supreme. Nola went to Haileybury College…  A prison… though with better hymns, and one where the prisoners eventually graduate as prison guards.” “Survive your first two years at Haileybury,” claimed RAF group captain Peter Townsend, “and you could survive anything.” Haileybury was a finishing school for a dead Empire. Nolan never slept well there. This was the early Eighties; he believed the world would soon end in a nuclear holocaust. In the dormitory each evening he would lie in his bed after lights out listening to the scores for  Star Wars , Stanley Kubrick’s  2001 , or Vangelis’s score for  Chariots of Fire  on his walkman.” Nolan’s fastidious character hints at a pre-21st century moral seriousness… Nolan believes in deadlines and careful resource allocation. He considers efficiency “a form of cont...

“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