Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A left-wing? It shows how much the term has been stretched. Ahmed Tantawy Related Here is a left-winger who has not called Tantawi a left-winger Another fait accompli for Sisi

Istanbul Appearances

Abraham Accords “were less peace deals than just straightforward trades. In some cases, they were ransoms: unelected Arab leaders would recognize Israel, a state they no longer had any ideological stake in opposing, in return for a significant diplomatic concession. Morocco would enter the accords in return for the United States recognizing their  occupation  of Western Sahara. Sudan would sign their name to the deal in  return  for the United States removing them from the state sponsors of terrorism list. Saudi Arabia, the geopolitical kingmaker of the Gulf Arab states, is gunning for the biggest payout of them all .”

Under the header “They mustn’t forget why they struck down Allende,” the magazine announced in October 1973 that: “The junta has been the victim of a campaign of organised hostility in the west as well as of its own mistakes”. The article continued: “Perhaps the imposition of martial law, the mass interrogations and the summary execution of snipers would not have aroused so much criticism if there were a clearer understanding of the events that precipitated the coup.” The magazines Latin American editor Robert Moss would go on to become a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, who  described  Pinochet as Britain’s “staunch, true friend” and praised the former dictator for having “brought democracy to Chile.” The Economist’s and Britain’s role in the coup of 1973 against Allende Related Liberalism at Large The World According to the Economist

“By the time we arrived in Israel in the early 1950s, the Arabs were the enemy, and Arabic was considered the language of the enemy. I was hugely embarrassed when my father spoke to me in Arabic in the street in front of my friends because I internalized the values of my new society. Everything Arab was considered hostile, foreign, alien, and primitive. What I didn’t understand at the time is that we don’t choose our identity for ourselves. I had a clear identity when I arrived in Israel at age five: I was an Arab Jew. But our identities aren’t informed just by us or by forces that are benign, but sometimes by other forces that are not so benign, as in this case, Zionism. Zionism is about erasing my Arab Jewish identity and giving me a new identity as a new Israeli, with which I’ve never felt really comfortable with. At school, I learned a lot about Jewish history in Europe and about the Holocaust, but I was never told anything about the history of the Jews in the Arab lands. The Ameri...

A long interview with Beydoun , author of  American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear  and   The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. My selection: “ We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.” “The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world…  I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11. What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion peo...

Amnesia.  “The world might not forgive, but wait long enough, the world will forget.” — Leila al-Shami

A hidden universe of suffering 

An excellent article ‘Even when things were at their worst, the majority of Americans were free to say what they thought for the simple reason that they never thought what they were not free to say’. — the atomic physicist Leo Szilard The new orthodoxy

How Arab art embraced cubism

A list of songs which have been banned by the BBC over the years

"But we have to choose whether to treat people all the same or not, whether they are Ukrainians fleeing war, or Africans fleeing war and persecution. Do we treat them all the same or do we treat them according to the colour of their skin?" — the mayor of Lampedusa, Italy  

It is a good revisit, and it always reminds me of a colleague who upon mentioning Orientalism and Edward Said in 2010/11, she said: “that a long time ago,” implying that it became outdated. She too was taken by ‘liberal globalisation’, ‘human rights’, etc.  I still prefer and recommend Vivek Chibber’s and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s approaches, for they show the limitations of Said’s analysis. Hamid Dabashi in his The End of Two Myths has also pinpointed what Said was unable to analyse and incorporate in Orientalism. Furthermore, we should not forget that today there is a whole literature on neo-Orientalism. Why Edward Saïd’s book still matters

Lyrics in English

The open letter makes it clear that these issues are not confined to surgery or anaesthetics but are commonplace. Dr Hilary Williams said there was widespread sexual innuendo when she was a trainee. "It's quite frightening to think that the perpetrators are in some way being protected by current systems - not necessarily deliberately," she added. Related Female surgeons sexually harassed while operating 35,000 cases of sexual misconduct in NHS [alone] in five years We know that  half of women  have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace - this rises to  seven in 10  for disabled women.  One in eight  LBT women have experienced serious sexual assault or rape at work. Four out of five women don’t report the abuse they have experienced. Male violence against women is endemic Sexual violence endemic at UK universities and colleges Pervasive in UK schools

Note:  Gabon mentions the ‘egalitarian principles of the French Republic’. I wish he referred to when in its history the Republic has ever had those egalitarian principles in reality. Gabon does not put the word ‘Islam’ in inverted commas. Is ‘Islam’ one as it is often portrayed or attacked? Does the French state have a problem with the ‘Islam’ of the Saudi monarchy? Does it have a problem with the .’Islam’ of el-Sisi in Egypt?  Did the French state have any problem with Bourguiba’s and Ben Ali’s regimes when they banned the headscarf in Tunisia public institutions and repressed those who broke the law? ******* “Even more surprisingly given the extremist and openly anti-Republican nature of Philippe’s declarations - even former presidential candidate  Marine Le Pen  never advocated anything like this - there has been little reaction from the political class, media, and public intellectuals, with the notable exception of an  open letter  by a handful of acad...

In exchange for a bailout from the IMF

“The internal colonialism thesis was not a plausible explanation of South African apartheid. It could not explain the fact that, by the 1970s, the majority of the workforce employed in modern industrial production in South Africa, such as auto plants, textiles, and steel production, came from the nonwhite sections of South African society that were supposed to be colonized.” Racism was deeply intertwined with capitalism, argues Kundnani

Complicity in extrajudicial killings

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