Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The objective of the US-UK imperialism strikes on Yemen is to stop the disruption to one of the arteries if capital accumulation and support Israel’s goals on its war on the Palestinians. The strikes on the Houthis might actually embolden the Houthis and see they support strengthened .  Everything that was worth striking has been struck by the Saudi coalition in the past nine years,” al-Iryani said, referring to the war waged against the Houthis by a Saudi-led coalition that began fighting the Houthis in 2015 after they had overthrown President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, head of the internationally recognised government. “I don’t think [US attacks on Houthi targets] are going to act as a deterrent to the Houthis,” Raiman al-Hamdani, a researcher at the ARK Group said.

So many Germans did ignore the genocide against the Jews. So many stood by when the Rwanda genocide was taking place. So many have ignored the Rohingya genocide. Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like .

Marco D’Eramo is excellent as usual. ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’ —Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. [See, for instance, David Cameron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s tears] It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion , and has become an indispensable tool of politics. Perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, s...

As “the Israelis and the Americans understand very well, the ongoing discourse on terrorism is not about the victims of ‘terrorism’ but about the ‘perpetrators’ . The fact that state armies more regularly target the very same victims that ‘terrorists’  target, yet are not referred to as ‘terrorists’, clarifies that it is not the act of ‘terrorism’ that defines the actor as ‘terrorist’ but rather the opposite: it is the perpetrator’s conferred identity as ‘terrorist’ that defines his/her actions as ‘terrorist’ in nature. Evidently, the US, Israel and other imperial European countries understand well that the resistance of Palestinians, Algerians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis and other peoples around the world to colonial and imperial invasions and bombings is a legitimate and moral self-defence against imperial and colonial terror, which is why they have to launch political propaganda campaigns and fabrications, and deploy the term ‘terrorism’ to depict such resista...

A liberal view

I wonder why the comparison of the civilian deaths is focused on the civilian deaths during the US-led campaign against ISIS. Is the implication ‘the collateral damage is worth it’? ISIS attacked civilians in ‘democracies’. Hamas attacked ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Both organisations are ‘terrorists’, according to the ‘free world’. Israel’s war on Palestinians in numbers

“ The reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and ‘integrate’ into German society. There is something even more pernicious about misrepresenting anti-Semitism in Germany as a foreign ‘import’, brought to the country by non-white immigrants. This increasingly popular lie obfuscates Germany’s brutal, anti-Jewish history and somehow dumps blame for the suffering of Jewish people onto Palestinians who are victims of a European racist, settler-colonial regime. It also covers up the German society’s anti-Semitic present. Anti-Jewish sentiment still persists in Germany. According to official statistics, the vast majority of documented anti-Semitic incidents are committed by the political r...

“ The threat of violence and instability impels the Chinese state to absorb and resolve disputes through legal and bureaucratic channels in which the state has a monopoly on decision-making and space for interest representation. The criminalisation of yinao reflects such state efforts to maintain social stability. However, the adverse impact of this criminalisation [...] suggests that the inability of formal institutions (for example, laws, courts, dispute mediation commissions) to resolve disputes could give rise to more social unrest.”

A book review Warning: it is a long review, but scathing “Why, after all, is there so little to be found in  PDCI [ The Politics of Decolonial Investigations ]   — and generally throughout the decolonial screeds of Mignolo — concerning the specifics of colonialism itself, its material basis and conditions, not to mention the actual, practically inexhaustible details of its historiography, anti-colonial movements proving no exception to this rule? Whatever the deeper reasons for it, this factual deficit is crucial to the critique and critical decipherment of the jargon of decoloniality — almost as if its terminological extravagances and redundancies and its flat-out rhetorical hubris were ironic compensation for an underlying historical vacuum. Part of the answer will no doubt also reflect the typically contemporary and cosmopolitan purview of more vernacular calls to “decolonize.” While, as a slogan, the latter does not necessarily ignore the historical impact of colonialism o...

“Neutrality as a sacred rule of journalism has repeatedly been  contested in  the U.S., particularly during the rise of social movements like  Me Too  and  Black Lives Matter .  These discussions have returned to the forefront with the reporting on the  U.S.-funded  massacre in Gaza. Not only did mainstream media outlets sideline pro-Palestinian media workers under the guise of objectivity, but they also violated that very principle through consistent complicity in  manufacturing  consent for the unfolding genocide of Palestinians.” Arab journalists are viewed as unreliable storytellers Palestinian filmmaker Bisan Owda – 2023

" This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy . . . and reason veils her face." —Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason” in  The Berliner Tagg,  October 1930 Julia is just one of the faces in the British gutter media Her first question really makes her complicit in crime, ‘encouraging assassination’ as Barghouti said. Full interview

  تَضِيقُ   بِنَا   الأرْضُ .   تَحْشُرُنَا   فِي   المَمَرِّ   الأَخِيرِ،  فَنَخْلعُ   أَعْضَاءَنَا   كَيْ   نَمُرَّ  وَتَعْصُرُنَا   الأَرْضُ .   يَا   لَيْتَنَا   قَمْحُهَا   كَيْ   نَمُوتَ   وَنَحْيَا .   وَيَا   لَيْتَهَا   أُمُّنَا   لِتَرْحَمَنَا   أُمُّنَا .   لَيْتَنَا   صُوَرٌ   لِلصُّخُورِ   التِي   سَوْفَ   يَحْمِلُهَا   حُلْمُنَا   مَرَايَا .   رَأَيْنَا   وُجُوهَ   الذِينَ   سَيَقْتُلُهُمْ   فِي   الدِّفَاع   الأخيِرِ   عَنِ   الرُّوحِ   آخِرُنَا  بَكَيْنَا   عَلَى   عِيدِ   أَطْفَالِهم .   وَرَأَيْنَا   وُجُوهَ   الذِينَ   سَيَرْمُونَ   أَطْفَالَنَا  مِنْ   نَوَافِذِ   هَذَا   الفَضَاءِ   الأَخِير .   مَرَايَا   سَيَصقُلُهَا   نَجْمُنَا .  إلَ...

Arno Mayer (1926-2023)

Israel’s target assassinations

Source: the Financial Times 02 January 2024 Related Visualising Palestine: Gaza

Double standards even in terms of ‘internal law’ and liberal dogma

“There are other times when I seek out the wisdom of those human beings who refused to turn their faces from forms of social terror and found strength to endure.” A good and stimulating interview . Contrary to the title though, the treatment of the relevance of Malcolm X’s ideas in the exchange between Yancy and Sawyer are marginal.  

He is a bourgeois businessman and hypocrite, complicit in crimes against Kurdish, Palestinians and others. “Erdoğan is the quintessential demagogue — he issues challenging statements to the established order while maintaining the status quo. Erdoğan’s denouncements of Israel tend to coincide with periods of heightened violence. But once public outrage declines, it’s back to business as usual .”

And we have our small dreams Such as to wake up healed of disappointment .. We did not dream of impossible things! We are alive, we survive, and we dream on. —Mahmoud Darwish

The genocidal drive to 'exterminate all the brutes' is embedded deep in the US and European leaders’ psyches . Related Source: Internet Archive