Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Against amnesia “Consider the rhetoric in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The swagger and liberal triumphalism. The arc of history bends towards progress and enlightenment. The world is flat. Market-driven globalisation is inevitable. No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other. Economic liberalisation will lead to political liberalisation. The kaleidoscope has been shaken and now is the time to reorder the world.” Note though that when writing about the ‘Iraq war’, Jason Cowley is ‘Western centric’. He is more concerned with his compatriots killed in an ‘unjust’ war .

Entretien avec Claude Serfati

But did we really have to wait for an event like the war on Gaza to realise that ‘European philosophy has been ethically bankrupt’? “Those of us outside the European sphere of moral imagination do not exist in their philosophical universe. Arabs, Iranians and Muslims; or people in Asia, Africa and Latin America - we do not have any ontological reality for European philosophers , except as a metaphysical menace that must be conquered and quieted.  Beginning with Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and continuing with Emmanuel Levinas and Slavoj Zizek, we are oddities, things, knowable objects that Orientalists were tasked with deciphering. As such, the murder of tens of thousands of us by Israel, or the US and its European allies, does not cause the slightest pause in the minds of European philosophers.” The unfinished project of Enlightenment

And across the country, Congolese wonder whether Tshisekedi will leave office quietly if he is not voted in today— as a report by Human Rights Watch put it , the threat of election-related violence threatens to undermine the democratic process. How could one even talk about ‘the democratic process’ in the Congo? Related An in-depth analysis:  Africa's Leaky Giant

   ما هو دور الثقافة في عالم استعماري رأسمالي؟ بلغة أخرى: هل يدعم الاستعماريون والرأسماليون الثقافة بطريقة بريئة؟ عن انحياز

Au lieu de a book In one sense, there is nothing extraordinary about this Zionist brutality. It is not, in its geo-political structure, very different from other imperialisms with which it shared during the 19th and 20th centuries. Of course Israel came to play a unique role in the world: its colon status on behalf of England and the United States marked a considerable aspect of its future course. But in its sense of entitlement to the land, resources and lives of another people, it merely replicated the horror of European and even American assumptions of superiority and secularized “divine right.” Crimes and state terror committed by the British and American imperialisms, the Zionist organisations, the ‘United Nations’ and the state of Israel

“ Mr Trump's victory was a broad one as well. He won the young and old, men and women. He also won over the evangelical and hard-right conservative voters he had difficulty winning in 2016.” Background What liberals get wrong about Trump’s support

Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, based in Qatar, conducted a poll of 8000 Arabs in 16 Arab societies . One of the results is: “67% of the polled agreed that Hamas attack on 7 October was ‘a legitimate resistance operation’.  If the poll is really reflective, it means there are so many ‘terrorists’ in the Arab societies and ‘the free world’ has a bigger task in eradicating them, which means it is ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ are to blame, it is in their history and character, they really hate ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and therefore they ‘hate us and they are against our values’, and the ‘war on terror’ must indeed be an endless war.

Extremism The world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes to $869bn (£681.5bn) since 2020, while the world’s poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – have lost money.

Highlights from Jason Hickel 1)  Compensation for atmospheric appropriation .  This is my top highlight. We show that rich countries have already dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C and are rapidly appropriating the fair-shares of others, forcing them to mitigate faster than would otherwise be required. In a scenario where all countries aim for zero emissions by 2050, rich countries will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. In  Nature Sustainability . 2)  Climate change and racial justice .  Rich countries and elites are overwhelmingly responsible for excess emissions, but communities in the global South—and Indigenous and racially minoritized groups within nations—face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change. The climate crisis is a process of atmospheric colonization, and the consequences are playing out along colonial lines. Ma...

I have just had a discussion with a student, a white English guy, at a London elite university. The discussion was brief, but ‘development’. The student believes that ‘development’ means, among other things, that ‘other countries would eventually catch up’ with the West. When I asked him about the functioning of capitalism , uneven development, monopoly of technology, power relations, imperialism, increase in inequality , domination, perpetuating oppression etc… and whether they study that, he openly expressed his indifference. When I said students at elite institutions are trained to manage the system, to be advisors to some governments, to follow the dictats of the international financial institutions– and of course to obtain a degree, have a ‘good’ job, open a family, etc – he immediately admitted: “Yes, I don’t care about the rest.”  The entire Ivy League should be razed to the ground Related What is PPE?

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the erudite and much misunderstood Zionist leader who posthumously became the founding father of the Israeli right (one of his closest aides, Benzion Netanyahu, was the father of the current prime minister) in his famous 1923 essay : My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent. The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North A...

"[I]n large measure," as Geoffrey Parker has observed, " 'the rise of the West' de­pended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former;. . . [T]he key to the Westerners' success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution.' " The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution.  The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or  religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. W...

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...