Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Although Challand is right to address the use of cultural activities in supporting political messages and mentions some of the positive achievements of the period, he is insufficiently critical of the weaknesses of the programs and policies militants proposed for the future. Revolutionary leadership was missing: the negative slogan of getting rid of the existing political system required a positive vision about the kind of society and polity with which demonstrators wanted to replace it. As many of Challand’s ideological references are Marxist, the absence of any discussion of the major issue of the movements’ lack of alternative economic programs, and in particular the fact that there was no explicit challenge to dominant neoliberal economic policies, is surprising. In other words, there is little reference to the economic structures that determine political choices and constrain outcomes. Helen Lackner reviews Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprising Related The Arab Thermido...

“Any supposed peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, always more talked about than experienced by voters in the UK, was now over, Shapps argued. We are not in a ‘post-war world’ but a ‘pre-war world’, the defence secretary told his listeners.”  “In a phrase worthy of Dr Strangelove, he said that we cannot assume that ‘the strategy of mutually assured destruction that stopped wars in the past will stop them in the future’. “The majority of its [Britain’s] citizens have had more sense than to approve the imperial follies of the post-Cold War hot wars.”  I am not sure about that. Rees must provide evidence. John Rees is from the Socialist Workers Party. Publishing on the Middle East Eye means Rees and MEE have to replace the term imperialist with ‘imperial’ and neocolonial power with ‘post-colonial power’ .

No surprise here, but good for the record. Complicity in crimes comes in different colours and shades. The Intercept: A comprehensive new analysis by The Intercept has revealed the full extent of the pro-Israel bias in three of America’s most influential newspapers: the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. These disturbing findings show directly how mainstream media coverage dehumanizes Palestinians and devalues their lives.  For instance, during the first six weeks of the war, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli ones, Israelis were mentioned at a rate of  16 times more  per death than Palestinians. Highly emotive terms like “slaughter” and “massacre” were used 60 times more often to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians. A similar analysis of cable news coverage by the same authors found an even more extreme anti-Palestinian bias. The U.S. news media’s refusal to recognize Palestinian humanity is directly abetting the...

It is a pattern. “Counter-terrorism training provided by American mercenaries to Emirati officers in Yemen has been used to train locals who can work under a lower profile - sparking a major uptick in political assassinations, a whistleblower told BBC Arabic Investigations.” Here only some examples: US trained butchers of Timor, Indonesia Human rights violations by the CIA Learning to kill by proxy The crimes of the US in Indonesia, Afghanistan and Guatemala The School of the Americas – a report From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington man behind brutal police squads Israel? It would be anti-Semitic to say that it has carried out political assassinations. Rogue State   by William Bloom

A summary by Middle East Eye

In a nutshell, the climate  negotiations “are predicated on a contradiction: the task of agreeing a programme of radical global economic transformation is allocated to those – including, this year, a record 2,500 fossil fuel industry representatives – who stand to lose the most from disrupting the current economic model. For the most influential in these negotiations – the titans of finance, energy giants, and the wealthy states who protect their interests – the solution to this dilemma is to find a way to transform the foundations of global capitalism, from energy to agriculture and from transport to industry, while preserving everything else about its social relations and overarching dynamics. Theirs is necessarily a future in which the transition to a decarbonised and ecologically sustainable economy implies no trade-off with continued growth, profit maximisation, private ownership or accumulation: in short, from fossil capitalism to a green capitalism. For some, green capi...

A poem by Kos Kostmayer

Emmeline Pankhurst, probably the most venerated in the mainstream British media, defended the presence and reach of the British Empire:  Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance. For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. —Quoted in Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography , London 2002, p. 312 Why is a London School of Economics’s building named after her?   There is a Memorial of her in Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster

“ Late modernity is a capitalist modernity , which, as a permanent process of rationalisation and secularisation, constantly gives rise to what  Georg Lukács  called ‘transcendental homelessness’. Modern humans have lost any spiritual sense of meaning. For Lukács, reading novels was one way of dealing with this problem. One can immerse oneself in literature and imagine a different world. Today, the growing numbers of esoteric communities and other forms of spiritual sense-making indicate there is considerable demand for transcendence. The rise of libertarian authoritarianism is also a consequence of the weakness of the left and social movements. It has often lost its anti-establishment appeal. Many people no longer see the left as sufficiently critical of the state and the media. It is no longer seen as a legitimate representative of a collective criticism of power and a productive counter-knowledge. Social movements such as  feminism  and the anti-nuclear movement h...

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?