Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Two researchers from Stanford University, Vasiliki Fouka and Aala Abdelgadir, documented and analysed the ban's consequences in 2019. They found that the ban hurt Muslim girls' ability to complete their education and obstructed their access to the labour market. It doubled the gap between the percentage of non-Muslim and Muslim girls completing their secondary education in favour of the former.” Like hypocrisy, double-standard, complicity, racism, commodification, etc, the ban on the headscarf has been normalised . Related The law on theheadscarf The imaginary separatism of salafist women

Jews and the Western elites

Vital services or financial ruin?

Speaking over the radio from Cairo, Ben Barka issued a rousing declaration, denouncing the Moroccan government’s ‘grave treason, not only to the dynamic Algerian Revolution, but, in general, to all Arab revolutions in favor of liberty, socialism, and unity, and to the world national liberation movement in its entirety.’ He  called instead  for Moroccans to paralyze ‘the criminal hands that have appropriated power and that are armed, financed, and led by the imperialists.’ His murder by agents of the Moroccan king with help from France and Israel was a major blow to socialist forces throughout the Arab world . Successive French presidents from De Gaulle to Emmanuel Macron have persistently obstructed justice in the name of  secret défense , a perfectly legal and very effective means of covering up state crimes. By the end of the following decade [1970s], Che Guevara, Henri Curiel, and Amílcar Cabral, key figures in the development of the tricontinental movement, had all be...

“Chomsky and his coauthors argue that machine learning  — the discipline behind generative AI and other powerful algorithms — will ‘degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.’ Chomsky has been fighting against this particular conception since the 1950s, so it’s not a surprise that he thinks it’s problematic for it to be released commercially. It’s less clear that his particular blend of cognitive science and politics can truly account for what ChatGPT and similar systems are up to . A competing  op-ed  from the  Wall Street Journal  penned by now deceased Henry Kissinger — a generational Chomsky nemesis — and coauthors argued that ChatGPT was as important a step as the printing press, with similarly wide-ranging implications for policy, foreign and domestic, and the status of knowledge. In a weird way, Chomsky actually agrees with t...

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for [Arab, Indian and African peoples]. — Aimé Césaire  The bourgeoisie as a class and as an organized social force — one is not necessarily talking here about individuals — will always take the side of reaction against radical change under capitalism and will always stab the working class in th...

“Welcome to the wackier side of geoengineering - deliberately intervening in the Earth's climate system to try to counteract the damage we have done to it .” We? Historical responsibility for climate change is at the heart of debates over climate justice The fault of humanity? The 1% emit more than double of the poorest half of humanity Climate breakdown responsibility

“The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred  on October 7.  The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence that Hamas deliberately and systematically deployed sexual violence as a weapon. And to this day, neither the Times nor any other institution has presented compelling proof to back that explosive assertion.” Full email from The Intercept, 15 March 2024: Over the last few weeks, The Intercept has exposed massive holes in the New York Times’s marquee front-page exposé on alleged sexual violence committed  on October 7. Instead of addressing the gaping flaws in the story and issuing a correction, the Times has launched an internal “witch hunt” targeting employees based on their national origin, ethnicity, and race to track down anyone who may have talked to The Intercept about the story, according to the union that represents the Times newsroom employees. The Intercept is continuing to inve...

At issue is not an accidental, negligible or ‘unfortunate’ streak of racism in the works of a stellar European philosopher.

El Mahala Textile in Egypt has been in turmoil

An interview with Malaika Jabali Correction:  “I feature Frida Kahlo, who was a part of the Communist Party.” She was in the Mexican Communist Party, not the American one.

The colour of economic anxiety

“Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war,  Die Welt  regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war ef...

Verbal gymnastics

Free yourselves from the indoctrination presented to you as innate knowledge. My generation lived through war and fascism. Through this experience, we reached the conclusion that there should never be war again. My generation experienced fascism, which at first we accepted. We didn’t know about what was going on in the concentration camps — there were no Jews in my Pomeranian village, and we didn’t know what was happening to Jewish people. These were all realizations that I had to come to later. It was then that I came to the conclusion that this fascism — which was, of course, also an outgrowth from humanity — had an economic base supporting it. Where did the cannons come from, who built the bombers, who desired this? And who is alive today and profiting from war? Where do new developments come from? Anyone sitting in their car today with their sat nav should be aware that this is a by-product of the production of weapons for war. So, the only advice I can give is to critically qu...

A liberal summary of the political economy of Britain  “Britain has been a  high-inequality, high-poverty nation  for most of the last 200 years, with significant consequences for life chances, social resilience, and economic strength. With the exception of the immediate post-war era, the struggles for share over the last 200 years have been won by the richest and most affluent sections of society, often with the compliance of the state. Under extraction, economic activity becomes detached from new wealth creation, with the boost to profitability and rising corporate surpluses of recent times used to reward executives and investors rather than boost productivity.” *** Unsurprisingly, not a single mention of Britain’s ‘extractive’ capitalism within its functioning as imperialist state, analysing the British economy in isolation of the global economy and global sociology. (e.g. defeat and weakening of social forces/struggle at home and abroad,‘neoliberalism’ as a global for...

 واشنطن والسوريالية

The Intercept reported on how the American Israel Public Affairs Committee delivered a series of donations worth $95,000 to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in the days after he passed $14 billion in military aid for Israel in November. Meanwhile, AIPAC plans to spend upward of $100 million to oust progressive Democratic members of Congress who have dared challenge Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. It’s all part of a yearslong effort to purge any Democrat who dares question Israeli policy from Congress, while elevating the most radical right-wing pro-Israel Republicans. And with 30,000 Palestinians dead and Israel readying a brutal ground assault in Rafah, it’s more important than ever for The Intercept to keep digging to expose AIPAC’s lobbying activity and how the organization leverages its deep pockets to make sure the U.S. continues funding Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. There’s no way to fully understand why the U.S. keeps pouring guns and money into Israel’s barbaric war on...

The reality of the Palestinian struggle

A very interesting article.  Some language is very inaccurate though: “Israel-Palestine confrontation.” (?) Available in English, Français and فارسي