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The Cunning of Gender Violence in Israel’s War

“We recognize the cruel irony that the very language and discourse of feminism is being used to justify our own elimination as a people by the very powers decrying gendered violence. We must, then, ask the question: What is Zionism performing when it simultaneously rapes and violates our women, mass murders our children and attempts to starve us to death while disciplining us for naming this as genocidal ?”

Every Document of Civilisation is Also a Document of Barbarism

They are Palestinians, not Ukrainians. Even right-wing, pro-Israel, conservative, oligarchic … paper cannot ignore what the UN is saying. “The UN said on Tuesday that more than 12,300 children died between October and February in the Gaza Strip, mostly in Israeli airstrikes, citing its own data and reports from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.  At the same time, the UN’s own calculations show that 12,193 children were killed in fighting in all armed conflicts globally between 2019 and 2022. At least 31,272 people have been killed in Gaza since October last year , according to the Gaza health ministry. Although it is run by Hamas, the ministry’s casualty figures for previous conflicts have been found to be accurate.” And after the killing of white Westerners, it is more if a reason to publish what cannot be ignored. Israel, is now being argued, has to change its way of conducting the war. Israel though has its own logic: a demographic one that complements the territorial...

Conscripts of Western Civilisation

The West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and speak for the world, and an unending politicisation of power. Becoming Western has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thoroughness. For conscripts of Western civilization this transformation implies that some desires have been forcibly eliminated—even violently—and others put in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condition of that transformation—and of its 'higher truth'. — Talal Asad,  Conscripts of Western Civilization , 1992, quoted in Joseph Massad's Islam in Liberalism, 2015, pp. 251-2

Manchester, England: A Progressive Council?

Cancelled then restored  منع "يوميات الإبادة" لعاطف أبو سيف في مانشستر Under pressure from the local Jewish Representative Council, the Manchester’s progressive art centre , HOME cancels a celebration of Palestinian writing A liberal review in the Guardian

On Extremism in UK

We implement extremist policies at home and abroad. We support extremist regimes. We support an extremist super-power. We engage in extremist wars. We sell extremist weapons. We support an extremist genocidal regime. We normalise extremist salaries, extremist wealth, extremist financial sector …  As you know, it's all right to treat ’extremists’ extremely. It's the desire to normalise one’s extremism that makes regimes like the UK’s call their enemies ’extremists’ . When the next violent attack takes place in a Western city they will as usual tell us about ‘terrorism’ re-mobilising their massive media – public and private – to hide their massive state violence in its different forms and shapes – mainly their economic and military violence.

Democracy and Bonapartism

Domenico Losurdo’s new book I have read and I recommend Losurdo’s  Liberalism – A Counter-History . A book praised even by the Financial Times Related Losurdo on social-political struggle Interview on opendemocracy

Sweden: Leve Palestina

Israel is not ISIS

So far, the major imperialist states supporting Israel in its genocidal war have not acted the way they did against ISIS when the latter killed ‘Westerners’. A friend, an ally, a state that is a European colonial creation, one that shares some similarities with the history of the Western colonial, racist and white supremacist history, and a very important geopolitical regime for imperialism in the region is still allowed to kill ‘Westerners’/Western nationals’ . ‘The price is worth it’. After a period of blackouts, the BBC is publishing what cannot be ignored. The criminals are heartbroken upon hearing of the death of three aid workers.

Quote of the Week: The Petit Bourgeois

The democratic petty bourgeois, far from desiring to overturn the whole of society for the revolutionary proletarian, strives for a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as endurable and comfortable as possible for him. —Karl Marx  The bourgeois ... is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be. —Theodor Adorno