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Tunisia’s Solar Ambitions

The Tunisian-British partnership TuNur hopes to build one of the world’s largest thermodynamic solar plants here, on collective lands once home to nomadic groups. TuNur plans to fulfil this ambition by building the world’s largest solar plant. Behind the name are a handful of well-known investors from the City of London who have taken a lively interest in the promise of green finance With persistently high oil prices and mounting supply challenges, Europe has pragmatically tried to speed its transition to lower-cost renewables ‒ by outsourcing. It covets the bountiful sunlight of its southernmost Mediterranean neighbours whose solar potential is among the highest in the world. The country, ensnared in a financial crisis, is struggling to achieve its climate objectives. Many foreign investors are hungry for its solar supply – mostly for export to the North. The electricity-generating mirrors may look green, but they reek of an extractivist Europe greedy for its neighbours’ resources – a...
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Quote of the Week: Blowing the Wax Out of the Ears of the Deaf Western Liberals

  As a comrade has said: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act "violently" in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution. — Leila Khaled quoted by Jodi Dean  
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UK: Starmer is ‘Pro-Business and Pro-Worker’?

Ms Blakeley admits she is writes as a Marxist. It is astonishing that she and the Tribune encourage the fragmentation of social thought . Complicity in crime (with Israel) besides hypocrisy, double standard, war on refugees and descrimination, obscene inequality … are not topics to be included in what is missing in Starmer’s manifesto.   At the time of publishing, I have not yet received a reply by Tribune to my comment.
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Arundhati Roy

Note the distortion by the BBC: “Admirers see her as a leading voice for liberal values and a champion of the marginalised.” Roy is liberal? Celebrated writer faces prosecution
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Israel’s Impunity, France’s Complicity

“Let there be no mistake:  French officialdom is complicit with what is going on in Gaza. Justifying the ongoing genocide, it has given credence, along with the MPs of the ruling majority and often those of the right-wing opposition and the far right too – but also at times the left – all the arguments used to vindicate Benyamin Netanyahu’s government. Economic sanctions, symbolic measures to remove the offending flag from the public eye, athletic boycott in view of the coming Olympics, a weapons embargo, all of these is only used against Russia. When 35% of the country’s exports come to Europe, the use of that economic lever is not even threatened; no more than the suspension of arms deliveries, or their components (the exact value of France’s exports of these is not known) or munitions; nor the slightest attempt to make them obey international law by sanctioning the French firms present in the occupied territories, like Carrefour or Alstom.” Yet the writers could repeat the clich...
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Quote of the Week: The Exceptionalization of the Suffering of the Jews

The exceptionalization of the suffering of the Jews was not a Jewish discursive project but a Western one, part of the exceptionalization of the genocidal violence of the Nazis. In the grand narrative of Western triumph over this ultimate force of evil, the State of Israel became an emblem of Western fortitude and marked the endurance of the Euro-American imperial project. Within this grand narrative, Jews were forced to transform from traumatized survivors into perpetrators. Jews from all over the world were sent to win a demographic battle, without which the Israeli regime could not last. The second and third generations born to this project were born with no histories or memories of their anti-Zionist or non-Zionist ancestors, let alone memories of the other worlds of which their ancestors were part. What’s more, they were totally dissociated from the history of what Palestine used to be and from its destruction. Thus, they were easy prey for a nation-state marketed by the Zionists ...
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Eqbal Ahmad and the Liberation of Palestine

“The more precise comparison, Ahmed argued, was to European settler colonialism in the Americas. With both, there were ‘the myths of the empty land, of swamps reclaimed and deserts blooming … messianic complexes of manifest destinies and promised lands … a paranoid strain in the colonising culture, an instrumental attitude towards violence and a tendency to expand.’ He noted that settler colonies of this kind tend to pursue three goals: some level of independence from their western state sponsors; a normalisation of their relations with neighbouring countries; and a solution to what they consider the ‘native problem’, through the elimination, expulsion or containment of the Indigenous populations. The US could claim it had achieved these goals in the nineteenth century, though Indigenous resistance has never ceased. Israel was still pursuing them in the 1980s and continues to do so today.” Out-organise the enemy!
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