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Academic Complicity

“The Western world’s last settler-colonial regime, committed to an ideology born in nineteenth-century Europe, remains remarkably adept at diffusing a story that erases Palestinian humanity,  including in the realm of higher education . Most students, however, no longer buy this Eurocentric erasure – nor does most of the global population.”

Saving Sea Turtles While Killing Human Animals

‘Telk Qadeya’: A Western world that excludes Palestinians from humans They save sea turtles They kill human animals But this is one issue, and that’s another How to become a white angel? Bear half a conscience Fight for freedom movements Eradicate liberation movements Bestow your compassion and tenderness On the killed according to nationality But this is one issue, and that’s another How to become civilised Abiding by all terms and conditions Make all your words righteous Take trees in your arms Sugar-coat titles and names While an army demolishes a nearby school And when caught red-handed … with blood Say everyone’s a victim But this is one issue, and that’s another How can I believe this world? When it talks about humanity Seeing a mother lamenting her child Who died in a raid … hungry Placing the killers on a par with their victims With all honesty and fairness But this is one issue, and that’s another How can I sleep peacefully? Plugging my ears While a family is buried under the ...

UK: Difficult Decisions to Make

Via Tony Morrow on Facebook

It Isn’t About the ‘Bread and Butter’ Issues

As ever, the ‘legitimate concerns’ brigade includes a well-heeled faction of the lumpencommentariat, such as Carole Malone, Matthew Goodwin, Dan Wootton and Allison Pearson. Notably, however, these ‘concerns’ aren’t about the ‘bread and butter’ issues that many leftists seem to think will defuse racist agitation: as I’ve said many times before, it isn’t the economy, stupid. What the two recent moral panics have in common is the coprological image of matter out of place: borders and boundaries eroding and people being were they ought not to be. As was proven when the court revealed that the suspect is a British minor and the riots persisted, it doesn’t matter what ‘the facts’ are: we can’t ‘fact-check’ this phenomenon into oblivion. It would be instructive to ask one of these ‘whiteness’ or ‘Englishness’ rioters what they would have done had the suspect been white. One of the rationalisations of rioters claiming not to be racist was that, because the suspect killed children, he was not ...

Britain’s Far Right Feeds Off Mainstream Political Racism

“The violence of the last week has been unusually vicious and frightening, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Fourteen years of Conservative rule have seen minority communities used as a scapegoat for worsening inequality time and time again. The history of institutional racism in Britain goes back much further, but you could begin the most recent version of this story at the introduction of the Hostile Environment, a set of policies that aimed to make Britain feel inhospitable… Labour right must also take its share of responsibility. New Labour helped to embed the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 years, with new, stronger powers of policing and surveillance and campaign literature that demonized asylum seekers. Keir Starmer appears to be taking up this mantle… Just this week, Sarah Edwards, the Labour MP for Tamworth, referred to the town’s Holiday Inn as an “asylum hotel” and said that the town’s people wanted “their hotel back.” Days later it was set alight by the far rig...

My Own Complicity in Crimes

A report Related Largest UK pension fund

Quote of the Week: ‘Do Not Listen to This Imposter’

 The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellowmen, ‘Do not listen to this imposter. — Jean Jacques Rousseau,  Discourse on the Origin of Inequality  (1754) 

The Myth of Middle East Exceptionalism

“Inspired by critical postcolonial/decolonial studies and the interdisciplinary perspectives of social movement theories, gender studies, Islamic studies, and critical race theory, it problematizes and demystifies the many faces of the myth of ‘cultural exceptionalism’ in the context of contemporary MENA social movements.” Unfinished Social Movements