Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Over the last eight years, but especially during the Biden administration, core aspects of Trumpism have been institutionalised. Let’s take a look at the record. First, the ‘China problem’ identified by Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, became a bipartisan obsession. It is now hegemonic to the extent that Harris attacked Trump from the right on this issue during their debate, condemning him for having ‘sold us out’ by selling chips to China. (He, in fact, limited sales of chips to China.) Second, economic nationalism – including protectionism, stimulus and a domestic industrial policy – was embraced far more vigorously by Biden than Trump. Ironically, he was enabled in this by pressure from the Sanders left, just as Trump was inhibited by pressure from the Republican right. Third, the far right’s borders agenda has been adopted uncontested, and now forms a major plank in Harris’s platform. Fourth, in all essential ways, Biden adopted Trump’s foreign policy. The withdrawal from Afghanist...

“[ I]nvocations of human rights and humanitarian intervention are selective.” It s like the West’s selective reading of history . “It can be difficult to understand why there was ever so much faith in such an order” – the international liberal order preached in and after Nato’s ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. “[N]o Western government has invoked R2P [the Right to Protect] in response to ethnic cleansing campaigns in Sudan, Nagorno-Karabakh or Gaza.” “[A]s the British political scientist Richard Sakwa has stressed, Russia’s aversion to R2P was not because Vladimir Putin is ‘the crude defender of sovereignty as so often presented’, but rather the West’s selective deployment of it .” (My italics N.M.) “[W]ill the death of the liberal order clear the way for a more democratic, accountable and egalitarian world?” I am not optimistic. One of the reasons is that articles like Lynch’s are so critical and an antidote to amnesia, a help for students, etc. but does not delve into structu...

‘Mouthpieces’ of Israel The article in Arabic

A report by EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency It reminds me of a Belgian student from last year when he said: “We are in the free world.”. Whatever happens in the world a few people will remain fundamentalist liberals unable to question. One in two Muslims in the EU face racism and discrimination in their daily life

Thanks to Justin Schlosberg for this brief, but good article .

It is business as usual at the neoliberal university

Israel’s reservists, targeting lists and indiscriminate destruction

While one can understand that the positive reactions to the assassination by Syrians opposed to the Syrian regime are a form of revenge because of Hezbollah’s complicity, the context surrounding the current moment, matters. We have to be clear, Israel’s war against Lebanon is not to promote the freedom of Syrians or any other population in the region suffering from authoritarian states. With this in mind, Palestinians and Lebanese people have the right to resist Israel’s racist, colonial apartheid state violence, including through military resistance. This includes the right of Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the main actors involved in the armed confrontation with the Israeli occupation army, to resist.” Joseph Daher explains why celebrating Israel's assassination Hezbollah's Nasrallah is short sighted when it comes to Syrians’ struggle against Assad's regime.

Total war and cold war have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity. Even worse: they have made barbarity seem unimportant, compared to more important matters like making money. —Eric Hobsbawm

In line with his view that holiness was totally separate from the material world, Leibowitz denied that the  Land of Israel  was holy and that the Jews had a special right to it, writing that "the idea that a specific country or location has an intrinsic 'holiness' is an indubitably idolatrous idea" and that "talk of rights is pure nonsense. No nation has a right to any land." In a 1968 essay titled "The Territories", Leibowitz postulated a hellish future: The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire ...

A staunch supporter of Israel. Back in 2015, Richard Seymour wrote: “From the Guardian to the Express, from the New Statesman’s craven toeing of the Blairite line to the lies in supposedly neutral dailies like the Metro, from the Sun’s made-up “exclusives” to the queue of Labour MPs and liberal pundits lining up to spew bile for the Daily Mail, from Tory attack ads to the Telegraph screaming for Corbyn’s head, the media and the political class have near-total unanimity in their ferocious anti-socialism. I know we call them “the bourgeois media,” but not even the most crass, petty-minded Stalinist apparatchik could have produced a caricature as venomous and despicable as our lot. You can’t understand the reasons for this in simple commercial terms. It isn’t about securing advertising accounts or selling copy. Nor is it simply about the short-term interests of their proprietors. It is primarily about their integration into the party-political machinery. It is about their dependence on, a...

NGOs use tax-free donations to fund Israeli military equipment Révélations : comment nos impôts financent des drones pour l'armée israélienne

 From Paris to Tehran

“[T]he Saudi state has been globally  celebrated , including by international  institutions . And this is no surprise – the gender reforms announced by the state, and formulated with the help of  consultancy firms , largely align with the United Nation’s  women’s empowerment agenda , which adopts a liberal model of gender equality that works to include ambitious women within the existing capitalist order, leaving its structural inequalities intact. What is obvious from these celebratory accounts is that gender reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost always discussed only in relation to  Saudi  women, rendering their implications for non-citizens invisible.” As of 2022 more than  foreign female servants and house cleaners alone numbered more than 1 million . “ This calls for a broader reflection on what emancipatory possibilities are foreclosed by liberal feminist justice frameworks that seek autonomy and equality for some, within unequal structures, rather ...

‘His death will not defeat Hamas’

“Didn’t ‘we’ [Britain] leave them with a viable country, functional state and infrastructure. What more do they want and when will they take responsibility for their own shortcomings?” a British journalist asks on Twitter.  Key points: “ There has been a historical tendency to separate matters of the economy from the political process in analysis and reporting on Sudan (and in Africa more generally).” “[T]he failure of the civilian technocratic government to disband the economic and political project of the Islamist military establishment. “Sudan’s 2018 revolutionary imaginary, fluid and expansive, was brought into being through the uprising’s main slogan: ‘Freedom, Peace and Justice’. In all of their iterations, these three words came to mean different things for different groups subject to violence and marginalization by the state in different ways. “In large part driven by externally supported processes, the importance of labor-based identities in shaping political struggle has ...

A review of Class War: A Literary History

 4 episodes with Antony Loewenstein and his guests

Israel is a unique case in the Middle East; it is financed by imperialism without being economically exploited by it… It is obvious that the readiness of the US government to forward these sums [of money] depends on what it gets in return. In the particular case of Israel this return is not economic profit. —The Class Nature of the Israeli Society by Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover and Akiva Orr, NLR Jan/Feb 1971 During the 1990s … there emerged, perhaps for the first time, a major cleavage within the elite. On the one hand, there is the ‘reactionary’ Zionist faction which hopes to freeze the world of yesterday. On the other hand, there is an increasingly powerful, ‘progressive’ faction, which seeks to ‘normalise’ the country, yet whose commitment to such normalisation weakens as its investment outside the country increases. This ruling class conflict doesn’t bode well for most Israelis, and for the Middle East as a whole. — Nitzan and Bichler The Global Political Economy of Israel , 2002...