Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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“By reducing the entirety of its brutal history to the singular crime of the Holocaust, Germany has failed to account for its settler-colonial  violence  against other people and, therefore, has not learnt any lesson at all. “The übermenschentum “mentality is still pervasive, though its existence is officially denied, and thus, its roots have gone unexamined. “We see a deeply-rooted settler colonial mindset in Germany's institutions and organisations that have not been confronted in a century.”

Harris or Trump will soon occupy the most violent elected office in their homeland (and the world). Trump and Harris “are destroying what is left of the democratic institutions of this country.” ‘Democratic institutions’? When were they ‘democratic’?  “ The existing two parties are identical in their genocidal militarism and backing of the Israeli settler colony, with one openly planning its  fascist takeover  of the entire country.”  The 50/60 per cent of eligible Americans who do vote “are conditioned by the commercial logic of their degenerate capitalism to choose between Coke and Pepsi, McDonald's and KFC, Nike and Reebok, Apple and Samsung, or Trump and Harris.” I have always liked Dabashi’s articles . I fear though he is sliding into repeating sentences with different words and tone.

Appearances can be deceiving Related “In the long term, the most debilitating state response to the movement may be neither the imprisonment of leadership or propaganda, but the state’s diversion of attention from social justice to development, that is, from the profound violence of the security state to the easily discussable and putatively separable matter of economic investment.” —Emilio Spadola Justice and/or development

  A liberal approach that ignores class, inequality and uneven capitalist development in the EU and the undemocratic nature of its structure and rule. “ Van Middelaar leaves little doubt of the much lower regard in which he holds the Commission, a useful but humdrum factory of rules, and the Parliament, a windy cavern of words. The Council, by contrast, is the seat of authoritative decisions. The Commission and the Parliament are given to utopian temptations of European federalism, for which he barely hides his scorn… How then does the Council reach its decisions? Behind closed doors, in deliberations of which no minutes are kept, that issue in announcements under the seal of consensus. Van Middelaar supplies a graphic, if tactful, description of the psychological and political mechanisms that generate such consensus. That it is reached far beyond any popular say in the matters so decided, in conclaves where no public gaze is admitted, is not cause for any particular complaint o...

 From the archive The Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East

Even Le Monde Diplomatique calls the ‘Palestinian question’. 1. “In the past few months, conferences have been held in Israel advocating resettlement (especially of northern Gaza) as soon as the territory is ‘cleaned up.” 2. The ‘Order and Clean-up’ programme “ involves the ‘total defeat’ of Hamas, then a process of ‘deradicalisation’; the idea is that evacuating the 300,000 Palestinians still living north of the Netzarim corridor will enable the IDF to establish an unbreakable siege of Hamas in this area, and orders to this effect were issued on 6 October this year. A second stage will trap Palestinian fighters in ‘closed military zones’, forcing them to surrender or starve to death, without regard for any hostages who might be held there. This strategy is already in place at the Jabaliya camp, which has been under siege since 12 October.” 3. “On 3 July the government approved the seizure of nearly 13 sq km of land in the Jordan valley, the largest confiscation of land in the West Ban...

I have put this interesting (and free book) in my reading list.

A reminder: There is no separation between the social relations inside the US and its imperialism.  “The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. *** From a critical take on the American journalist and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates “Convinced that the presumption of inequality and discrimination underpinned the making of the modern world, Du Bois placed his American experience of racial subjection in a broad international context. Remarkably, all the major black writers and activists of the Atlantic West, from C.L.R.James to Stuart Hall, followed him in this move from the local to the global. Tran...

I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?” they would say: “we were playing with the stars.” — Ghassan Kanafani *ليت الأطفال لا يموتون* *ليتهم يرفعون الى السماء مؤقتا* *ريثما تنتهي الحرب* *ثم يعودون الى بيوتهم آمنين !* *وحين يسألهم الاهل محتارين* *اين كنتم ؟* *يقولون فرحين* *”كنا نلعب مع النجوم “* غسان كنفاني   

_ كانت الوحدةُ الأمميةُ للعمال من أهم أفكار ماركس، وهو نفسه قد ساهم في بناء أول أممية حقيقية.... بعد قرنين نجد أن ماركس يمثل بؤرة الخلافات داخل الحركة العمالية وعامِلَ انقسام وتذرر. _ كان ماركس علامةً فارقةً في نقدِ الفلسفة، بل إنه كان قد جسد نقده ذاك عمليًا بالاتجاه نحو العلومِ الاقتصادية والتاريخية لِيُخَصِّصَ لها معظم أعْمالِهِ..... بعد قرنين يُقَدَّمُ ماركس على أنه فيلسوف وتُقَدَّمُ أعْمالَهُ على أساس أنها "الفلسفة الماركسية". _ كان الخيطُ الناظم لأبحاث ماركس هو نقدُ الاقتصاد وتعبيرته النظرية الاقتصاد السياسي، وطبعا ليس من الصدفة أن تكون جُلُّ أعْمالِهِ مُنْدَرِجة تحت عنوانٍ واحدٍ "نقدُ الاقتصادِ السياسي"...... بعد قرنين لا نعثر على ماركس إلا بصفته "رجل اقتصاد" وصاحب "نظرية اقتصادية", بل انهم يتباهون لأنهم يستحضرون ماركس لحل مشاكل الرأسمالية. _ كان ماركس قد كرس كل أعمالِهِ النظرية في سياقٍ واحدٍ ولأجل قضية واحدة هي المساهمة في النضال الثوري ضد النظام الرأسمالي، وكان هو نفسه في محطات كثيرة ومهمة مناضلا داخل تلك الحركة الثورية، وهو الذي ساهم في...

Back to the origins and context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which many if not most people, only have a superficial idea about it or a distorted one. I think Volodomyr Ishchenko provides an excellent approach .

“Many of the world’s wealthiest spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help their preferred candidate win .” An election that  “is on track to be the most expensive in history.”

“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