Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 A Short Guide to Marx’s Capital   in 150 pages A book by Colin Chalmers

David Lay Williams’s contribution “inverts the common conservative argument that arguing against economic inequality is somehow contrary to the thrust of classical Western thought. If anything, it’s the casual and lazy dismissal of concerns with economic inequality that constitute an intellectual deviation and decline from the norm.” Note how a universal topic like economic inequality does not include non-Western thinkers from China to India, from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. Williams just restricted his research to Western European thinkers. The reviewer himself mentioned a couple of non-white intellectuals and activists, but not a single non-Westerner came to his mind.

‘ Houthi Hunting Club. Red Sea 2023-2024’

“The Israeli authorities’ organized, violent displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, who are members of another ethnic group, is likely planned to be permanent in the buffer zones and security corridors. Such actions of the Israeli authorities amount to ethnic cleansing .”

A retired NHS surgeon returns from Gaza with a testimony

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”. There are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it  [sic].           —Aziz Al-Azmeh,  Islams and Modernities  

Israel has reached an unimaginable peak of evil. And indeed many people all over the world find it hard to imagine that this is so… The only possible conclusion must be that Israeli evil has nothing to do with Judaism and that what is manifested in Israeli behavior is not Jewishness. It is pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism and should be treated as such.“ — Nurit Peled-Elhanan , Israeli academic and author

“We are living through a moment when the ‘F’ word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism lurks everywhere.”  Alberto Toscano “reminds us that liberalism is no enemy of fascism , and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism.”

French police violence

“Liberals are losing their minds and blaming Muslim, Arab, and anti-genocide voters for the outcome. They refuse to take the responsibility.” "Liberals jump for 'women's rights' but refuse to listen to the voices of Palestinian women who suffer under the occupation.”  Liberals, and a few conservatives, have waged a jihad ‘to save Muslim women from brown Muslim men’ in Afghanistan and Syria (think Yazidi women, for example), LGBT people in the MENA region, the ban on the headscarf in France, etc. now they can see how Palestinian women have been liberated once and for all: we have less of oppressed Muslim women wearing the headscarf. What the IDF has achieved in a year, Western missionaries and liberal jihadist have been unable to achieve in decades. Expand: liberals and capitalist exploitation, dispossession, racism, etc. Related Martin Kettle on the Guardian  blames the voters “Kettle cannot hold back on his bitterness toward US voters - a very liberal take on the Demo...

Just another news item “ And large areas looked like Stalingrad after the Second World War.” —  Jan Egeland,  the head of aid organisation Norwegian Refugee Council Comparing Gaza destruction to Stalingrad? This a vase for the German regime to protest against the UN? How dare you compare the destruction of Gaza to Stalingrad, especially that we are helping the Israeli army in this destruction? The UK paper The Telegraph, echoing Madeleine Albright, would say that ‘the price is worth it.”

This is only one of the ways and it should not be the only one. The twentieth-century anti-fascist movements from Germany to Spain to Chile also have many lessons to learn from. Change won’t come through conventional politics but by circumventing it

Maersk –  a publicly traded, family-controlled company – “ has made almost 1,000 shipments of goods to the Israeli military through Algeciras [Spain] since the embargo announcement.” That is why the Israeli football fans did not observe a minute of silence in Amsterdam game.

“[W]e did not join the cries of liberals, Native or not, calling upon our People to vote in order  to ‘Save Democracy,’ and during an election where both Presidential candidates are complicit in carrying out genocide in Gaza– an assault on life that has only been possible due to US financial and military support, despite not having the support and consent from the majority of US citizens. “The so-called threats to democracy, marked by “the rise” of white supremacy and facism, is narrative gaslighting that ignores that these values have served for the foundation of this country all along, and have been effectively woven in the very fabric of our government and economic institutions since the colonization of our homelands.” NDN Collective

In 2016 “the Trump presidency had seemed unlikely to many of us then, but Fitzgerald, among others on the anti-fascist left, had an acute awareness that we could not rely on establishment politicians as a bulwark against oppression. Now, let’s compare this: “ There is an urgent need for social justice movement organizing, growing unions and union power, antagonism rather than acquiescence to existing power structures, and expansive networks of care and support. The most powerful social movements of  the last decades did not primarily build on support from Democratic leadership under Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden. Nor did they collapse during Trump’s first tenure…  There’s no one way to plug in to today’s interconnected struggles. The Palestine solidarity  movement , which also  challenges  U.S. hegemony and colonial power structures…” with the ‘revolutionary leftist’, tribalism and parochialism, and continuing illusion in the Democratic Party in...

“Israel's colonial hubris regards having the  ability  to reshape the Middle East through mass violence being fed by the autocratic nature of the Arab states and the failure of the democratic movement in the region.” Egypt and Syria are singled out in the article.

Politically and intellectually bankrupt

Europe’s longest-held political prisoner

“For decades, I asked such intellectuals and academics with pretensions of worldliness how they could only consider the Democratic or Republican Party's policies on domestic matters, which affect some 345 million Americans, versus global matters that affect eight billion people. The answer consistently boils down to the fact that both parties pursue imperialist policies around the world. Since the only variation in their programmes relates to domestic issues, it becomes necessary to vote for the ‘lesser evil’  and defend it as an absolute good to defeat the more evil.” Indeed. Even Noam Chomsky believed (probably still believes) in the ‘lesser evil’ dogma. He advocated a vote to John Kerry in 2004. Massad rightly calls such a dogma a myth and parochialism. Frantz Fanon, however, “ understood by the early 1960s that only the colonised would be able to defeat the ongoing imperial depredations visited on the globe, especially given the complicity of the white liberals and socialists o...