Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“More than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 can be linked to just 36 fossil fuel and cement producers, according to a report from the Carbon Majors database.  “The top five state-owned emitters — Saudi Aramco, Coal India, CHN Energy, National Iranian Oil Company and Jinneng Group — accounted for nearly a fifth of all global emissions in 2023.  “The top five investor-owned emitters — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, TotalEnergies and BP — made up 5 per cent of emissions.  “The report’s findings are based on a database that traces the emissions from production and combustion of products from 180 of the largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers from 1854 to 2023.” Source: the Financial Times

Shaul Magid, Peter Beinart, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Pankaj Mishra

“From Iran to Turkey, from Egypt to Iraq, they kept writing, kept challenging, refusing to be erased .” Related Women and gender

“What Alice and Rebecca did could be massively groundbreaking and change universities’ ability to exploit their staff. I can see why Oxford would want to keep them quiet.” Sham contracts

and more borrowing, more cronysm, more complicity in mass murder, more spending on 'defense',  welfare cuts and more  On 'Starmer's Britain’

 Lashes of tyranny

“Had he [Öcalan] betrayed the Kurds? Could the self-dissolution of the PKK be understood as anything other than a total capitulation? What factors prompted the decision? ”

“The myth of ‘Western values’ died in Gaza. Myths do not die. They are debunked or refuted. They often persist for a long time and are adaped to new contexts; they are part of a belief system. I remember well after Iraq and Afghanistan how people invoked ‘democracy’ and ‘Western values’ in a way not dissimilar from what the Bushes and Blairs and later the Obamas and Bidens articulated them. Recently, a student at the ‘best’ European university in social sciences told me that the myth of sectarianism in the Middle Ast is still being repeated. A white liberal, ‘MeeToo’ English woman what Russia was doing in Ukraine was ‘a Russian thing. It's in their history’. Zelenskyy's recent rise in ‘popularity’ among many is built upon ‘the myth of Western values’ defending Ukraine against an authoritarian Russian regime. Myths are strentghned through amnesia. History is brushed aside and Pavlovian conditioning is enforced.  We should remember how the emergence of ISIS was analysed. How ...

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” he exclaims in the “final prayer” of Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon was an atheist; praying to a higher authority would have struck him as ludicrous. And why pray to his body? Did Fanon have some sort of mystical belief in the wisdom of the flesh? Not at all. He was asking his body not to show him the path of enlightenment but rather to rebel against any inclination toward complacency or resignation. The body, in his view, is a site of unconscious knowledge, of truths about the self that the mind shies away from uttering, a repository of desire and resistance. Fanon’s relationship to reality is fundamentally one of interrogation: “Anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything other than a perpetual questioning won’t see a thing—neither gratitude nor hatred. Yet Fanon’s manner of interrogation was not that of a skeptic. “Man,” he writes in Black Skin, White Masks, is not simply a “no,” but “a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.” His ...

“ The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945…  The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism. Revealingly, the binary of the enlightened west and unenlightened east – once used to authorise the Nazi quest for  Lebensraum  in the east and then adapted to serve cold war policy agendas – is the currency today of far-right nationalists across Israel, Europe and America…  And there was much about western democracies – especially their foundations in white supremacy, and cultures of racism and antisemitism – that allowed Hitler to believe that they would welcome his extermination of Jews.” Related The new German chauvinism  ( an essay in two parts) Germany's reckoning with its past is no longer a model

“[W]hy take the time to engage with global and regional history, international political economy, imperialism theory, and war studies just to find oneself in the uncomfortable position of being at odds with the propaganda and power of Western liberal states and state media and their interests?”

Sudan takes UAE to the ICJ Related UAE 2024

Excerpts from an article by Bénoît Bréville Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2025 How should we interpret the geographical dimension of the party’s growth? Does its rise mean the whole country has shifted to the right? Are its voters mainly motivated by social or cultural issues? It would be more accurate to speak of multiple RN electorates, given that the party has managed to gain a foothold at every level of society.  In the EU election of June 2024, the RN list headed by Jordan Bardella came first in every socio-professional category, achieving 53% among manual workers, 40% among white-collar workers, but also 20% among executives (tying with Raphaël Glucksmann’s centre-left Place Publique). The RN’s base is predominantly working class, made up of people with lower levels of formal education, but it also draws support from sections of the middle class, so most researchers have abandoned trying to draw broad-brush conclusions or working with very large categories. Some have pointed t...

Jean-Michel Aphatie : «  Chaque année, nous commémorons le massacre d’Oradour-sur-Glane, c’est-à-dire le massacre de tout un village. Mais nous en avons fait des centaines en Algérie. Est-ce qu’on en a conscience ?  »

“So far,  HTS  has undertaken no ideological updating. They prefer to maintain a kind of vagueness rather than taking a clear line which might antagonise the conservatives still belonging to the movement. With the fall of Damascus, that ideological clarification is of course more necessary than ever   ; at stake are, on the one hand, the movement’s local acceptance and, on the other, the international recognition of the new Damascus authorities. In fact when the movement’s leaders are asked to define themselves, there are as many different answers as there are individuals questioned. “At present it is a sort of Thermidorian logic – a kind of post-revolutionary moderate pushback – which prevails. The page of Terror has been turned and the movement is banking on the different silent majorities as much to consolidate its grip on domestic affairs and eliminate the remains of a radical minority as to present themselves as a national alternative. “ HTS  is not a ...

“The first is a belief in development, a term for the growing political and economic sophistication that emerges at the level of the nation-state. The second is the idea that development goes through stages — unidirectional phases that cannot be reversed or skipped. The third is a view of development as a homogenizing, Westernizing process, in the sense that nations adopt American values and traditions through capitalist growth. These studies often concluded that newly independent or decolonizing nations should forge closer ties with their former colonizers to attract foreign investment and open themselves up to trade — in short, to become modern. “He never accepted the implication of European superiority, or the small-mindedness of modernization theory, limiting our notion of social progress to technocratic or minimalistic ideas about growth. He preferred thinking in terms of equality: political equality, economic equality, cultural equality. “His experiences in Africa and the ideas o...

“Under President Sissi, Madbouly has become one of the main pillars of the realisation of the regime’s ambitious vision for the development of infrastructures and grandiose urban projects, and it’s just too bad if these are carried out at the expense of social justice and the rights of the poor.” Related Urban transformation:  the Egyptian novel in the sixties

Journalist : M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people? Ben M'Hidi :  And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. — The Battle of Algiers ,  a 1966 movie   Related The Rebel’s Clinic

“Rather than watching an orchestrated, forgettable set piece featuring smiling foreign dignitaries and heads of state visiting an ever-so-polite president in the Oval Office, it was refreshing to witness a blatant exhibition of the crudeness, rudeness, and brutishness of power politics that usually occurs far, far away from the cameras and, hence, reporters and the public” Related Zelenskyy:  a supporter of Israeli oppression