Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Palestinian liberation from below The book is published by Resistance Books

After rejecting in 2019 the Arab league request to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the Jordanian regime has now bowed down to external pressures and issued a ban  on the Brotherhood. The ‘terrorism' excuse has been found as well as the recent advance of the Brotherhood in the parlamentary elections .  This works well for the monarchy, Israel and the 'normalisation' process. Stability of an American protectorate is more crucial in the current context than ever.

“The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died on 13 April, in Lima. He was 89. Best known for his role in Latin American literature’s revival, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also a political activist. After a brief period of communist involvement as a student, he made a U-turn and used his literary influence to mount a defence of neoliberalism. In 1990 he ran for president, and in 2021 he supported far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori against left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo.” ( Le Monde Diplomatique) Neocon with a Nobel By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2010 In Llosa's  El Sueno del Celta, the  hero, Roger Casement, 1864-1916, “was an outstanding historical figure. As a British consul in Africa, he was the first to condemn, as early as 1908, the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State…  Vargas Llosa’s novel has rescued Casement from oblivion, as ‘one of the first Europeans to have formed a very clear idea of th...

By Marc Scully 22 April 2025 Pope Francis has died and eulogies are pouring in praising his concern for the poor, marginalized and dispossessed. Tell that to the thousands of young boys molested and sexually assaulted by Catholic priests. Pope Francis was supposed to clean up that criminality against children in the church but he did not and it prevails. Cleaning it up would have required turning offenders over to civil authorities for prosecution but Pope Francis continued to protect them. Pope Francis had an avuncular persona but contrary to the eulogies he does not have an inspiring history when it comes to standing with the oppressed. Serious questions remain about his role during Argentina's Dirty War, an anti-communist rampage under the military junta from 1976 to 1983 when at least 30,000 people were disappeared or killed in the most barbaric ways like pushing them out of airplanes over the ocean. Those questions about Pope Francis' role don't go away and it isn'...

Note that the automatically-generated subtitles contain some spelling inaccuracies.

Race as a social construct Related The invention of 'heterosexuality'

Free jailed union leaders Solidarity with teachers Support TikTok workers

“The struggle for a Free Palestine is a fight against the same systems driving climate collapse: extractivism, militarism, and capitalism . Palestine's struggle mirrors every frontline community fighting to survive capitalism's fires and floods. From  Yemen  to  Niger Delta  to  Central India , the lesson is the same: our chains are linked.” Build more weapons

 

An authoritarian who cannot deliver economically, resorts to repression. It is not very different from what Turkey's Erdoğan is doing. Lenghthy prison terms to opposition figures

Vidal disdains the U.S. power elite not because it oppresses the common man but because it savages his own vision of America, a history-steeped mythos that ignores (when it doesn't condemn) the multicultural realities of today's nation. — Louis Bayard

Solidarity with Palestine “Break relations with the genocidal state of Israel” Related The President of Chile Gabriel Boric has been described by  The Economist  as " woke " and as part of the  millennial left , "with a program focused on social justice, human rights, the environment and feminism". Boric has expressed support for the  State of Palestine  on multiple occasions. In 2019, after receiving a gift from the Jewish Community of Chile, he called for Israel to return the occupied Palestinian territories in a tweet.  He described Israel as a "genocidal and murderous state" that violates international treaties, stressing the importance of defending international principles and human rights regardless of a country's power.  Boric refuted accusations of  antisemitism , asserting his rejection of all forms of discrimination. He considers the Israeli occupation of territories beyond the  1967 borders  as a violation of international la...

For many, the memory of the Holocaust as a break with civilization is the moral foundation of the Federal Republic. To compare it with other genocides is therefore considered a heresy, an apostasy from the right faith. It is time to abandon this catechism .

“There can for present purposes be no question that there is sufficient evidence that the UAE is not only failing to prevent genocide, but is also complicit in genocide .”

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture. The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism. The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the  strength  of American capital, not its decline. Trump claims that the  result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy. A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing. Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate. Tariffs on their own are insufficient to r...

Freedom in capitalist markets entails the freedom of property owners to use and dispose of their property, including the freedom of business owners to run their businesses as little dictatorships, not as representative polities. You do not elect your boss, let alone vote on your wages or working hours. The political scientists Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch have argued that workplaces are fundamentally places of unfreedom—many workers do not even have enough individual liberty to decide when to go to the bathroom without their bosses’ permission. — Trevor Jackson , The New York Review of Books, 2024

Camilla Vallejo has made  anti-Zionist  remarks during her political career. In 2016 she called  Israel  "a terrorist State that seeks the displacement and extermination of Palestinians", and that the " Palestinian–Israeli conflict does  not constitute a war, but a genocide". She stated that "[t]his is not about  antisemitism  ... I emphatically condemn ... the impunity of a Zionist project that violates all international law, that seeks to oppress and exterminate a brother nation.”

The German court logic: if you can survive by working illegally, then you don’t need rights . If your suffering is managed by another member state, then the system has done its job. “Europe’s asylum system is no longer about protection, if it ever was. It’s about containment, outsourcing, and denial.”

I hadn't realised I “ signed up to work on code that directly powers war crimes" . 

Blaming China is part of finding-someone-to-blame tradition. The Muslim, the migrant, the Russian, the unions, the West vs. 'Islam', etc. Years of stagnation, decline in competition with China, rentier economies inabilities to resume capitalist growth after 2008/2009, etc. have created tensions among capitalist states. Forget the cheap goods enjoyed by Westerners for years. Forget the billions made by Western multinationals in China.  US's protectionism and relative decline is just one of the outcomes of 'globalisation'. China is now a demon and the 'the innocent West’ is a victim that must do something to stop its relative economic decline/stagnation. Rearmament is meant for China, not Russia .  “Structurally, this crisis is one of overaccumulation.  Chronic stagnation places mounting pressure on the political and military agents of transnational capital to crack open new spaces of accumulation.”  Meanwhile, let's focus on Trump's unpreditable decision...