Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Middle East Panorama radio show on Resonance FM 104 or http://www.resonancefm.com/ Every Friday 14.00 - 15.00 London time (GMT) Interview with Yoel Cohen , a British-born academic currently living in Jerusalem, where he is Senior Lecturer at the School of Communications, Netanya Academic College; and The Holon Academic Institute of Technology and at Holon Institute of Technology, Israel. He has written several books and articles concerning the news media and the Middle East, including The Whistleblower of Dimona: Israel, Vanunu and the Bomb (Holmes and Meier, 2003) and Nuclear Ambiguity (Sinclair Stevenson, 1992), Whistleblowers and the Bomb: Vanunu, Israel and Nuclear Secrecy (Pluto Books, new edition, 2005). >> Listen here 9/11 - 'The War on Terror'. We asked some people to comment on the following statement: “Capitalism and the ‘war on terror’ not only help to sustain one another but they have this in common: they worship success but are nourished by failure.” (David

Middle East Panorama show on Resonance FM 104.4 or http://www.resonancefm.com/ Every Friday 14:00 - 15:00 London Time (GMT) "The Financial War on Terror". Ibrahim Warde , adjunct professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Massachusetts, and journalist for Le Monde Diplomatique, speaks about The Price of Fear: Al Qaeda and the Truth Behind the Financial War on Terror (IB Tauris. 2006). 4th London Kurdish Film Festival. This year's festival will run for one week and will present an extraordinary variety of films made by Kurdish film makers or about Kurdish issues: features, documentaries, shorts and, for the first time, animated films, from all over the world. For more deails visit: www.riocinema.org.uk Sherif Abdel Samad on the Internet portal Qantara.de wrote about the Egyptian band Wust EL Balad saying there is "a touch of religion, politics, love, and revolution."

Note: I am not doing justice to Mbembe’s arguments in the book by my selection. A full read of the text is recommended. Under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised?  Under the guise of war, resistance, or the war on terror?  Politics ... is doubly defined as a project of autonomy and as the reaching of agreement within a collective through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war... Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject, and politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation (fixing one’s own limits for oneself ). My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations.  Contemporary experiences of human destruct

1.  On Saturday night, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was lit up with the Israeli flag. Careful observers noticed orange blotches on the column — these were leftovers from a  climate protest   several weeks ago. The Israeli flag appeared to have blood stains. The symbolism was perfect: While the German establishment project declares its unwavering support for the Israeli government, it can’t quite hide the fact that  colonialism and apartheid   are inherently bloody affairs. On Saturday, five parties in the Bundestag — CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, and Greens — published a  joint statement  declaring their support for the State of Israel and its “right to self-defense.” The far-right AfD, for its part, made an almost identical declaration. Even the reformist left party DIE LINKE, represented by chairperson  Janine Wissler , issued a one-sided condemnation of “terrorism.” [ Just a few years ago, Wissler was part of a  post-Trotskyist organization  that defended the basic rights of Palestinians.] 2

Sunday between noon and 1pm (GMT) 104.4 FM (London) or http://www.resonancefm.com/ worldwide War on Terror, Inc. Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear by Solomon Hughes (Verso, 2008). "Who is behind companies that reap the dividend of war? How close are they to our political decision-makers? Do they actually deliver what they are contracted to deliver, and at a cost-effective price? " Iraq: 5 Years On. "How the Media Sells War and Why?" From a public meeting called by Media Workers Against the War. Speakers include: Nick Davies , an award-winning investigative reporter (the Guardian): "Our media have become mass producers of distortion." And Dhar Jamail , independent journalist and author of Beyond the Green Zone . Related: War on Terror, Inc. Review Flat Earth News by Nick Davies Other: "Our Reign of Terror, by the Israeli Army"

Middle East Panorama radio show on Resonance FM 104 or http://www.resonancefm.com/ Every Friday 14.00 - 15.00 London time (GMT) "Endless War? Hidden Functions of the 'War on Terror'" (Pluto Books 2006) by David Keen. A Live interview. David Keen explores how winning war is rarely an end in itself; rather, war tends to be part of a wider political and economic game that is consistent with strengthening the enemy. Keen devises a radical framework for analysing an unending war project, where the "war on terror" is an extension of the Cold War. >> Listen “There is a different and progressive voice and a promising alternative to both the US occupation and political Islam in Iraq” says Samir Adil a co-founder and the president of The Iraq Freedom Congress - IFC. >> Listen Iraqi Tradional Music Revisited in a War Era .

A photo  via The Intercept Jeremy Scahill:  “From the moment President Joe Biden spoke to his ‘great, great friend’ Netanyahu on October 7, in the immediate aftermath of the deadly Hamas-led raids into Israel, the U.S. has not just supplied Israel with additional weapons and intelligence support, it has also offered crucial political cover for the scorched-earth campaign to annihilate Gaza as a Palestinian territory. It is irrelevant what words of concern and caution have flowed from the mouths of administration officials when all of their actions have been aimed at increasing the death and destruction. Everything we know about Biden’s 50-year history of supporting and facilitating Israel’s worst crimes and abuses leads to one conclusion: Biden wants Israel’s destruction of Gaza — with more than 7,000 children dead — to unfold as it has.  Nothing justifies the killing of children on an industrial scale. What the Israeli state is engaged in has far surpassed any basic principles of prop

"The issue is not Sanders' own personal anti-imperialist credentials, nor is critiquing a worthy effort to end a war a holistic condemnation. The issue is the normalisation, without debate, of a "war on terror" that has produced a body count higher than that of the evil it is supposed to counter. Sanders' resolution, excluding this US war from debate on a US-backed war in the same theatre, reflects this." How a Bernie Sanders resolution is normalising "the war on terror"

" It is critical to recognize and fight against the unique elements of Trump’s extremism, but also to acknowledge that a substantial portion of it has roots in political and cultural developments that long precede him. Immigration horror stories — including families being torn apart — are nothing new. As ABC News  noted last August , “The Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.” And the reason Trump is able so easily to tap into a groundswell of anti-Muslim fears and bigotry is because they have been cultivated for 16 years as the central fuel driving the war on terror. There are  factions on both the center-left and right  that are primarily devoted to demonizing Muslims and Islam. A government can get away with bombing, invading, and droning the same group of people for more than 15 years only by constantly demonizing and dehuman

“ There are too many whose idea of ‘critical’ is limited to saying some development was problematic but some was quite good, if only there had been more of that ‘good’ development. The most stunning imperial formation was that the War in Afghanistan was unquestionable–whether as an act of revenge and/or care (for Afghan women). The friend/enemy distinction has been marked on to women’s bodies playing out in a fundamentalist logic of either supporting education or not supporting education, supporting the Taliban or condemning them. The Kite Runner  made everyone feel they knew Afghanistan. Like white people who watched the TV serial  The Wire  that came out about the same time as the beginning of the US war and occupation of Afghanistan.  Suddenly white liberals felt they knew the deep struggles of racialized people in Baltimore, and elsewhere, because they watched  The Wire , and liked the character Omar. The critique was only of the withdrawal, not of the war, as if to believe that th

Predator drone: American foreign policy under Obama "Under Obama, drones became the weapon of choice for the White House, the Predators of “Task Force Liberty” raining Hellfire missiles on suspect villages in the Northwest Frontier, wiping out women and children along with warriors in the ongoing battle against terrorism: seven times more covert strikes than launched by the Republican administration. Determined to show he could be as tough as Bush, Obama readied for war with Pakistan should it resist the US raid dispatched to kill Bin Laden in Abbottabad, for domestic purposes the leading trophy in his conduct of international affairs.   Assassinations by drone, initiated under his predecessor, became the Nobel laureate’s trademark. In his first term, Obama ordered one such execution every four days — over ten times the rate under Bush. The War on Terror, now rebaptized at presidential instruction “Overseas Contingency Operations” — a coinage to rank with the “Enhanced Interr

Middle East Panorama show on Resonance FM 104.4 or resonancefm.com Every Friday 14:00 - 15:00 London Time (GMT) "I can definitively say that what Al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable," Rumsfeld told reporters on 15 April, 2004 after Al-Jazeera showed the bodies of women and children killed by U.S. bombs in Fallujah. "...Al-Jazeera has been ragarded with suspicion by Arab governments who complain that its programs bruise their sensitivities and threaten the stability of their regimes," wrote Mohamed Zayani in Al-Jazeera Phenomenon, Critical Perspectives on New Arab Media ( 2005) Jon Anderson and Dale Eikelman argue that "Al-Jazeera plays a role, jejune as it may be, in the pacification of Arab public opinion."  The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples' History of the British Empire (Bookmarks 2006). Part of a book launch speech by the author John Newsinger: >> The British Empire in the Middle East   Friday 8 December : "The

French Education Minister: “The Republic is under attack.” The reason? One French man was beheaded for his “freedom of expression.”  “At the very moment that, in the name of fighting terror, the French state is devastating Raqqa, arresting refugee activists, banning climate demonstrations, and giving police the power to conduct home-invasions without a warrant at any hour for three months, the political classes’ propagandists have rallied French society behind them under the banner of defence of Republican ‘values’ – liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, civilization, human rights. In this situation, the nature of Republicanism as the all-purpose ideology of the French ruling class emerges clearly. Republicanism can be harnessed to justify anything that aligns with the interests of French state power. In the name of Republican values, France can  criminalize BDS , hold up racist caricature as an exemplary exercise of free speech, or  seriously contemplate  censorship of the media.

Written after Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Huntington’s Class of Civilisations , but before the ‘war on terror’, the war in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the rise of China, the 2008/09 Great Recession, the Arab uprisings, the rise of the far right, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. ————- Why then do the European states claim for themselves the right to spread civilization and manners to different continents? Why not to Europe itself? – Joseph Roth, 1937 “Modern democracy, like the nation-state it is so closely associated with, is basically the product of the protracted domestic and international experimentation which followed the collapse of the old European order in 1914. In the short run, both Wilson and Lenin failed to build the ‘better world’ they dreamed of. The communist revolution across Europe did not materialize, and the building of socialism was confined to the Soviet Union; the crisis of liberal democracy followed soon after as one country after an

  Despite ongoing claims about “ungovernability,” transhistorical blood feuds, or the racialized nature of “the Arab” and “the Muslim,” there is, in fact, nothing exceptional about war and conflict in the Middle East. The region was left with the obscured but violent legacies of notions like the semi-civilized and extraterritoriality. The War on Terror brought these concepts back to center stage. Blowback from weaponized techniques of extraterritoriality impact the United States as well as the Middle East. One hundred and one years after Versailles, the twinned concepts of extraterritoriality and the semi-civilized continue to shape our world in ways that can no longer be overlooked. From Versailles to the War on Terror

I wrote this article on 11 September 2006 9/11 saw thousands of innocent people killed in cold blood by an act of terrorism. Yet the impulse to retaliate has already shown us why a ‘war on terror' cannot be won. "Why would other people," asks David Kean, "not feel similar emotions and impulses when  they  are attacked, when  their  innocent people are bombed or shot in the name of somebody else's ‘justice'?" In the words of Shylock, in Shakespeare's  The Merchant of Venice , "He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses ... scorned my nation, and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" ( The Merchant of Venice , Act 3, Scene 1) The article in full 

“ The American media have largely echoed this language. The storming of the Capitol, we were told, was something that happened in a ‘banana republic’, not in America. (No mention of the fact that the ‘banana republics’ of Latin America were corrupt and authoritarian in part thanks to American meddling.) The presence of raucous, overwhelmingly white militants armed with guns stirred comparisons with Nazi Germany, Afghanistan and Syria, as if the many available and suitable comparisons from American history had been declared off-limits, threats to our amour propre. What to call the mob provoked a great discussion – ‘protesters’? ‘dissidents’? ‘insurrectionists’? – until, finally, much of the liberal press settled on describing them as ‘terrorists’, the word we reserve for all that is evil and un-American, and usually Middle Eastern. The use of the T-word represented a belated recognition of how dangerous a threat the far right has become. But it was also a consoling flight from realities

"If you want to know why so many British Muslims have deserted groups like the Labour Party and Stop the War Coalition, it is because they have to choose between Blairite War on Terror supporters and Putinite War on Terror supporters. Because apparently supporting Eastern European oppression of Muslims instead of Western European oppression of Muslims (of course in Syria today you have the Western Europeans bombing one area and the Eastern Europeans bombing another side by side) is unfortunately what passes as “progressive” in much of the identity-politics dominated, reality-removed, solidarity-illiterate sections of those who call themselves “Left” today. That’s why."

The Other and the Ordeal of the World Can the Other, in light of all that is happening, still be regarded as my fellow creature? The Other’s burden having become too overwhelming, would it not be better for my life to stop being linked to its presence, as much as its to mine? Why must I, despite all opposition, nonetheless look after the other, stand as close as possible to his life if, in return, his only aim is my ruin? If, ultimately, humanity exists only through being in and of the world, can we found a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude? In a world characterized more than ever by an unequal redistribu- tion of capacities for mobility, and in which the only chance of survival, for many, is to move and to keep on moving, the brutality of borders is now a fundamental given of our time. Today we see the principle of equality being undone by the laws of autochthony and common origin, as well as by divisions within citizensh

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha