Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

For the Last Time: "The West"

Atif, 14 years old. Stonemasonry worker in Shaq Al-Thüban area south of Cairo, he takes a salary that varies between 10 to 15 EGP per day.  Atif is cutting stones since he was almost 8, he was seriously injured more than once like hundreds of other children who are doing this dangerous job. Source: Everyday Egypt on Facebook

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 Iraq Legacies and the Roots of the 'Islamic State'

"Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. The police officer in charge was Maurice Papon, who worked for Petain’s collaborationist Vichy police in the Second World War, deporting more than a thousand Jews to their deaths."  Robert Fisk, the Independent , 17 November 2015 Related Are We ISIS? Flag Down

France Returns to the State of Exception Gilbert Achcar Human rights? "...  What you call the ‘predominance of human rights’ is an ideological phenomenon that certainly is of symptomatic value, but is not enough to change social structures. There are even ways of using it that hide the varieties of racism that are now developing, paradoxically by way of a ‘humanitarian’ or ‘philanthropic’ discourse that serves to keep populations or categories of individuals in the condition of recipients of help rather than as bearers of equal rights. Differences or incapacities are presented as essential properties, though they are in fact the result of historical conditions and of relations of domination." Étienne Babilbar

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound. Deny the British Empire Crimes?  No, We Ignore Them.