Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"The Department of Defense and others have noted that between 2006 and 2010,  climate-change-fueled droughts  killed off 70 percent of Syrian farmers’ livestock, driving hundreds of thousands of economic refugees into crowded cities. Faced with scarce resources, the many protesting food shortages were polarized against President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarianism and pushed toward religious extremists who were, as Juan Cole  put it , “everything the state was not” — distributing water, food and oil that Assad had failed to." The War on Climate Change Anthropocene or Capitalocene

"That's a rubbish decision for which John McDonnell bears a considerable responsibility. The unity of the cabinet (which doesn't exist) has been placed higher than maximising our ability to prevent a war. That is an abdication of conscience. This is one reason why I'm not in the Labour Party."   Via  John Rees

The Magical Thinking about ISIS The Wrong Kind of Secularism

 “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 Keen,  Endless War ?, 2006)

Chomsky and His Critics

"Our way of life" RAF to Look for Any Unbombed Bits of Syria DAVID Cameron has called on Britain to flatten the last remaining bumpy bits of Syria. Making his case for British airstrikes against ISIS, the prime minister told the House of Commons there was an outside lavatory 15 miles from Aleppo that still has its roof attached. He added: “It stands there, being a toilet, brazenly defying our values. If not now, when?” The prime minster then listed seven other small buildings across Syria that remain structurally sound, including a newsagent, a car wash and a fruit kiosk that could be sheltering up 20,000 ISIS maniacs. He added: “We have learned the lessons of Iraq. Too many buildings were left standing in Iraq. And it was in those buildings that ISIS was formed. “We will only bring peace to the Middle East when all the buildings have been destroyed and everyone has to stand around in the street.” Meanwhile, Cameron has not ruled out sending troops to

The Threat is Already Inside And nine other truths about terrorism that nobody wants to hear Good arguments, and facts, by a defender of the system Note: Foreign Policy calls Hamas and Hizbullah "terrorist organizations".

My comment on Paul Rogers's recent article "Its ambitious aim was to cause the overthrow of the 'near enemy' regimes in the Middle East and southwest Asia, replacing them with 'proper' Islamist regimes; to see Zionism destroyed..." Do you have figures and evidence of any attacks on Israel's interests? Are they of any significance? More importantly, you too either has fallen in a trap or that is just your way of working withing the frame work of defending the system, trying to make it better. You are speaking about "the same mistakes being made." They are not mistakes and only an apologist for the state terrorism of the Western regimes would call them mistakes. Occupations, invasions, support of dictators in the Middle East and outside the Middle East, imposed economic policies, support of Israel's state terrorism, support of the so-called Islamist liberals as long as they maintain the status quo of "the free market" and depe

An e-book and interview The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine  (e-book) My interview with Ilan Pappe Syriza's U-turn on Israel is Now Complete

I think this incident is full of metaphor, allegory, images, parabols, etc when put into the context of occupation, ethnic cleansing, rape, plunder, and all other barbaric acts of a state. Tel Aviv, Israel: "a sex worker, who worked 12-hour shifts and slept with up to 30 men a day, hanged herself. Three hours after her body was found, the brothel went back to work."  Source: Haaretz.com, 22 August 2015.

Isis: In a borderless world, the days when we could fight foreign wars and be safe at home may  be long gone Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilization . Yes, It Is Islamic Extremism - But Why? Graham E. Fuller is a former vice-chair of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University, and author of numerous books on the Middle East and Islamic movements. His first novel, “Breaking Faith: A Novel of Espionage and an American’s Crisis of Conscience in Pakistan,” will be out in March 2015.

A photo by Everyday Egypt

Here is how that paper defended the barbaric action of the British state Invading Iraq was the Right Thing to Do, according to The Telegraph

" We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think—that is, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life." Hannah Arendt "Why Do Some Islamist Groups Seem Sadistic, Even Evil?" Read also Are We ISIS? Flag Down

Endless War? The legacies of "The War on Terror". My interview with David Keen (LSE) in 2006. 

In Riyadh, It's Hard to Feel at Home

"A divided Europe will not necessarily replicate the horrors of the early 20th century. History will rhyme, however, at the intersection of several trends running in parallel. The splintering of Europe overlays the   erosion of central authority within the Sykes-Picot borders  in the Middle East — borders that the Europeans created to divide the region and tighten their colonial grip. With those territories in prolonged conflict, the weakening of those regimes and the radical ideologies borne out of power vacuums will risk drawing a minority of European Muslims into battle   while driving migrants   into the heart of Europe, accelerating Europe's path toward  fragmentation." The Fear of the Other Europe The Lucky Generation

The Churchill You Didn't Know

Arab Revolts - Past and Present Joseph Messad

" This morning when I awoke I made the mistake of turning on the television "news". Two of the world's worst murderous thugs, Barack Obama and Francois Hollande were opining about their partnership to destroy Daesh/ISIL and how they would protect our freedoms by bombing the Middle East into rubble and removing Bashar al-Assad from power, and the utter hypocrisy of their verbal nonsense was too much  for me. They continue to up the massive military ante which puts all western citizens at increasing risk in their own countries while systematically stripping away our freedoms, and straight faced they expect us to sop up such blatant drivel. Before the rise in my gorge caused me to lose my breakfast I turned it off, which is what I have been doing consistently since the Paris attack and whenever these so-called leaders of the "free" western countries are pontificating publicly, which is far too often. The television networks must be noticing a precipitous drop