Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Syria and the Left

Militarized Neoliberalism: Jeff Halper's War Against the People Also, My interview with Jeff Halper (London, June 2008)

The generalised picture of the Arab World portrayed by Albert Hourani looks gloomy but accurate. “The link between the regime and the dominant social groups,” writes Hourani, “might also turn out to be fragile. What could be observed was a recurrent pattern in Middle Eastern history. The classes which dominated the structure of wealth and social power in the cities wanted peace, order and freedom of economic activity, and would support a regime as long as it seemed to be giving them what they wanted; but they would not lift a finger to save it, and would accept its successor if it seemed likely to follow a similar policy."  Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples , Faber and Faber Ltd, United Kingdom, 1991, p 454

The Myth of Leftist Academia The ideological control of the university is intimately related to the economics of “higher education” in the neoliberal era.  Professors who profess too much in ways that might offend concentrated power are easily dispensed with when they are hired only by the course, semester, or academic year.  Department chairs and deans can avoid headaches merely by not renewing the troublemakers’ contracts. Adjuncts and temporary instructors (glorified “Assistant Professors” at many universities) who wish to keep a foothold in academia are well advised not to rock doctrinal boats. As the AAUP notes, “The insecure relationship between contingent faculty members and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom…Contingent faculty may be less likely to take risks in the classroom or in scholarly and service work….The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances.” This content was originally published by tele

Happened at Al-amiriyya Context of the piece

The House of Zion

THE FAMISHED RAJ By John Newsinger "The Bengal Famine of 1943–44, a man-made catastrophe that in total caused the deaths of perhaps five million people, was described by the incoming British Viceroy Archibald Wavell as threatening ‘incalculable’ damage to the Empire’s reputation. [1] It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule.’ Wavell was right about the scale of the disaster. But so effectively has the episode been written out  of the histories of the Second World War and the Raj that it can scarcely be said to have damaged Britannia’s reputation. In the prestigious Oxford History of the British Empire: The TwentiethCentury, a volume that surely sits on the shelves of every university library in the English-speaking world, the Famine goes unmentioned. In Max Hastings’s 600-page study of Churchill during the Second World War, Finest Years, it gets barely a paragraph, while Boris Johnson’s cod biography, The Churchill