Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Hasan Al-Turabi "Turabi’s concepts of an Islamic state have aroused significant criticism, not because of  his concepts but rather, because of his practices as a political activist working with military dictators. When he described the nature of an Islamic State, he argued that such a state could take different forms, depending on the specific conditions of particular time and place. However, in accord with the principle of  tawhid , the state would not be secular – separating religion from public life. In whatever form the Islamic state took, it would emphasize justice and avoid oppression. The criticism of Turabi comes from the fact that, in practice, he supported oppressive military dictatorships that claimed to be implementing Shariʻa."

"Reconciliation no longer a taboo?" Sooner or later, and this did happen before, the two reactionary forces, will sit and work together to maintain the status quo, to absorb parts of the crisis.

"... Capitalism for the 150 or so years [sic] of it's existence was based on production of material goods from which surplus value derives that in turn was divided between industry profits, interest payments and rent...The  heyday of this economy in terms of its employment of labor forces in manufacturing (production centered) activities was between 1940 and 1980. Today production centered economies have been dissembled with manufacturing in the US employing at best 10 percent of the workforce...Japan and Germany around 20 percent...top Asian tigers like South Korea about the same...even China overall has never seen manufacturing employment rise above 25 percent of employment. And the rest of the world is experiencing what has been dubbed "premature deindustrialization".  The current economy, if you want to call it that, is based on money games, Himalayan sized debt, leverage, and extraction of "pounds of flesh" from the bones of humanity. It operates

Brazil on Edge "In spite of a founding platform that emphasizes ethics in politics, the party has engaged in the same appalling behavior as the country’s other capitalist parties. From phony contracts and mob connections in PT-ruled cities in the 1990s to bribes for votes at the federal level in the 2000s, the party has been transformed into a business-as-usual operation... However, " the treatment the PT has received is hypocritical and unfair, even by capitalist democracy’s shallow standards."

Class and Politics in Post Revolutionary  Iran:  A Brief Introduction

Israel squeezes lifeline of Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinians

" Europe’s silence in the face of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s hostile takeover of two of his country’s independent newspapers over the last weeks is being chalked up to the need to avoid jeopardizing Ankara’s finger in the dike of even more massive waves of Middle Eastern migration into the continent. But Europe’s cavalier attitude toward this kind of rising authoritarianism on its eastern border is more than just strategic indifference — it’s symptomatic of a steady erosion of core civil liberties within the EU itself. Government encroachments on free speech are an attempt to tighten control and consolidate power in the face of political stress and rising dissent . Absent an underlying sense of threat or insecurity in the system, even the most revolutionary speech is only words, scarcely menacing and unworthy of a reaction that would attest to its significance. Restrictions on speech meet with least resistance when populations at large feel buffeted by the same an