Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Fly Emirates! Tortured, detained, disappeared: United Arab Emirates abuses rife in southern Yemen

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India  By Shashi Tharoor, Penguin 2017 Excerpts, part 3 of 3 "The historian Andrew Roberts rather breathtakingly claimed, given this background, that British rule 'the modernisation, development, protection, agrarian advance, linguistic unification and ultimately the democratisation of the subcontinent'." p. 175 "The construction of the Indian railways is often pointed to by apologists for Empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonised to do so... "In its very conception and construction, the Indian railway system was a big colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns on capital for 5 per cent net per year, unavailable in any other safe investment."

We are the good guys and Trump is the bad guy, they say. Yes, Trump is a mysogenist. But it was not him who perpetuated patriarchy, gender pay gap, violence against women, etc. Yes, he is anti-immigrants. But it was Obama who deported more people than any other president. Yes, he is a threat to international relations. But it was not him who invaded countries, fueling sectarianism, supported Israel, imposed IMF policies, established Guantanamo, carried out torture and rendition, created obscene inequality, mass incarceration in the US, supported the Egyptian military, and so and so forth. Trump is not an aberration; he is their product and now they disavow him. " The liberal establishment and their representatives are crying rivers of crocodile tears for the victims of Trump’s policies. In so doing, they hope to make political capital out of Trump’s crimes. But there is only one snag with their strategy: it rests on our memories being so short that we have forgotten all of

Japan's demographic crisis No sex, please

Inglorious Empire -What the British Did to India By Shashi Tharoor (Penguin 2017) Excerpts, part 2 "The sight if Muslim and Hindu soldiers rebelling together in 1857 and fighting side by side, willing to rally under the command of each other and pledge joint allegiance to the enfeebled Mughal monarch, had alarmed the British, who did not take long to conclude that dividing the two groups and pitting them against one another was the most effective way to ensure the unchallenging continuance of Empire.", p. 101 The tendency to separate was apparent in British attitudes from the start. Indeed, it had been evidenced in the only already-white country the British colonized, Ireland; instead of assimilating the Irish into the British race, they were subjugated by their new overlords, intermarriage was forbidden (as was even learning the Irish language or adopting Irish modes of dress) and most Irish people were segregated 'beyond the pale'." p. 102 "Laws h

Israel A liberal Israeli paper unlike any Western liberal one

Fiat workers to strike over Ronaldo signing Good, but not enough.