Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How One Palestinian University is Remaking "Israel Studies"

Stephen Rosen: “[W]hat is nationalism? And what nationalism is actually Western invention. Imperial China had no nationalism. Where do they get their ideas of nationalism? Well, they got their ideas of nationalism from the Japanese, which emerged as a national state in the 19 [century].  Well, where did the Japanese get their ideas about nationalism, which were then translated into Chinese? They got it from the Germans. So what they imported was a 19th-century version of social Darwinism in which race  is of the fundamental basis of nationality and there are very – when you hear Xi Jinping [a communist/Marxist?] and other Chinese leaders talking about cultural pollution, when you talk about the natural affinity of all Chinese people wherever they are, you begin to worry that there is this submerged, and sometimes not even so, some racialist component.” — The historian Lord Acton put  the case against "nationalism as insanity" in 1862. Bertrand Russell  criticizes nationalis

Syria: just another news item while I am sitting comfortably at a café in a rich city sipping coffee... The assault on Idlib and its consequences See also Inside Syria's Secret Torture Prisons: How Bashar al-Assad Crushed Dissent

German Jews warned not to wear kippas

Russia "A lot of the continuities I see are really more focused on the internal evolution of the system. I think that a lot of what people, certainly in the West, criticize Putin for certain kinds of authoritarian behavior, reining in the regions, control of the press, galloping corruption–all of these things were not only present under Yeltsin, but actually the foundations were laid during the Yeltsin years for what then developed under Putin. The clearest example I can think of this is the constitution. That was imposed after this slightly dodgy referendum in 1993. All of Putin’s presidential power derived from that moment where Yeltsin resolved the conflict with the Parliament by force. If you want to undo this contrast between Yeltsin, the democrat, and Putin the authoritarian, all you’ve got to do is look at that moment and then you understand that in that particular moment when a liberal, or someone committed to a liberal free market transformation of Russia, when Yelt

Poland He fought within Solidarność for a peaceful transformation of the system, where strong workers’ organizations and widespread civic participation would lead to a democratic socialism, based either on continued state ownership or extensive social democratic-type economic intervention. (There were plenty of hothead activists in the movement, Modzelewski later recalled, “but nobody called for the privatization of the economy, or reprivatization of property confiscated by the state in 1945. Nobody.”) "I Didn't Sit Eight and a Half Years in Jail to Build Capitalism"

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