Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The Taliban of San Francisco

Bassam Shakaa: The Making of a Palestinian 'Organic Intellectual'

Britain's National Breakdown Over Brexit (Written before Johnson became PM)

Made in Algeria: Football, Racism, and the Africa Cup of Nations Further reading: For the Muslims

Syria 1942 Providing food and clothes to Greek refugees.     (Credit to Huda's Welten Blog)

"The killer clowns offer the oligarchs something else too: distraction and deflection. While the  kleptocrats fleece us , we are urged to look elsewhere. We are mesmerised by buffoons who encourage us to channel the anger that should be reserved for billionaires towards immigrants, women, Jews, Muslims, people of colour and other imaginary enemies and customary scapegoats. Just as it was in the 1930s, the new demagoguery is a con, a revolt against the impacts of capital, financed by capitalists." From Trump to Johnson: nationalists are on the rise — backed by billionaire oligarchs

“It is worth noting,” [Martin Luther] King said, “that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. … Our irrational obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.” Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx (Click on Free view when subscription message pops up)

We go there to help them develop, we send them aid, our good-hearted philanthropists have relentlessly poured huge amounts of money in African countries, beautiful celebrities have made historical visits and speeches... so that those dark-and-brown-skinned creatures stop coming here and rely on themselves. It is obvious that migrants and would-be migrants should invest in building better boats and take with them onboard smaller boats (those ones that they can inflate when the evil water goes angry at them. They should look on ebay and buy some of them. They need them as back up. If they cannot afford bying inflatable boats, they should learn alternating techniques they would employ if there were too many of them on a boat; every half an hour half of them would swim. They would take turns. In that way the boat does not capsize. They should also take intensive swiming classes, go on diet because weight matters when you take a boat, and most importantly, they should carry out a thoroug

A bombastic champion of the British empire, UK's 20th Etonian Prime Minister, a hop-ium supplier, now a hero in the tabloid, a representative of arrogance amd chauvinism ... Another outcome of years of mediocrity, celebrity-entertainment, and complicity. Boris Johnson: Gaffeur, entertainer, Brexiteer, Premier

"The attack on the band [Mashrou' Leila] in its home country started with a series of threats and accusations of  blasphemy  by Christian fundamentalist groups a few weeks before their August 9 concert in Byblos, a tourist-favourite town north of Beirut that hosts an annual summer festival." 'Blasphemy' laws to punish gay-fronted band See also Activists in Lebanon have long fought to end the use of article 534 of the penal code to prosecute consensual same-sex conduct. The law is a colonial relic,  put in place by the French mandate  in the early 1900s, and punishes “any sexual intercourse contrary to the order of nature” with up to one year in prison. It has at times been enthusiastically wielded to persecute LGBT people, often affecting particularly vulnerable groups including  transgender women  and  Syrian refugees .  Human Rights Watch