Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

 “You never understood that we might want a different life than yours, to believe differently, to feel differently, and think differently from you.” —Arminius, Barbarians - last episode

 Jeremy Corbyn: Seize the time! John Molyneux, 29 October 2020 Today’s suspension of Jeremy Corbyn by Keir Starmer  is outrageous but it is also the culmination of a long process that began the moment Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party. From the very first day the British political establishment, led by David Cameron and supported by most of the mainstream media and a considerable section of the Parliamentary Labour Party, set out to discredit and destroy him.  This project had nothing to do with Corbyn’s personal strengths or weaknesses and absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism,  real or alleged.  The motive was simple and obvious: from the outset they perceived Corbyn and especially those who supported him and were mobilized by him as a threat to their interests, precisely because he had a long record as a socialist, as an anti-racist campaigner, as a defender of workers’ rights and, particularly, as an opponent of war and British imperialism. The last they found

This article is also available in French Arabic and Spanish  French Soldiers in the Sahel: A Barely Repressed Colonial Unconscious

Trump “was elected fair and square,” states Hamid Dabashi. I disagree. He was not. Neither were the ones before him. Leaving aside the electoral college’s role, how is it fair election when just to be a mayor of New York you need to be backed by millionaires and billionaires? The power of the different lobbies with heavy money, of individuals and corporations, and the corporate media shapes many outcomes. Money matters a great deal in elections,” Adam Bonica from Standford University said. It’s just that, he believes, when scientists go looking for its impacts, they tend to look in the wrong places. If you focus on general elections, he said, your view is going to be obscured by the fact that 80 to 90 percent of congressional races have outcomes that are effectively predetermined by the district’s partisan makeup — and the people that win those elections are still given (and then must spend) ridiculous sums of money because, again, big donors like to curry favor with candidates they k

 “ What Macron fears the most is the breakdown of the racial contract. For the more the pressure of liberal forces dismantles the social contract, the more the rulers count on the solidity of the racial contract to continue to link the fate of the white working-class to the bourgeois state. And when the racial contract weakens (i.e. the convergence of postcolonial subjects, the Gilets Jaunes, and other social movements against the police; the Left’s greater understanding of Islamophobia and structural racism; etc.), power panics and is left with only one choice: reinforce the racial contract. This is one of the cardinal functions of the notion of “laïcité,” or secularism, whose meaning shifts according to the ideological needs of the colonial counter-revolution.” Despite Mélenchon’s blunder, I agree with Bouteldja here. Walking the Tight Rope

Why Tunisia, Africa Must Demand French Apology [and Compensation]

 ‘No change for thirty years’