Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“We did all we could to rescue those onboard,” said the medical team of the NGO Italian Emergency, operating onboard the Open Arms. “All this took place just a few kilometres away from an indifferent Europe. Instead of preparing a structured search and rescue system, they instead continue to bury their heads in the sand, pretending not to see the cemetery that the Mediterranean sea has become.” Just more dark-skinned people have ‘died’. In fact, they were killed by indifference and negligence. They were killed because many walls have been erected to keep the Other away. They were killed because some rescue boats/organisations are underfunded or stopped from operating. They were killed because some Western states led by NATO helped make Libya lawless. They were killed because, like other human beings,  they sought a better life. They were killed because for decades local regimes working with international institutions have not been able to create decent jobs and improve the lives of the

 The Living Mahabharata

 When the Read Flag flew over Iran

“A Harvard University study estimated that the worst fires in decades in 2015 were linked to more than 90,000 early deaths. The fires that year are also believed to have produced more carbon emissions in just a few months than the entire United States economy.”   Inside the destruction of Asian’s last rainforests

 Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crush

 Angry TV-makers stop release of lauded Iranian documentary The documentary Coup 53   (use “vidoo” option to play)

A very good summary by an athropologist: What is the way forward for Muslims living in the West? I do not think there is a single answer to that question because Muslims in the West are not a single homogeneous group, sociologically or theologically. Nevertheless they are seen, and will continue to be seen, as a minority within the Western nation state. And given the widespread violence perpetrated by heavily armed Western states and lightly armed jihadists (a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one) Muslim minorities in the West will continue to be the object of suspicion and discrimination. Our concern in this matter should not be to find someone to blame but to try to understand the limits of action facing Muslim minorities. The very common suggestion that Muslims should undertake a reform of their own religious tradition to help prevent “Islamic extremist violence” assumes that Muslims constitute a single political subject, that they are entirely self-contained, and that refor