Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  “In foreign reporters’ postcards there is a banalization of Iraqis’ agony, a mockery of their intelligence, a minimization of their grievances to corruption and poor services. … a horde of diaspora ‘scholars’ from Washington DC to London are committed participants in the normalization of the  abnormal  and the concealment of  ruination .” A very good reflection by Nabil Salih

In 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, charges for domestic violence were filed with the Indian police every four minutes. Forced marriages involve nine couples out of ten and remain the norm. Since 2020, eleven States have adopted anti-conversion laws. Ironically, ‘Love Jihad’ was a reference first used in the socially and politically most progressive state in India. According to the India Spend Initiative, an independent research body, 90% of all crimes motivated by religious hatred perpetrated since 2009 have taken place during Modi’s term of office.  According to the statistics compiled by Hate Crime Watch, an independent database which was shut down in 2019, 74% of the victims are Muslims, who only constitute 14% of the population. A crusade against mixed marriages Related Arundhati Roy on religious nationalism and dissent 

“Telepneva and Williams both trace with regret the arc of movements that started off calling for freedom and self-determination but ended up running neocolonial or authoritarian regimes. Williams’s portrayal of Lumumba and Nkrumah is hagiographic at times, but she also offers an alternative story of national liberation, told from the perspective of ‘minor’ characters, including Thomas Kanza (Lumumba’s ambassador to the  UN ) and Nkrumah’s secretary, Erica Powell. What emerges from these testimonies is not a picture of tragedy, romance or against-the-odds heroism, but a sober assessment of the tough and sometimes impossible choices facing left-wing anti-colonial activists who were under pressure from foreign enemies and foreign allies alike. ‘For better or worse,’ Telepneva concludes, ‘the Africans in this story were agents of their own liberation,’ however brief it turned out to be.” Africa’s cold war

“For all its rhetoric around ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights,’there is an inexcusable free pass given to Modi’s violence by the Biden administration and American liberals. This selective attention is inextricable from a robust  defense relationship : over $4 billion in arms sales to India in the past decade, along with FBI-run trainings for police in Indian-occupied Kashmir, the world’s most  militarized  region… Liberals and conservatives alike will glorify the unity between the “world’s largest” and the “world’s oldest” democracies. Violence, repression, and authoritarianism will be ignored in the name of friendship, progress, and security.” Biden’s tacit endorsement of repression, authoritarianism, and religious intolerance

Andrew Bacevich is a conservative critical of American ‘foreign policy’/imperialism. Note the absence of the political economic factors of the US involvement in supporting Ukraine. In fact, not a single economic factor is mentioned, which – even when the reader doesn’t believe in “democracy vs. autocracy” or “rules of internal order” rhetoric as Bacevich correctly highlights – is left wondering about the reasons of American involvement in the war.  Furthermore, he is treating the involvement as exclusively directed against Russia, excluding the main threat for Washington’s imperialist hegemony – China . “ In the present moment, however, Russia is anything but America’s principal global adversary,” Bacevich states. It is a narrow way of looking at the global geopolitics. There is no reference either to the domestic social factors in the US in influencing the state’s decisions in going to war. Quoting a critic of Bacevich, there has been a "very powerful, cross-class social constitu

This is an example of obvious political selectivity: I wonder why David Hearst singles out some ‘dictators’ and ignores others who have much more money and wealth and have been investing and wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in the West.  Since the people who take the route of migration do it because of lack of development and prospects in their native countries, imagine if the petro-gas-dollar money of the last 4/5 decades have been shared and invested in the region. Hearst is short-sighted, for the issue is structural and has roots in the natures of the MENA’s states, the form of ‘development’ pursued and imposed and the dynamic of global capitalism.

 “ These are not the refugees we are used to…These people are Europeans…These people are intelligent, they are educated people…This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists." The limitations of humanity