Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A Special Relationship See also Henry Kissinger's " Grand Strategies" CIA Roots of Islamic Fundamentalism Birds of Feather  ...

Today, the so-called liberal paper The Guardian removed a comment of mine. I lost the original text, but it was in this vein: I am lonely in London. I tried to integrate for a few years: I conformed and conceded. In the last few years and after seeing the crimes of the state of this country at home and abroad, the plunder of the wealth, the exploitation, the hypocrisy, the vacuousness of the so-called freedom and democracy, the wars, the indifference and complicity of the silent majority and their individualism and self-centrism, the mediocrity and sameness, etc. I have become more radicalised and more extremist, unbearable to people because of my radical views, and I now refuse to integrate in such a society.

A shopkeeper reading a newspaper, Cairo 14 December 2015 A photograph by Everyday Egypt

Unworthy Victims

A Spatial History of a Main Baghdadi Street

Fortress Europe Staunch Defender on the Left It is not a Refugee Crisis

Human Development Read also The Lucky Generation

Sameeh Alqa'sim and the Language of Revolution

Reading while riding A photo by Everyday Egypt

" There is no document of  civilization which  is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Walter Benjamin "لا توجد وثيقة للحضارة ليست في نفس الوقت وثيقة للبربرية" ولتر بنجامين

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine

Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) In a Pomegranate Chandelier Man Without a Country

"...  I think there's a serious misunderstanding... on the role Trump is playing. Trump is not the cause of anti-Muslim bigotry in the US: he is a symptom of it. We're now 14 years into a war that the United States has waged on Muslims, in which all of the extraordinary steps that the state has taken - Guantanamo Bay, torture, black sites, omnipresent electronic surveillance, endless war, unlimited drone assassination anywhere on the planet - are acceptable precisely because the victims of these measures have been racialized. "The innocent have nothing to fear" is code for "look, we're going after Muslims, everyone knows we're going after Muslims, you're white, you have nothing to worry about." And a decade and a half of a bipartisan project to criminalize Muslims - embraced by every mainstream candidate in the United States from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders - has been an American mainstream which is suspicious of Islam at best and violen

Turkey's Time Has Come (A free subscription is required to read this interesting analysis ) Read also Whose Side is Turkey on?

Clash of Barbarisms " The process of civilization is described as a historical process of pacification of human relations, overcoming aggressivness and the rule of law. And what we are seeing in this kind of clash is not, therefore, a clash of civilizations or features of civilizations clashing, but a clash of those kinds of barbaric potentials that every civilization include, whether Islamic or Western. These are barbarian forms which are potentially included in every kind of civilization and which can take over in periods of crisis or some specific historical periods. "  Gilbert Achcar, 2003 Achcar said in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris: "The Western intervention, the Western action in the Middle East, has been creating the ground for all this. This is what I called previously the clash of barbarisms, with a major barbarism represented by Western intervention."  A page from the "Western" book of barbarism

Maxime Rodinson on Islamic "Fundamentalism"

A mild, defensive article by Stop the War Coalition

On Naguib Mahfouz "No corner of Egyptian life was foreign to him: his characters are pharaohs and whores, shopkeepers and bureaucrats, peasants and presidents. Part of Mahfouz’s achievement is its sheer extent, its superabundant precision, a kind of indigenous update of the Encyclopedists’  Description de l’Egypt . It is the size of his ambitions that make it so natural to compare him with the giants of the nineteenth century—Balzac, Dickens and Zola..."

Occupation with a Human Face

Israel's barbarism

رسائل ماركس وأنجلز حول الديانة الإسلامية

"David Halberstam wrote  The Best and the Brightest  out of genuine puzzlement at how highly educated academics, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and businessmen fell victim in Vietnam to their own myths of moral supremacy and military firepower. In our own time, the power of the technocratic elite has multiplied, helped by lavish funding from insecure politicians and self-seeking businessmen, the delegitimation of dissent in the mainstream media and universities, and broad-spectrum depoliticization." Read the article in full

Jacques Rancière: The Front National’s useful idiots "Les idéaux républicains sont devenus des armes de discrimination et de mépris"

I Saw a Man Beheaded "I want to share this account* as a small intervention to re-frame ideas and experiences of violence and terror. I was an ambulance volunteer during Israel's Operation Cast Lead. It was a 22 day war on the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009 that killed 1409 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. It was the heaviest Israeli attack on Palestinian territory since 1967. The 2014 Gaza War has since eclipsed this in terms of deaths, injury and destruction in Gaza. On the afternoon of Friday the 16 th  of January we picked up the body of a man who had just been decapitated by an Israeli air strike. Dominant cultural narratives on violence in the global north now only see beheading as a terrorist act by ISIS or Al Qaeda or similar groups. The perpetrator is a Muslim. The colonial fantasy of the savage is coming back in to focus.   The role of the state, armed with heavy aerial power – drones, F16s, Apache Helicopters, MIG jets – is not part of the story of beheading. I th

Niall Ferguson, a reactionary historian Watch this man He was already arguing in  The Cash Nexus , published a few months before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, that ‘the United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy’ – if necessary by military force. ‘Let me come clean,’ he wrote in the  New York Times Magazine  in April 2003, a few weeks after the shock-and-awe campaign began in Iraq, ‘I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang.’

In an interview in 1986 Maxime Rodinson said: " Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but it can last another thirty or fifty years — I don’t know how long. Where fundamentalism isn’t in power it will continue to be an ideal, as long as the basic frustration and discontent persist that lead people to take extreme positions. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe! Islamic fundamentalists will continue to dominate the period for a long time to come."

How the National Front Changed France Read also France and Its War on Terror and Intellectuals From Left Bank to Left Behind: Where Have the Great Frenceh Thinkers Gone?

Mercenaries in Yemen: the US Connection

The Forgotten Alliance

Pakistan’s Contrary Years (1971-1977): A Cultural History of the Bhutto Era

"We" are still striving to cvilize those " recalcitrant Arabs " and Muslims. Today we do it in a better way. Not only do we use better weapons, NGOs, monarchies as allies, etc, but "we" do it "democratically": we debate it, we vote for it and the public knows about it. Shock and Awe

Via Stathis Kouvelakis  After Tsipras's "historic" visit to Israël and his previous one to Egypt, now it's the turn for Egypt's dictator El Sissi to visit Athens. Tsipras has totally aligned himself with most reactionary forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. “Your visit inaugurates a new period of close cooperation between the two countries,” Tsipras told the Egyptian leader. “You have sincerely conveyed Egypt’s voice to our European friends,” said El-Sissi."

Syria and the Left

Militarized Neoliberalism: Jeff Halper's War Against the People Also, My interview with Jeff Halper (London, June 2008)

The generalised picture of the Arab World portrayed by Albert Hourani looks gloomy but accurate. “The link between the regime and the dominant social groups,” writes Hourani, “might also turn out to be fragile. What could be observed was a recurrent pattern in Middle Eastern history. The classes which dominated the structure of wealth and social power in the cities wanted peace, order and freedom of economic activity, and would support a regime as long as it seemed to be giving them what they wanted; but they would not lift a finger to save it, and would accept its successor if it seemed likely to follow a similar policy."  Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples , Faber and Faber Ltd, United Kingdom, 1991, p 454

The Myth of Leftist Academia The ideological control of the university is intimately related to the economics of “higher education” in the neoliberal era.  Professors who profess too much in ways that might offend concentrated power are easily dispensed with when they are hired only by the course, semester, or academic year.  Department chairs and deans can avoid headaches merely by not renewing the troublemakers’ contracts. Adjuncts and temporary instructors (glorified “Assistant Professors” at many universities) who wish to keep a foothold in academia are well advised not to rock doctrinal boats. As the AAUP notes, “The insecure relationship between contingent faculty members and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom…Contingent faculty may be less likely to take risks in the classroom or in scholarly and service work….The free exchange of ideas may be hampered by the fear of dismissal for unpopular utterances.” This content was originally published by tele

Happened at Al-amiriyya Context of the piece

The House of Zion

THE FAMISHED RAJ By John Newsinger "The Bengal Famine of 1943–44, a man-made catastrophe that in total caused the deaths of perhaps five million people, was described by the incoming British Viceroy Archibald Wavell as threatening ‘incalculable’ damage to the Empire’s reputation. [1] It was, he said, ‘one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule.’ Wavell was right about the scale of the disaster. But so effectively has the episode been written out  of the histories of the Second World War and the Raj that it can scarcely be said to have damaged Britannia’s reputation. In the prestigious Oxford History of the British Empire: The TwentiethCentury, a volume that surely sits on the shelves of every university library in the English-speaking world, the Famine goes unmentioned. In Max Hastings’s 600-page study of Churchill during the Second World War, Finest Years, it gets barely a paragraph, while Boris Johnson’s cod biography, The Churchill

How the Workers Became Muslims (a book) “In this beautifully written and brilliantly argued book, Ferruh Yilmaz shows how moral panics and political mobilizations against Muslim ‘difference’ function in western nations to obscure pervasive oppressions of race and class. Drawing deftly on advanced currents in studies of communication and cultural studies, How the Workers Became Muslims demonstrates the dynamism of discourse as a social force. Yilmaz reveals how the prevailing categories and classifications that are deployed in political discourse deliberately direct attention toward conflicts over cultural norms and values in order to deflect attention away from material and political conflicts over resources and rights. This book shows how anti-Muslim mobilizations are not merely manifestations of cultural racism and Islamophobia, but rather key tools for the perpetuation of class dominance and the occlusion of class conflicts.” —George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place.

"...the chief connection between human rights and market fundamentalism is a missed connection: Precisely because the human rights revolution has focused so intently on state abuses and has, at its most ambitious, dedicated itself to establishing a floor for protection, it has failed to respond to — or even much recognize — neoliberalism’s obliteration of the ceiling on inequality. Could a different form of human rights correct this mistake? I doubt it. This is not to contradict the moral significance and possibly even historical success of human rights when it comes to combating political repression and restraining excessive violence. But whenever inequality has been limited, it was never on the sort of individualistic, and often antistatist, basis that human rights share with their market-fundamentalist doppelgänger. And when it comes to mobilizing support, the chief tools of the human rights movement — the critique of state repression and the melioration of disasters of w

"What is Cameron’s problem with IS? Ordinary people who in their spare time have formed a huge multinational oil trade and a workforce of thousands willing to be paid in rice and fear – that’s the Big Society right there. Cameron called them “Women-raping, Muslim-murdering, medieval monsters” – he carefully avoided saying “child molesters” in case one of the backbench shouted: “Present!” This is before we get to the fact that he used the word “medieval” to justify a military expedition into the Middle East. Of course bombing will cause delight in Islamic State, where it will form the only entertainment. There’s no music, no dancing, and we’re spending a couple of million quid a night providing the  mise en scène  for these sadists’ fantasy life." Frankie Boyle, theguardian.com, 04 December 2015 The ideological disciplining power of neoliberal university economics extends down to students. Students who must begin paying off exorbitant student debts the day after they gra

ISIS Emerged out of the Dashed Hopes of the Arab Uprisings Read also Are We ISIS? Flag Down

Al-maādii, Cairo Laleh Khalili 2015

Murray Bookchin and the Ocalan connection: the  New York Times  profiles the students of PKK Rojava

Yemen: A detailed report of the barbarism of a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States against the people of Yemen

I remember that it was in 2001/02 when I heard of Eric Lerner's theory in The Big Bang Never Happened . I found it logical though I did not have any profound scientific knowledge. After all, "the father" of the Big Bang theory was the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître. "The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told  Phys.org . Ali and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, have shown in a paper published in  Physics Letters B  that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their  new model  in which the universe has no beginning and no end. Read more at:  http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html#jCp

France and Its War on Terror and Intellectuals Read also From Left Bank to Left Behind: Where Have the Great Frenceh Thinkers Gone?

Aziz al-Azmeh, among many critics, has been one of the most prominent figures in assering that 'there are as many Islams as there are situations that sustain it'. مثقفونا "المتنورون" يقولون إن الدين ليس هو منشأ الارهاب بل تمثلاته "الخاطئة" في رؤوس الارهابيين......لكن السؤال هنا: وما هو الدين غير تمثلاته في أذهان معتنقيه؟ الأجدر أن نقول أن منشأ الارهاب ليس هذا التمثل أو ذاك للدين بل النظام الاجتماعي الذي تنشأ في خضمه تلك التمثلات.... ولعل أكثر التمثلات "خطأ" للدين جعله جوهرا متعاليا عن التاريخ. فيظهر هنا كدين إرهابي "بالفطرة" ويظهر هناك كدين "متسامح" "بالجوهر".. أما الدين فهو بالضبط تمثلاته المتغيرة والمتحولة وفق سياقها التاريخي، ولا وجود لجوهر للدين إلا كتمثل خاص ينتجه التطور التاريخي... لكن ماذا نفعل، فمثقفينا يحاربون الارهاب .......بالاسهاب محمد المثلوثي، تونس، 22 نوفمبر 2015

Why Does Cameron Want to Bomb Syria? Yes, There is an Imperialist Ruling Class