Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

تونس "دعم المؤسسة الأمنية" هكذا يهتف السياسيون والمثقفون من أقصى اليمين إلى أقصى اليسار، من الأشد تزمتا إلى الأكثر حداثة وليبرالية، من راشد الغنوشي إلى حمة الهمامي، ومن إمام المسجد إلى أكاديمي الجامعة، ومن أنصار الأحزاب الحاكمة الى أنصار الأحزاب المعارضة الأكثرها راديكالية.... جوقة يومية تطالب بتزويد البوليس بالسلاح والأجهزة المتطورة وإحياء مؤسسة المخابرات وإعادة الكوادر القديمة وانتداب المزيد من الأعوان و"تحسين ظروف الأمنيين"....الخ، بل إنهم يلومون الحكومة على تساهلها هنا، وعدم ا لضرب بيد من حديد هناك، وبقدر الصخب والضجيج الذي أثارته بعض قوانين ميزانية 2016 فيما يتعلق ببعض التفاصيل الجبائية فإن رصد أكثر من 10 بالمائة من هذه الميزانية لحساب وزارتي الداخلية والدفاع لم يلق سوى الترحيب من جميع الكتل النيابية في ما يسمى مجلس نواب الشعب... وبما أن "الخطر الإرهابي"، وفق الخبراء والمحللين وكل مرتزقة صناعة الرأي العام، سيمتد لسنوات طويلة، فإن "المجهود الوطني" لتعزيز "المؤسسة الأمنية" و"تطوير أدائها" وتمكينها من كل الوسائل ا

Is there really any difference between a terrorist and an ordinary criminal? and a good comment by Ed Lytwak: " The real question: Is there any moral difference between individual terrorism and State Terrorism?  P.S. apart from the fact that State terrorism is systemic and practiced on a much larger scale."

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