Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

"Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers." — Naomi Klein

Trump and Fascism. A View from the Past A historian's analysis

Fanon as Example and Figure: A Conversation Between Oscar Guardiola-Rivera and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Tunisia Relatives, torture victims give first public testimony to Tunisia truth commission If I manage to give my own testimony, I will also expose the French, British and American complicity "The real test facing Tunisia's transitional justice process, however, is whether it will ultimately lead to criminal prosecutions for the crimes of the past decades, which have thus far gone without adequate investigation or punishment," Amnesty said. تونس: شهادات ضحايا انتهاكات حقوق الإنسان على مدى   خمسة عقود تُبَث علانية

Neo-liberalism's far-right across Europe in figures

Britain Part-time Lecturers on Precarious Work

The Liberal Defense of Murder

"This process of appropriation includes many others: framing the Law of Value as something morally and politically valuable; mapping natural resources, translating Cheap Nature into a portable, readable format; codifying the limits of nature and society in laws and bills, so as the first remains cheap, and creating new institutional arrangements, which  allow the market and the state to produce this logic through space and time . Appropriating Cheap Nature is not only a process of violent material dispossession. It is also a way to see the world which naturalises – and makes desirable – this process, upon which capitalist accumulation depends." Capitalism as Ecology: Mexican Resistance at the Frontier

Law says, “Go to the Mullā and learn the rules and regulations!”  Love says, “A single word is enough: shut and put away all other  books!” . . . Law says, “Have some shame and decency: put out this light!” Love says, “What is this veil for? Let the visions be open!” Law says, “Come into the mosque and perform the obligatory prayer!”  Love says, “Go to the wine-tavern, and having drunk, peform the  superogatory prayer!” . . . Law says, “O, Believer! go for Ḥajj—for you will have to cross the Ṣirāt  Bridge!” Love says, “ The door of the Beloved is the Kaʿbah, don’t move from  there!” Law says, “We strung Shāh Manṣūr up on the cross!” Love says, “ Ten, you did well; for you sacrificed him at the Beloved’s  door!”  — ( probably not actually authored by) the most widely sung Su poet of the Panjāb, Bullhē Shāh of Ḳaṣūr (1680–1758). Quoted in Shahab Ahmed's What is Islam?

Islam is thus not the simple structure so often portrayed.  Those who find the present fact of Islam adequately explained by the Koran and the life of Muhammad are simply beyond help. — Carl Heinrich Becker 

Occasionally, I get across a rarity, a non-conformist among the complacents, the career-seekers: " The point that you made about people blaming the ‘ignorant uneducated American’ is also very evident amongst my Facebook friends who are predominantly university-educated people. I feel that most of these people live in their university educated-upper class bubbles, completely oblivious to how neoliberal policies are affecting people that live in the ‘real world’." — Pieter Dockx, an LSE student. Will Trump call Sanders? 

A counter-narrative How did the first world war actually end?

دموع الليبيراليين في وداع الإمبراطور "The tears of the Liberals at the emperor's departure"

Did Medieval Muslims Invent Secularism?

Liberal crap Putting the blame on those who did not vote.  Clinton is not a friend of women; she is part and parcel of a criminal state. A state that implemented reactionary policies on wages, working conditions, commodification of women, imperialist policies towards women in the Middle East and elsewhere through killing by drones and IMF adjustment prgrammes, corporate lunder and exploitation, support of theocracies that oppress women... She is not a friend of women. Nor is Mother Theresa a friend of the poor. Those who have been staunch defenders of the status quo wanted a continuation of the very same neoliberal injustice at home and abroad. The 50% or so who did not vote are fed up with the dictatorship of the two-party system. Conversely, those who wanted the status quo, the affluent and the rich support and backed Clinton to the hilt. Paraphrasing Brecht, the liberals wish they could dissolve the people and elect another. Richard Seymour: " This is part of a genre

Sarkozy/Juppé (status quo), or Trumpette? "The FN has become the party of the working class,” says Bruno Cautrès, a political sciences researcher at Paris-based Sciences Po Cevipof. “The party offers a double explanation for their malaise: Europe has failed to protect their jobs from globalisation and failed to protect their way of life from Muslim immigrants.”  (the Financial Times) England :  Neoliberal vultures contnue their plunder, "legally".  Virgin Care and the NHS Branson's Virgin Rail profits Crony capitalism Branson, The Stuntman

The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social

Génétiquement, les Maghrébins ne sont pas des Arabes

"[T]he Intruder, characteristically an asylum seeker, an illegal immigrant, or increasingly a legal immigrant, who has been added to the ranks of the category of 'criminal’ while being housed and ‘protected’ by the Incompetents, enslaved as they are to doctrines of ‘Political Correctness’. Migration is therefore a central issue here. And neoliberalism contributes to the revival of far-right politics through the global, structural changes that it has carried through over the last 40 years. In particular, it is the connection between domestic socio-economic change, as reflected in the rescaling of welfare assistance, and the compulsions toward labour market flexibility, with the accompanying sense of individualized social insecurity for workers (Theodore, 2007: 252–53).  Neoliberalism, then, has rested upon the opening up of labour  markets within the mature capitalist economies to competitive pressures on the social wage through both offshoring production sources in low

Making and Unmaking of the Greater Middle East It is a good essay, but I wonder why one in concluding a 30-page essay does not insert three lines on the role of Russia and its support of the Assad regime.

After Brexit, here we have another product of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism). So far the effect has been in the two most aggressive countries where neloliberalism have been implemented.  " Trump has won because a (just) sufficient number of people are fed up with the status quo.  Apparently 60% of voters asked at the polling booths reckon that the country “is on the wrong track” and two-thirds were fed up and angry with the Washington government – something Clinton personifies. Like the vote of the Brits for Brexit, against all expectations, a sufficient number of voters in America (mainly white, older and in small businesses or working in failing industries in smaller central US states) have overcome the vote of the youth, the more educated and better-off in the big cities.  But remember hardly more than 50% or so of eligible voters turned out to vote.  A huge swathe of people never vote in American elections and they constitute a sizeable part of the working class.

Winter , chapter 2 from Banquet of Seaweed by Haydar Haydar

The Twenty-First Century Victorians

Islamic State vs. Al-Qaida Note: In the first paragraph, a wrong translation of "Rumiyya", an Islamic State's publication.

Russia falls into old habits

Keep it leaking!  Exposing the powerful, the criminal, the corrupt, etc is not whistleblowing; it is the voice of dissent, and it should be encouraged and supported. Whether it is the Panama Files, or the banks and the politicians, or the oligarchs and the politicians, or the theocratic regimes and the Western governments ... in essence it is more facts about the real nature of the capitalist democracy. What we see, after all, is the tip of the ice-berg. "ISIS and Clinton Foundation are both funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar"

England In a recent report on HMP Bedford, inmates claimed it was  easier to get hold of drugs than clothes or bedding . (the BBC online)

Why did one of the 20th century most influential thinkers fade from significance?

" Spain’s first Twitter hate-crime arrest was that of a 19-year-old student in Valencia who greeted Carrasco’s death with the tweet: “That’s the way! Kill them all.” The applause that greeted the murder in certain quarters owed much to the mindset of Spaniards who were fed up with politicians lining their pockets while they themselves scrabbled for jobs, had homes repossessed or coped with dramatic falls in income, according to Ángela Domínguez. Carrasco’s tyrannical reputation – and the corruption rumours – had helped make her a target. “Part of society saw it as an almost necessary ritual,” she said. “There is a shared responsibility.” Although people in León complained privately about Carrasco, few had dared to confront her. Perhaps they feared that, without a pistol in their hand, they were always bound to lose. Rosa Seijas, who sued over the fixed exam system, sees a cowed society that has accepted cronyism as inevitable. “Everyone complains, but nobody does anything,” sh

Jessica Ellis replying to Michael Moore

Engaging Books Series

"Thus, increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.   All of this is very unfortunate. Ideally, the great academic minds of a society should be put to work for the sake of building up that society and addressing its problems. Instead, most Western academics today are using their intellectual capital to answer questions that nobody’s asking on pages that nobody’s reading. What a waste." Academics writes rubbish nobody reads Or Prof, nobody is reading you

“The connection between the human condition and labour is frequently forgotten, and for me was always so important. At 16, I went down a coal mine in Derbyshire and spent a day on the coal face – just watching the miners. It had a profound effect.” What did it make you feel? “Respect,” he says quietly. “Just respect. There are two kinds. Respect to do with ceremony – what happens when you visit the House of Lords. And a completely different respect associated with danger.” He says: “This is not a prescription for others, but when I look back on my life I think it’s very significant I never went to a university. I refused to go. Lots of people were pushing me and I said, ‘No. I don’t want to’, because those years at university form a whole way of thinking.” And you feel free from that? “Yes.” John Berger: 'If I'm s storyteller, it's because I listen'

Trade is no longer rising

When Western governments, "NGOs", CIA, etc pour money and agents in some countries to influence elections outcomes and make sure that the winner is their ally, does no make it to the news headlines, but considered conspiracy theory. When suddenly something is unearthed because there are elelection in a Western country and rivals are at each others' throes, then it is news. “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” Hillary Clinton, 2006

In Chinatown, London: Swoop and rescue 

Hundreds of migrants dead? the BBC. Well, Let them Drown

هل تعرفون القتلى جميعا؟

How Britain Destroyed the Palestinian Homeland

"The Assad regime has become a representative of the internal First World in Syria, the Syrian whites. I think the elites in the West find Bashar al-Assad more palatable than other potential interlocutors. He wears expensive suits and has a necktie, and, ultimately, these elites prefer a fascist with a necktie to a fascist with a beard. Meanwhile, they don’t see us, the Syrian people. Those who are trying to own the politics of their own country have been rendered invisible." Syria's "Voice of Conscience" Has a Message for the West

A Dr.  preaching neo-orientalism, imperialism and patronizing other countries , brandishing an empty term ("democracy) of the West, i.e. the capitalist, imperialist democracy of the Western powers that we have seen in practice not only in wars and occupations, but in IMF adjustment programmes, in global capitalism's uneven development, in plunder by corporations, in NGOs working with repressive regimes and perpetuating power structure, in Western powers working with local regimes in aborting, diverting or co-opting uprisings or confining it to the parliamentary capitalist democracy, oppression within the undemocratic European Union itself, level of corruption on an unprecedented scale, driving down wages, undermining unions (even banning people from joining a union), gambling with pensions, corporatization of education, undermining academic freedom, a development of an oligarchy and a mediaocracy, depolitization, passivity and narcissism, a plague called identity politics ins

In a foundational work of medical literature, The Welfare of Bodies and Souls (Kitāb maṣāliḥ al- abdān wa al-anfus) of Abū Zayd al-Balkhī (849–943), we find the author stating:  "The best drink that humans, through their reason and understanding, have devised a means of producing, is the refined grape-drink among whose properties is that it intoxicates [al-sharāb al-ʿinabī al-raqīq alladhī min ṭabʿi-hi al-iskār]. It is, of all beverages, the most noble in essence, most superior in composition, and most beneficial—if taken in moderation, and not to excess." Abū Zayd is, of course, speaking of grape-wine. "The benefit of a substance to the body lies in what the substance provides the body by way of health and strength, whereas its bene t to the soul lies in what the substance provides the soul by way of happiness and ani- mation: for these two things—I mean: health and happiness—are the end to which all people strive in this world; and they are not found together in

Britain: The party of war " For the past 18 months, Britain has been complicit with mass murder as our Saudi allies have bombarded Yemen from the air, slaughtering thousands of innocent people as well as helping fuel a humanitarian calamity" How Britain's party of war gave the green light to Saudi in Yemen and A Brief History of the Yemen Clusterfu*k How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11   (The Washington Post) " These days, Canada is the second-largest arms exporter to the Middle East. Our Alberta oil sands produce more carbon emissions each year than the entire state of California. Our intelligence agency is allowed to act on information obtained through torture." Think Canada is a progressive paradise?

Hizbollah, Syria, and the Arab Uprisings

" Though it was originally published before the iconic events of 9/11, now more than a decade ago, S. Sayyid’s  A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism  (1997) has assumed even more timely significance since its first appearance. In this pioneering book, Sayyid provocatively suggests, and one can still see the logic of his proposition, that we must see political Islamism as a particular phase of decolonization of Muslim political cultures. Sayyid took the rise of Islamism as a challenge to ‘Western’ political hegemony, and particularly its self-congratulatory declaration of the End of History. That proposition still demands attention." Islamism — A Eurocentric Position?

لأن الشيوعية قد أصبحت، بفضل المنظرين الماركسيين، في نظر الشغيلة وعموم الفقراء والمهمشين مرادفة للعلمانية أحيانا، للإلحادية حينا آخر، للتقدمية عند البعض، للتنويرية عند البعض الآخر، وحتى أنها قد أصبحت تظهر في الوعي العمومي (الشيوعية كمرادف للماركسية) كفرقة سياسية أو ايديولوجية تنازع الايديولوجيات الأخرى (الشيوعية في مواجهة الدين)...فمن الطبيعي أنه حينما تظهر الشيوعية كشيء واقعي، كشيء بسيط يمكن أن تصل اليه الجماهير بنهوضها الثوري التلقائي، وبدون الحاجة للمذاهب النظرية والايديولو جية، بل ضد المذهبية نفسها، فإن تلك الجماهير التي تباشر الشيوعية في حركتها بمستويات وأشكال متنوعة لا ترى فيما تقوم به أية شيوعية....وهذا طبيعي، لأن الجماهير لا ترى في حركتها حركة علمانية أو حركة إلحادية أو تقدمية أو تنويرية، فهي لا تواجه سوى شروط حياتها المادية المباشرة، ولا تستهدف غير تغيير أسلوب الانتاج الرأسمالي الذي يدفعها الى حضيض الفقر والبطالة والمجاعات والحروب وقمع أجهزة الدولة وتسلطيتها. لذلك فهذه الجماهير لا تتجه لعلمنة الدولة (فتلك مهمة العلمانيين، أي أولائك الذين يطمعون في تحرير الدولة من كهنوت الدين

Tunisia: A social experiment against state policies

How to Understand the European Union

" The fundamental problem with the EU these days is that it needs a federal state structure simply in order to exert its basic functions. The EU 28 is a dysfunctional mess in virtually everything it does. The eurozone is stuck in a perma-crisis. The EU is pathetically weak towards Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and largely absent in Syria. Now we know that it cannot even do trade deals. My overall conclusion is that the next phase of European integration — which will happen eventually — will have to be preceded by a period of disintegration. Brexit was only the start." — Wolfgang Münchau, the Financial Times After creating such a crisis and plunder, that is probably how neo-liberal EU will restructure itself, but with more plunder  (privatisation and robbery), more attack on the living standard of the workers, more nationalism and xenophobia at home and abroad. I think Stratfor.com analysis regarding the future of the EU is more sound than the above o