Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

At issue is not an accidental, negligible or ‘unfortunate’ streak of racism in the works of a stellar European philosopher.

“Four years before [Alexis] de Tocqueville’s  Ancien Regime , Karl Marx famously wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please. They make it ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them, and this history conditions and weighs upon them as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of ‘dead weight’ did the Nazi Holocaust cast on Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?” Nazis! Liquidating the ghetto of Gaza Related Huwara, February 2023 “I want to restore security for the residents of the State of Israel,” fellow Otzma Yehudit MK  Zvika Fogel said  the morning after the rampage . “How do we do that? We stop using the word ‘proportionality.’ We stop with our objection to collective punishment [just] because it doesn’t fly with all sorts of courts. We take the gloves off. “Yesterday, a terrori

  Western collective consciousness has long been socialised with the assumption that the non-West is naturally a place of unrest, deprivation, violence and, all in all, of inescapable backwardness. This thinking was proliferated in the earliest writings by the “founding fathers” of various disciplines as a matter of scientific fact. Take the case of my own discipline: international relations. It is meant to educate the future politician, diplomat, public intellectual or policymaker on how states interact in the international political system. Yet, its first textbooks are rooted in “Darwinist ideas”, that imagined a racially hierarchical global order and placed white Europeans at the top and all the darker peoples of the world at the bottom. This hierarchy, they insisted, was justified due to white people’s natural intellectual and cultural superiority. Over the years, the ways in which these hierarchies are perpetuated have changed and we started to use different lingo. But be it fragi

So many Germans did ignore the genocide against the Jews. So many stood by when the Rwanda genocide was taking place. So many have ignored the Rohingya genocide. Responses to genocide are often determined by where the crime is committed, and what the victims look like .

Marco D’Eramo is excellent as usual. ‘It’s been a good day; I never dine better, I never sleep so peacefully, as when I have sullied myself sufficiently with what idiots call crimes.’ —Marquis de Sade, La philosophie dans le boudoir We are growing habituated to the savagery, day by day. Then we wonder how the Germans could have ignored the genocide that was being perpetrated all round them. This is a close cousin of greenwashing: we supply the bombs and we feel sorry for their victims. Call it compassionate bombing. [See, for instance, David Cameron’s and Emmanuel Macron’s tears] It is little wonder that the global South finds the West hypocritical. Denial is exercised when actions can only be performed if we deny to ourselves that we are doing them. Hypocrisy becomes all the more necessary when it comes to public opinion – its growth has been a fruit of the formation of public opinion , and has become an indispensable tool of politics. Perhaps today Westerners, and not only Germans, s

Israel is indeed committing genocide Related Liberalism at Large :  The World According to the Economist The world the  Economist  made

With the evidence we have so far, I think we can call it “an-going genocide. Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segev was the first to point out that this war is  “a textbook case of genocide” The International Bureau of the International Federation for Human Rights has adopted a resolution recognizing Israel’s actions against the Palestinian people as  “ an ongoing genocide ”. “Most states (and political leaders) prefer to avoid using the term ‘genocide’, because if they recognize it, they must act, in accordance with the convention they have signed, to ‘prevent’it or to ‘put an immediate end to it’. And this, obviously, is not on their agenda.” A demonstrator carries an image of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and  US  President Joe Biden painted red to imitate blood, during a march in support of the people of the Gaza Strip, in Nablus, occupied West Bank, October 26, 2023. Zain Jaafar/ AFP  via orientxxi.info

I wish leftists, and a few revolutionary leftists, covered, analysed, and spilled as much ink on the oppression of Palestinians as on the slaughter of Syrians by the Assad regime. Debunking myths and ‘the Western’ media and politicians’s complicity in crime. “Hamas’s attack in southern Israel, however grimly, predictably brutal, was not an ‘ invasion’  as it has widely been reported. During the Great March of Return – 2018-2019 – both  “the BBC and Westminster politicians referred to this as ‘ border   violence’.  So did the international press from the  New York Times  to the  Globe and Mail .” The purpose of asserting that there is a border between Israel and Gaza is to euphemise [sic] Israeli violence, and to represent the aggressor as engaging in self-defence. Gaza is not a nation-state. It is not even an ‘ open-air prison’  as is often said. It is a fortified ghetto controlled by the state of Israel… The occupying power, the aggressor, the purveyor of racist  apartheid  – is not m

Why Europe clings to the colonial mindset

This book [ Genocide in Libya ] is not meant to be conclusive, but to bring out Libya and Libya’s brutal, genocidal colonial history. And to get rid of that common and really absurd way of thinking that goes “I don’t know anything about Libya, so I’m going to talk about tribalism, I’m going to talk about [Muammar] al-Qaddafi, about regionalism or religion.” Who doesn’t have regions? Who doesn’t have these social complexities? An interview with Ali Abdullatif Ahmida Related There was no a Nuremberg trials for Italian fascists

Situating the Holocaust in a broader context of white racism, colonialism and imperialism 

Ideological, financial, physical and military contributions to colonisation

From Tragedy to Farce For a Nobel Prize for War

The tip of the iceberg. Just scratch the head of the majority and you will find them Starkeys. The BBC : David Starkey has been criticised for saying slavery was not genocide because of the survival of "so many damn blacks."  Starkey has been dropped by publisher and unversity . 

Film review: Black 47 I recall what Shashi Thahroor said abour famines in India. Since the British left India in 1947, there has been no famine. "As a result of what one can only call the British Colonial Holocaust, thanks to economic policies ruthlessly enforced by Britain, between 30 and 35 million Indians needlessly died of starvation during the Raj. Millions of tonnes of wheat were exported from India to Britain even as famine raged. When relief camps were set up, the inhabitants were barely fed and nearly all died. "It is striking that the last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since, because Indian democracy has been more responsive to the needs of drought-affected and poverty-stricken Indian than the British rulers ever were."  Inglorious Empire, 2017, p. 150

A BBC journalist makes an atrocious "explanation" of atrocities Allan Little speaks about how hatred combined with fear are mobilised to commit atrocities throughout history! I emailed the BBC requesting the scholars and the studies Little relied upon to make his claims, for he never mentions a single source or authority on the subject. I am still waiting fir a response. In The Dark Side of Democracy , an article (which is also the title of his book ), the prominent sociologist Michael Mann included in his analysis of genocide and mass killings an excellent discussion of other scholars of the subject. (Michael Mann 1999) "Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially anti-modern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions  have little to do with u

Manufacturing consent and views Here is an interesting and a telling comparison one should make: the way the mainstream, corporate media (from the Times to the BBC) have reported about some Westerners killed or kidnapped and the genocide* in Myanmar.  Compare how many articles, number of words and images have been used to report on one British Muslim woman who had joined ISIS and the genocide against Muslims in Myanmar.  *The United Nations and a Havard researcher, for example, have used the word genocide. 

"The world at a fascist moment" "Fascist"? Not even "neo-fascist? I have also noticed that there is no questioning of "democracy", the one used in the mainstream discourse.

Although global media outlets like the  Economist  have made the case that the Rohingya of Burma are the “ most persecuted people in the world ” for several years at this point, their plight has yet to fully register around the world. Does that mean that what's been happening to the millions of Syrians is not persecution? The assertion above does not say "the most persecuted ethnic group." I don't understand the criteria used here and not questioned or at least qualified by the Economist and Jacobin editors. The Catasrophe of the Rohingya

"The global community has done little to intervene in the  ongoing genocide ."  Is there such a thing as a "global community" or "international community"? What we have, in fact, is big powers and regional ones decide who is worth "saving" and who is a collateral in geopolitics. Think, for example, of Bosnia vs. Rwanda and Syria. "For the most part, there has been confusion about who the Rohingya are and why they are being targeted by the Myanmar regime. Azeem Ibrahim, an international research fellow affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and the U.S. Army War College, argues that the persecution of the Rohingya is historically rooted in the situation of postcolonial Myanmar and the normalized “otherness” of the Rohingya people within the country’s culture. Ibrahim’s new book  The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide  t races this troubling history of persecution and explains its origins." Book review The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar