Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The ideologization of war

Rodinson argues that both in its traditions and history Islam was no more and no less able to control borrowing, lending, interest rates, merchant entrepreneurs than any other religious program; the stereotypes of Islamic submission to God's will, or Islamic belief in predetermination, have played little part either in the acquisition of Islamic wealth or in its administration. Islam was frequently a way ruling classes had of keeping their power, and Rodinson suggests that this is as likely to be true now as it has been historically. Maxime Rodinson explains the mysterious Near East

How the Jewish state’s founding ideology shapes it to this day Related Even the liberal Ban Ki-moon is better than the ‘liberals’ in power: “The starting point of a new approach must be to recognise the fundamental asymmetry between the parties. This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps — the traditional conflict-resolution tools.  The reality is very different: a powerful state is controlling another people through an open-ended occupation, settling its own people on the land in violation of international law and enforcing a legal regime of institutionalised discrimination. Calls for a return to unconditional bilateral talks every time there is a fresh flare-up in fighting will only serve to perpetuate the status quo if these root causes are not addressed.  What has become increasingly clear in recent years is Israel’s intent to maintain its structural domination and oppression

 How unscientific is the labour theory of value?

“Islamising stones is easier than Islamising souls”

Class and the Parable of an Environmental Victory

“This book places the Israeli army under an uncompromising lens. It reveals a yawning gap between the propaganda about ‘the most moral army in the world’ and the dark reality. Through a wide-ranging historical survey, studded with little known facts, it exposes the army for what it really is: a brutal police force of a brutal settler-colonial state. Essential for understanding the political sociology of Israel today and the reasons for the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian so-called ‘peace process.’” – Avi Shlaim, author of  The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World An Army Like No Oher

Can the Arab uprisings move towards a successful revolution?

"The border in this sense is a very recent, twentieth century form of racial sovereignty. It is no more inevitable or natural than the existence of concentration camps. The fact, however, that it feels natural, that it has achieved the appearance of 'the way things are', that it seems inevitable, is an indication of how powerful the ideology is." The border as political fantasy

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the

The ideology of the end of ideology Pontecorvo/Godard/Fassbinder

In late nineteenth-century  " [i]n the Muslim world, the Islamic  burkah , the full body covering of Muslim women, was growing in popularity. Often wrongly regarded as a mark of medieval obscurantism, the burkah was actually a modern dress that allowed women to come out of the seclusion of their homes and participate to a limited degree in public and commercial affairs. Even in this insistence on tradition, therefore, one glimpses the mark of growing global convergence." Uneven and Combined Development (Part 1)

" Lorna Finlayson’s book has the deceptively simple aim of showing that there is no distinction in kind to be drawn between the methodology of political philosophy and the philosophy itself.   And, she suggests, since the methodology is in turn really just a way of trying to sustain the distinction between political philosophy and politics, the collapse of this distinction also supports the claim that the political philosophy/politics distinction is itself untenable. Political philosophy—or, it turns out, mainstream analytic political philosophy—has a mistaken understanding of itself as standing outside or above the messy power-ridden realm of actual politics, Finlayson argues; this misunderstanding is ideologically motivated, and the methodology of political philosophy serves to exemplify and buttress it. Showing that the distinction between the methodology of political philosophy and political philosophy is ideological, in the pejorative sense familiar from critical theory sinc

" All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word ‘nature’ is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine." Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history—a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practised by the bioand theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are the academic ‘libera