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Quote of the Week: What Edward Saïd Fell Short of Exposing

The cross-categorization of “Islam and the West” … survived [Edward] Saïd’s intervention, first and foremost because the material basis of its continued validity persisted… Saïd, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world.   The West” coinvented an “Islam” best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining the illusion of its own civilizational superiority. This dual false consciousness was not merely a product of a sense of racial superiority; it was also a requirement of the economics of robbing continents of their wealth and wherewithal. Any and all acts of decolonization are entirely contingent on dismantling all such civilizational divides as “Islam and the West,” “the First and the Third World,” “the West and the Rest,” in all of which the ruling ideological powers of the world have robbed continents of their material and labor resources and the cen

Quote of the Week: How the West Won

"[I]n large measure," as Geoffrey Parker has observed, " 'the rise of the West' de­pended upon the exercise of force, upon the fact that the military balance between the Europeans and their adversaries overseas was steadily tilting in favour of the former;. . . [T]he key to the Westerners' success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution.' " The expansion of the West was also facilitated by the superiority in organization, discipline, and training of its troops and subsequently by the superior weapons, transport, logistics, and medical services resulting from its leadership in the Industrial Revolution.  The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or  religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. W

The West’s [and Zelensky’s] Hypocrisy Are Not New

BBC: Hamas attack on Israel. Middle East Eye: Palestinian attack on Israel. That is expected from the BBC. Watch how little sympathy and concern there will be from the West for the many Palestinian men, women and children who are killed once again by Israel. Their immense suffering will be obscured, and justified, by the term "Israeli retaliation ". —Jonathan Cook Related Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State   (Pluto Press 2006). Interview with Jonathan Cook, a former staff journalist of the Guardian and Observer newspapers, from Nazareth, Israel.   >>  Listen to Jonathan Cook . How Israel went from helping create Hamas to bombing it My interview with Khaled Hrub , author of  A Beginner’s Guide to Hamas

Hamas”/“Islamic Jihad” as False Synecdoche for the Entirety of Palestine

Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”? Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact. In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has

History

Alain Gresh removes Political Economy from History. He also separates the "Enlightenment" from barbarism (e.g. slavery, colonialism, etc) that co-existed with it. The West's selective reading of history

Ahmed Matar: ‘Yes, I Am a Terrorist’

Yes, I am a terrorist أنا إرهابي (na’am ana' irha'bii) The West cries in fear when I make a toy from a matchbox While they [the West] make a gallows of my body using my nerves for rope  The West panics when I announce one day that they have torn my galabia   While it is they who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture  And to announce my joy and my utmost delight when they violate me! The West is sorely grieved when I worship One God in the stillness of the prayer niche. While from the hair of their coattails and the dirt of their shoes  They knead a thousand idols that they set atop the dung heaps made of the titled ones  So that I become their slave and perform amongst them the rituals of flies.  And he, they will beat me if I announce my refusal.  If I mention among them the fragrance of flowers and grass  They crucify me, accusing me of terrorism!  Admirable are all the deeds of the West, and of its tails  As for me, as long as I am related to freedom  E
An animated introduction to Said's Orientalism  and beyond Said's Orientalism Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

LGBTQ

"I'm uncomfortable with how close the mainstream LGBTQ movement in the West has aligned itself with both capitalism and the military. For example, as an Arab man, how can I celebrate legislative changes in the United States that allow gay men and women to serve in the military, when this same institution is responsible for things like the Abu Ghraib prison torture, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continued drone strikes? But there’s hope. There are queer Arab movements, both in the Arab world and in the Western world, who are working to make a space for themselves within the mainstream LGBTQI movement—Qaws, a queer Palestinian movement, is one that comes to mind in its efforts to challenge the Israeli government’s pinkwashing of the occupation, while building positive bridges of solidarity between movements in the West and the East."  — Saleem Haddad , author of Guapa
How did the West usurp the rest? Abstract: Traditional explanations of the “ rise of the West ” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the con- junctural and contingent aspects of Europe ’ s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European develop- ment, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “ West ” and “ East ” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the short- comings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists ’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these proble
“Toward the end of 1951, Secretary of State Dean Acheson formed a special committee on the Arab world under the chairmanship of Kermit Roosevelt, from the newly established CIA. The committee suggested the need for “an Arab leader who would have more power in his hands than any other Arab leader ever had before, ‘power to make an unpopular decision’ … one who deeply desires to have power, and who desires to have it primarily for the mere sake of power.” This recommendation was made more explicit in a British Foreign Office minute on December 3, 1951, which described the joint American-British view as follows: “the only sort of Government with which we can hope to get an accommodation is a frankly authoritarian government … both ruthless and efficient … We need another Mustafa Kemal [the Turkish officer who led a modernizing coup in 1921, and assumed the title Atatürk, the father of the Turks], to secularize and Westernize his country … Even though Egyptians are not Turks, and men like
"Please help the people of Aleppo, just like we helped the people of Kobani. Oh, hang on, Aleppo? Kobani? Oh, that’s right. In Kobani they were Kurds. Civilised, secular, “progressive”, feminists, even green warriors apparently. They were like “us.” “We” (western imperialists and western … “anti-imperialists”) understand them. Therefore, they deserved to be saved from ISIS beasts, said the imperialist leaders, and their “anti-imperialist” echo in unison. Aleppo? Facing a fasc istic enemy that has massacred twenty times as many people as ISIS fascists could ever manage, is not full of Good Kurds. It is full of Arabs. And we all know what western imperialist leaders, the far-right, neo-Nazis, Trumpists, racists, and “left-wing anti-imperialists” think of Arabs, especially when they live in Syria. They are all backward, blood-thirsty, barbaric, “jihadis” and “head-choppers,” *all* of the above categories tell us, yes, the left-fascists just as emphatically as any of the others. So t
" Assad and his wife have a remarkably similar background to many elite figures in the West . Like Libya's Gaddafi dynasty, the House of Assad has strong connections to the United Kingdom. Bashar was studying ophthalmology in London when his brother Bassel dashed his chances of becoming president by smashing his Mercedes into a roundabout at 80mph. His wife, Asma, is British-Syrian, went to a private school, studied at King’s College, London and spent time working as a banker before becoming First Lady. The regime has sought to capitalise on Asma and build up an image for her as a sort of Syrian Princess Diana, including through her involvement in charity work. Her philanthropy, alas, does not extend to asking her husband to stop gassing Syria's civilians. Even the regime's poisonous propagandist, Bouthaina Shaaban, was educated at the University of Warwick, and the language she uses in interviews with western media outlets suggests the extent to which she unde
"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