Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Nadim Mahjoub Monday, 11 September 2006 Note: Much of the information in this article, including research, citations, and source material is based on information found in  Endless War , by David Keen. "I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory."  Adolf Hitler, speech to Wehrmacht commanders-in-chief, 22 August 1939 It has been said that September 11 th  portends something new; that the terrorist attacks carried out on September 11, 2001 against the USA have changed the world. "It stands to reason that 19 men cannot change history. But they did." ( The Economist , 31 August 2006) The so-called ‘war on terror', a continuum of the 1980s Reagan's war, has been designed to end ‘terror'. To achieve this it will require years of ‘counter-terroris...

" In the absence of unforeseen reversals for ISIS and its many associated groups, the 'war on terror' in its current incarnation is set to escalate and indeed last well into the 2020s." — Paul Rogers, opendemocracy.net, 19 February 2016 Since "the war on terror" (read the war of terror) has been waged by states, Western and non-Western, for the last 15 years, it is this Terror that is the main terrorism, with its different features, which breeds more terrorism and makes it endless.  "Endless War?  Hidden Functions of the 'War on Terror'" (Pluto Books 2006) by David Keen. Keen explores how winning war is rarely an end in itself; rather, war tends to be part of a wider political and economic game that is consistent with strengthening the enemy. Keen devises a radical framework for analysing an unending war project, where the "war on terror" is an extension of the Cold War. An interview .

A long interview with Beydoun , author of  American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear  and   The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. My selection: “ We live in the United States of Amnesia, and we forget the explosion of bigotry, hostility, nationalism, and militarism that happened instantaneously.” “The neoconservative government which presided over the Bush administration had catapulted the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. The best way to think about them is these are Neo-Orientalists who believe that the West is sort of this monolithic, aligned, geographic/civilizational entity, and as a consequence of 9/11—even before 9/11— was on this predictable path towards perpetual war with the Muslim world…  I think there were always Muslim boogeymen before 9/11. What’s really troubling about the response with the War on Terror is that it conflated an entire faith group or an entire global population of 1.7 billion peo...

Against Amnesia The experience of violence by a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists. That's what happens to peoples and nations. When they are battered, they hit back. State terror very often breeds collective terror. –Eqbal Ahmed, 1998 [Ahmed though does not explicitly include the state terrorism of Western states. He merely talks about the how US ‘promotes terrorism’, for instance.] From a transcript of a talk by Eqbal Ahmed University of Colorado, Boulder, on 12 October 1998 “By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the Western world. At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started to be described, by 1944-45, as 'freedom fighters.' Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, Willi...

Like with imprisonment, a radical examination of “counterterrorism” shows it fails to work even on its own terms: many more civilians have been killed as a result of the war on terror than the “jihadists” have killed, or could ever have hoped to kill. The wars, bombings, and covert operations pursued by the United States have killed nearly five hundred thousand people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, according to a Brown University  estimate . Families and whole swaths of communities within the United States have been devastated by domestic practices of intensive targeting and prosecution. Like the war on drugs, the war on terror at home does not reduce violence but spreads it; its impacts reverberate from schools to family life to diminished political power for Muslim-American communities. Under the guise of policing “homegrown terrorism,” it has dramatically expanded the politics of fear and suspicion around Muslims and the sphere of law enforcement around Muslim communities....

"The war on terror" and our friends in barbarity Tony Wood (NLR 2004): What has been the international response to the ongoing assault on Chechen statehood? As the Chechen foreign ministry official Roman Khalilov dryly notes, ‘the international community’s record of timely, painless recognition of secession is extremely poor’.  [51]  Here Chechnya has been a casualty of the basest  Realpolitik . Western governments gave the nod to Yeltsin’s war as a regrettable side-effect of a presidency that had at all costs to be prolonged, if capitalism was to be successful in Russia. Putin has benefited from a similarly craven consensus. Yet for all the column inches expended on the harm done to Russia’s fragile democracy by the imprisonment of  YUKOS chairman  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, it is in Chechnya that the face of Putin’s regime is truly revealed, and it is above all by its sponsorship of wanton brutality there that it should be judged. The few early criticisms of ...

In the postcolony, wherein a particular form of power rages, wherein the dominant and the subjugated are specifically linked in one and the same bundle of desire, enthusiasm for the end is often expressed in the language of the religious. One reason why is that the postcolony is a relatively specific form of capture and emasculation of the desire for revolt and the will to struggle.  The enthusiasm for origins thrives by provoking an affect of fear of encountering the other—an encounter that is not always material but is certainly always phantasmatic, and in general traumatic. Indeed, many are concerned that they have preferred others over themselves for a long time. They deem that the matter can no longer be to prefer such others to ourselves. Everything is now about preferring ourselves to others, who, in any case, are scarcely worthy of us, and last, it is about making our object choices settle on those who are like us. The era is therefore one of strong narcissistic bonds. In t...