Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Even former Nazis could identify with Israeli expansionism — and used this support to absolve their own pasts. “Between 80 and 100 percent of steel and iron for Israel’s growing machine industry came from German resource payments to Israel, without which Israel would have been unable to develop its industrial base…  By 1954, some 20 percent of Israel’s imports were from West Germany, making it Israel’s second-biggest import partner. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gained access to a higher-quality arsenal. German officers were also sent to Israel to train the IDF, while Israeli officers were sent to Germany to be trained by the Bundeswehr, including future IDF chiefs such as Haim Laskov. “Over a thousand West Germans asked the Israeli embassy if they could become Israeli soldiers, including the writer Günter Grass, previously of the Waffen-SS. “Instead of  challenging  the capitalist elites that fed Nazism’s initial rise and continue to dominate German politics to this ...

Although aassociated with the U.S., apple pie's origin is England. “ Targeting vulnerable foreign students or migrant labourers for harassment , abuse and deportation is second nature to US ruling regimes - as American as their sugar-infested apple pie… “President Donald Trump did not invent this particular brand of American cruelty; he is just carrying it to its vicious ends. There is now a systematic crescendo of demonising Trump by the entire institution of liberal imperialism. Embarrassed by his refreshing vulgarity, they are using it as camouflage to exonerate the rest of American history - as if it was a haven of grace, kindness and generosity towards foreigners. “Trump is simply using the precedent set by previous presidents, from Carter to Obama, against people with a moral compass.”

“If Baran was silent, the real Barans of today are being forced into a silence that is far more violent. And I wonder what kind of country tells a child: you can die building it, but you can never live in it .” Related Majidi in context

From Kolbar to 'terrorist'

Next time you hear a British person, for example, especially a supporter of Winston Churchill, says ‘my country’, turn their argument/belief on its head by quoting their ‘hero’: I  do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right.   I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, 'The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.' They had not the right, nor had they the power. —Winston Churchill  To the   Palestine Royal Commission   (1...

Key points Hemedti’s war machine is predicated on continual expansion. Since the RSF offers its recruits licence to loot and raid in lieu of wages, absent fresh targets, its forces have a tendency to disperse. In every city it captures, the RSF has employed the same playbook: destroy state institutions, plunder humanitarian resources, raze civilian property. Its assaults have functioned as an enormous engine of primitive accumulation that has destroyed agricultural land, displaced millions of people, and effected a wealth transfer from Sudan’s poorest to a class of militia leaders backed by Emirati capital… The paramilitaries have generalized the predatory political economy of Bashir’s regime. While Bashir exploited the peripheries to enrich the centre, the RSF has turned the entire country into a periphery to be plundered. The RSF’s mode of warfare has ultimately proved its undoing. The Sudanese army’s resurgence is partly due to its successful solicitation of foreign support. Qatar –...

Capitalist Colonial  departs from Kaminer's previous work by “ centering questions of coloniality and race , but the departure is not a total about-face, because the last thing I want to do is abandon the labor process or class analysis. At a fundamental level, the book is proof of Stuart Hall’s well-known theorem that “race is the modality through which class is lived.”

Solidarity with François Burgat , a prominent academic who stands trial for apology for terrorism in France. Also in French

Before he became part of the genocide supporters “Starmer wants to be thought a 'safe pair of hands', communicated above all in his commitment to the country's most conservative institutions and ideas, from NATO to sound money to royalism. He clings insecurely to the symbolic security of the flag and its metonyms, sends himself up with tryhard images of himself enjoying football with the lads and a pint, because he is terrified of being seen as anything but utterly mediocre. It's shameful to have a political enemy like Starmer , who progresses almost by default, simply because of the way the historical deck is stacked, and because of his willingness to exploit whatever evanescent advantages come his way, rather than because of any particular skill, charisma, or historical necessity of his appearance.” Good, but What is the point of using wrods that do not exist in a dictionary or online?

“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity. ‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian. “The  essayist Giuliano da Empoli's  argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian ...

 عن علي خنيس، فيسبوك هذه الصورة منذ سنوات لمهاجر من أفريقيا جنوب الصحراء. قالها منذ سنوات انه لا يريد الموت في تونس، ولانه لم يدخلها الا مكرها بقوة حراس حدود أوروبا بالوكالة وتجار البشر الذين تتقاطع مصالحهم. كما أنه لم يتخيّل حينها أنه سيتعرّض هو أو غيره من المهاجرين والمهاجرات سود البشرة جنوب الصحراء لعمليّات سحل على الهواء مباشرة من قبل تونسيين هم نفسهم ضحايا لنفس السياسات العنصرية الأوروبية التي تعيد الدولة إنتاجها على شعبها ويعيد شرائح من شعبها إنتاجها على المهاجرين والمهاجرات جنوب الصحراء. وهؤلاء نفسهم يمارسون العنصرية ضد أبناء شعبهم من التونسيين والتونسيات سود البشرة ولا يرونهم ويرونهنّ إلاّ "وصفان، عبيد وغيرها من التسميات التي يستعملونها في الإشارة لهم وبلا خجل. دولة عنصرية اسمها تونس تقع في شمال أفريقيا أيقظت كل نزعات العنصرية والكراهية الكامنة في المجتمع تحت إشراف خطاب رئاسي يتبنّى كل مقولات أقصى اليمين الفاشي الأوروبي من نظرية الاستبدال و"تغيير التركيبة الديمغرافية" إلى "المؤمرات والمخططات التي يحضر لها منذ عقود" وتستمعلها للتغطية على الفشل السياسي...

80 years since liberation from Nazi-fascism

 

[Maxime] Rodinson mobilised Ouzegane’s [*] point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument... Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book  De Pythagore à Lénine , ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type. — Selim Nadi * Ouzegane, an Algerian militant, was counted amongst the founders in 1936 of the Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA), before being excluded for ‘nationalist deviances’ in 1947

Palestinian liberation from below The book is published by Resistance Books

After rejecting in 2019 the Arab league request to ban the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the Jordanian regime has now bowed down to external pressures and issued a ban  on the Brotherhood. The ‘terrorism' excuse has been found as well as the recent advance of the Brotherhood in the parlamentary elections .  This works well for the monarchy, Israel and the 'normalisation' process. Stability of an American protectorate is more crucial in the current context than ever.

“The Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa died on 13 April, in Lima. He was 89. Best known for his role in Latin American literature’s revival, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 2010, Vargas Llosa was also a political activist. After a brief period of communist involvement as a student, he made a U-turn and used his literary influence to mount a defence of neoliberalism. In 1990 he ran for president, and in 2021 he supported far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori against left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo.” ( Le Monde Diplomatique) Neocon with a Nobel By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2010 In Llosa's  El Sueno del Celta, the  hero, Roger Casement, 1864-1916, “was an outstanding historical figure. As a British consul in Africa, he was the first to condemn, as early as 1908, the atrocities of Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State…  Vargas Llosa’s novel has rescued Casement from oblivion, as ‘one of the first Europeans to have formed a very clear idea of th...

By Marc Scully 22 April 2025 Pope Francis has died and eulogies are pouring in praising his concern for the poor, marginalized and dispossessed. Tell that to the thousands of young boys molested and sexually assaulted by Catholic priests. Pope Francis was supposed to clean up that criminality against children in the church but he did not and it prevails. Cleaning it up would have required turning offenders over to civil authorities for prosecution but Pope Francis continued to protect them. Pope Francis had an avuncular persona but contrary to the eulogies he does not have an inspiring history when it comes to standing with the oppressed. Serious questions remain about his role during Argentina's Dirty War, an anti-communist rampage under the military junta from 1976 to 1983 when at least 30,000 people were disappeared or killed in the most barbaric ways like pushing them out of airplanes over the ocean. Those questions about Pope Francis' role don't go away and it isn'...