Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  Statements on the BBC and other media outlets

The Telegraph calls it an invasion , the BBC calls it a coup . A 20-years war, an election organised under occupation and during bloodshed, with a president elected by 923,000 votes out of 9.7 million registered votes out of a population of 30 million. No, it is not a coup. The Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion and then Taliban won that war. There was no government or Afghan army to speak of. It was a regime kept alive by the American forces ruling over about 30% of the population. But those who always scream about fair and democratic elections, do not care about facts. Ironically, the BBC is one of the proponents of ‘Fact-check’. 

The BBC has confirmed it received 109,741 complaints from the public over its coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh's death. The figure makes the coverage of Prince Philip's death the most complained-about piece of programming in BBC history. I have seen the floods of headlines on the BBC front page, but I have never read a single article about the death of a prince. Nor did I bother to send a complaint. 

 A review “Whereas previous works sketched impressive if inevitably tendentious genealogies of the present – and were greatly aided in that effort by Curtis’s skill not just as a researcher but as an interviewer – the gain in affective texture in the new series is at the expense of its argument about how we got here. A dogged hostility to what he sees as the debilitating leftist academic narrative of neoliberalism (the ‘n-word’, as he dismissed it in a recent interview), and the effort to trace the mood rather than the origins or structure of our present, leaves an aesthetic of explanation without the required content or complexity – the capture of emotion without the current of history.” Dreamworlds of Catastrophe

 The biggest threat to its independence is the corporation itself

“ The chart shows [Gary] Lineker as the highest-earning star with an unchanged salary of £1.75m in the last financial year.” Like other similar injustices, the majority are complicit in this, for they accept it as ‘natural’ and ‘new normal’.  After all, Lineker is a frontline essential worker before and after the pandemic, and has been risking his life for many years to entertain a passive complacent audience. And now the poor Lineker “has agreed” to a £400,000 pay cut.  When politicians use the language of “we are in it together”, they express the ideology of the ruling class. And the BBC and Lineker are examples of this. “I am making sacrifices because we are all in it together.”

The BBC : " For three years, Donald Trump presided over a nation of relative peace and prosperity. The crises he faced were largely of his own making, and he confronted them by rallying his supporters and condemning his opponents. Now Trump faces a situation ill-suited to a playbook of division. The US economy has been hobbled by a deadly pandemic. George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has spread racial unrest across the nation. The public is uncertain and afraid - and increasingly angry." These are circumstances that would test the abilities of even the most skilful leaders. This president, however, risks becoming lost at sea. His public calls for unity and healing have been undermined by a penchant for Twitter name-calling and bellicosity. Message discipline, a valuable attribute at this moment, is not his forte. There may be no easy way to guide the nation through its current peril. Barack Obama's measured coolness did nothing to

"It seem clear that, for whatever reason, Western political systems have proven incapable of responding rationally, in time, to the Coronavirus threat. As Richard Horton writes of the government, overwhelming scientific evidence of an advancing threat did  not  generate the required action: 'For unknown reasons they waited. And watched.’

Separating science from the social and political, the BBC attempts to debunk myths adopted by the far right, but it ignores that the main perpetuators of racism are established institutions, domestically and globally, which lay down the conditions and grounds of racist behavious, the corporate media and political parties that play the "immigration card", especially in times of crisis of capitalism. The mainstream liberal ideology that claims inclusiveness in the name of "free market liberalism" but practises exclusion in employment, through Fortress Europe, and through the forms of "development" (e.g. uneven development), cultural essentialism, the nation state that embodies superiority and nationalism of the "imagined community" (including selective history and filtered school curricula and how "the West" and the white 'race' got welathier and more powerful) and the fear of the Other and the fostering of the irrational in an

Why the Corporate Media Won't Call It a Coup 

"Big issues transcend Brexit." Indeed. I remember when in late 2018 I asked someone who works in Parliament: with or without Brexit, will there be an end to obscene inequality, exploitation, austerity, tuition fees, support of dictators...? He replied: "No," with a strange look at me as if I had asked him questions that either he never heard of or they were irrelevant. Ken Loach

"When pollsters asked the British public what share of Labour members faced complaints of antisemitism, the average guess was 34 percent — over three hundred times the real total. With media insistent that Labour is “riddled with antisemitism,” Jeremy Corbyn’s efforts to fight it have done nothing to placate his critics." The corporate media is one of the pillars of the capitalist state apparatus. How Labour Became "Antisemitic"

According to this BBC clip, China became communist in 1949 . And we know through schooling, the "cold war", the media, the common people we meet everyday and the experts that China was "communist" until very recently. According to the man in the interview, "there's a long way to go to reach the final goal of building a communist society." Now who should I believe the BBC's journalist or a Chinese 'illiterate', who has never been educated in how to describe socio-economic formations and did not know that "communism" existed in many countries and failed. Could it be that he is just brainwahsed and still believes in an ideal? Here is what the British Academy wrote in an introduction to a conference last year: "2019 will mark the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, which aimed to create the world's largest socialist society. " (my emphasis) However, a few lines down we read, "This confe

The liberal impartiality/hypocrisy of the BBC "Theresa May condemns Trump's 'go home' remark" Here is what racism and Islamophobia look like in the British establishment: The hard-centre is racist The Tories' Islamophobia problem and Angela Merkel, too. Merking

Britain Wealth creators, life savers and science developers at the BBC Their salaries are justified. And as long as consent (or the "ideology of consent") is still there, the majority accepts it. and 40% of adults have less than £51,200 in wealth each   Wealth includes property, savings and pension. 30% of adults have less than 13,700 in wealth each. That is about the annual salary of a bus driver (after tax).

The BBC: ignoring criminal consequences of an era In its " Russia's bitter taste of capitalism ", there is an omission of the major consequence of the restoration of capitalism in Russia and the USSR, which is that  the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union took more lives than the Iraq and Syrian wars put together : 1.9 million excess deaths in Russia alone in 1990–95; around 4 million for the  USSR in the 1990s.  Sources:  – Vladimir Shkolnikov and Giovanni Andrea, "Population Crisis and Rising Mortality in Transitional Russia’, in Cornia and Renato Paniccià, eds,  "The Mortality Crisis in Transitional Economies", Oxford 2000, p. 256; Michael Marmot,  "The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects our Health and Longevity", New York 2004, p. 196. –  Jospeh Stiglitz's Globalisation and Its Discontents, 2002 Then add the plunder of the wealth and the rise of the oligarchs. Compare that with the way the BBC deals wi

BBC's 'Lost Boys?' is a lazy reproduction of racist, culturally essentialist stereotypes approved by an 'insider' "The story of British Pakistani men"

Social justice "The top 12 earners on the BBC's latest list of star salaries are all men."  It would have made a difference if half of them were women! "Match of the Day host Gary Lineker has overtaken Chris Evans as the best-paid person on the list, earning between £1.75m-£1.76m in 2017-18." What the fuck does Lineker produce for society? Do the British people question this? We have seen already that they don't give a shit.

Along with two criminals,  Aung San Suu Kyi, Barack Obama and others, Mother Theresa was also a nobel prize winner. The BBC has just revealed that Mother Theresa charity in India has been selling babies . But after all these years, the Corporation has still not questioned the mission of the woman/the saint. After all, it is about showing that someone, somewhere in the "Third World" is doing something for the poor. That makes the "West" feel good about itself.

" Turkey has been under a state of emergency since a failed coup in July 2016, with 107,000 public servants and soldiers dismissed from their jobs. More than 50,000 people have been imprisoned pending trial since the uprising." The BBC is lost in translation. In the very same paragraph , "coup" and "uprising" were used to mean the same thing. We know that what happened in 2016 was a coup and the major Western powers were slow to condemn it. They played watch-and-see first. In these elections, the HDP has scored above the 10% threshold that will aloow it to enter parliament despite its leader being in prison. The 2016 coup: an analysis by Stratfor "Regardless of whether Erdogan is at its helm, Turkey will continue down its expansionist path, a path that was unlikely to be short-circuited by a haphazard coup led by a motley group of Islamists and nationalists. Turkey is on this course, at this stage in history, because geopolitics wills it. B