Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

It takes Cristiano Ronaldo around  3 minutes  to earn the weekly salary of  a Saudi worker on the average annual salary of £58,000,  90 seconds  to earn the weekly salary of  a British worker on the average annual salary of £26,000. Ronaldo earns £3.6 million per week.

The figure of the half a million Iraqi children killed by the sanctions, and which goes back to a 1995 study carried out under Saddam Hussein regime, is an arguable figure. Massad and a few others still repeat it without backing it with recent studies and sources.  A game of capitalist greed

  Qatar World Cup 2022: How football became a game-changer for the Middle East

Should it be cancelled to protect workers?

“A Saudi Arabian takeover of Newcastle United is close to being agreed.  Approval from the Premier League could possibly come in the next 24 hours after a consortium proved the Saudi state would not have control of the club.  Instead the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is set to provide 80% of funds for the £300m deal, will be seen as separate to the state and therefore allow the takeover to pass the Premier League owners' and directors' test.” — the BBC “The  Public Investment Fund  is the  sovereign wealth fund  of  Saudi Arabia . It is among the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world with total estimated assets of at least $500 billion.  It was created in 1971 for the purpose of investing funds on behalf of the government of Saudi Arabia. It has been characterized as among the least transparent sovereign wealth funds in the world. In 2016, the  Wall Street Journal  noted that none of the fund's investments were named.” —...

The right is creating its own new stories. Because culture war is not about winning a debate about what constitutes England through factual disputes about its character, its statues, its football team or its history of empire. It is not a peripheral indulgence, or a mere confection. Culture war is an aggressive political act with the purpose of creating new dividing lines and therefore new and bigger electoral majorities. It aims to create its own truth, and its own England, through what Nietzsche called a “mobile army of metaphors” The right is winning

Football: a people’s sport?

  Shouldn’t Martin Ødegaard, when protesting against worker exploitation in Qatar, do the same against his club’s most important sponsor, the United Arab Emirates, which treats its migrant workers the same or perhaps worse than Qatar? Norway and the boycott of Qatar World Cup

 Football: Debunking the ‘opium of the people’

The mass submission to football (Originally published on the right-wing French paper Le Figaro)

Justice If you earn £25000/year before tax, it takes the Brazilian player Neymar 6 minutes to earn your weekly salary ! May be it is worth it. A footballer entertains us and makes us happy; he might even help us release some orgasmic energy!  In doing that, he is more useful to society than a nurse or a cleaner.

"Hooliganism came relatively late to Russian football, emerging in the early 1990s as a self-conscious copy of the decades-old English example – with its vicious firms, favoured clothing labels and racist chants." The rise of Russia's neo-Nazi football hooligans

Two young English men in their early twenties in a conversation - I have been drinking every night since Thursday. - Really, - yes. -... Arsenal [the football club] was shit... Me: I consider that part of "our British values"

Football Apart from being the opium of the our era , it is a crminal industry. Here is just one feature of this criminality, which people support and encourage it. Find out how long it takes Ronaldo, for example, to earn your annual wage. Or, how long it would take you  to earn Cristiano Ronaldo's annual wage? 

“If more Englishmen do not come out & unequivocally condemn this violence, people will think those drunk extremists represent all of us.”

" With football, by contrast, there can be outbreaks of angry populism, as supporters revolt against the corporate fat cats who muscle in on their clubs; but for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham." Football: a dear friend to capitalism

" Benzema received less tentative backing from the maverick Socialist politician and former Education Minister Benoît Hamon, who  said  Benzema had “evoked a reality.” We are, he continued, a nation in “denial over the rise of intolerance.” In today’s France, he concluded, “we can all too easily say that we don’t like Benzema because he has the mug of an Arab.” This is the same France, Hamon had no need to add, where former President Nicolas Sarkozy referred to Arab youths as “ scum ” and whose interior minister, Brice Hortefeux, once  joked  that : “One Arab is OK. It’s when there are more that there are problems.” "Does French Soccer Have an Arab Problem?" Related The culturalization of social antagonisms Anti-Muslim Racism from Above and From Below Racism: the achilles heel of middle class liberalism " I sure as hell would not be able to sleep soundly if I thought my fate rested upon the European liberal middle classes."

An interview with Shiva Balaghi. Ms Balaghi talks to MEP about Maziar Bahari 's film "Football Iranian Style" and also about Bahari's other documentaries: "Paint No Matter What" (about the Iranian artist Khosrow Hassanzadeh) and "Along Came A Spider" (about a serial killer in Iran which was based in part on an art project that Hassanzadeh created). Cumulatively, Maziar's documentaries helped bring greater attention to the vibrant creative cultural, intellectual, and social life in Iran. Shiva Balaghi is a historian of the modern Middle East, with special interests in the interrelated histories of colonialism, nationalism, gender and visual culture. She is a Cogut International Humanities Fellow at Brown University, where she teaches history. She is completing a book on the cultural history of Iran from the mid-nineteenth century through the present. Also in the show, the recent anti-government protests in Iran and the character of the oppositi...