- The Unspoken ‘Wog’ Slur, by Gavin Lewis Archived Message
Posted by johnhol
on March 14, 2019, 8:30 pm
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Extract: At the forefront of the British media pushing an ideology of what David Harvey calls New Imperialism is the BBC’s global News channel. If victims of the British Empire were largely unimportant due to their less-than-human status, similarly BBC News 24 has been happy to follow the United States in not referring to civilian deaths caused by Western forces. In the years following 9/11 there was little or no mention of the studies establishing that over a million people died in Iraq alone.10 Bizarrely, given Britain’s history, even the term ‘imperialism’ is largely absent from BBC News’ vocabulary. In the summer of 2018 Prime Minister Theresa May admitted on behalf of the British government that torture had occurred under the Blair regime and publicly apologised and compensated victims—Fatima Boudchar had actually been pregnant when she was kidnapped along with her husband for rendition to then-aligned Libya.11 May’s admission was quickly followed by two reports from the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament naming numerous cases where British security personnel had been present during torture. It was demanded that a further, fuller investigation take place.12 However, not only did BBC News play down these admissions but within weeks it hosted—in an act of ‘balance’?—former Labour minister Margaret Hodge alleging that the present (anti-war) Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was an anti-Semite because of his position on settler-colonial Israel.13 This was followed by a similar appearance by her colleague Frank Field.14 What is significant is that by long-established convention these former ministers shared cabinet responsibility15 for this torture and yet they were not subjected to any BBC questioning that referenced the phenomenon, let alone any commentary critical of it. In the autumn immediately following, Blair appeared on the BBC’s flagship news-interview vehicle, The Andrew Marr Show. Here Blair was given a platform as, apparently, respected elder statesman to talk about Brexit and Britain’s future, without any reference to his responsibility for mass civilian deaths of people of colour, and accompanying human rights offences. Blair has consistently been offered the same BBC News soft public-relations appearance opportunities—even after the release of the Chilcot report (on the circumstances leading to Britain’s entry into the Iraq war)—by the corporation’s then chief political editor and now news presenter Nick Robinson.16 It hardly needs to be pointed out that if—instead of being responsible for Iraqi dead—Blair had played a part in the killing of a million white Israeli settlers in the former Palestine, spoon-feeding him soft public-relations opportunities would not have been tolerated. Not only have victims of the New Imperialism been subjected to racist double standards on the comparative value of human life and absented from coverage but also these double standards have extended to who is doing the killing. As part of the new ‘nation building’ variant of the traditional Western ‘civilising the savage’ narrative, the BBC led Western outrage after the Taliban shot young Malala Yousafzai. By contrast, the BBC didn’t allow any prominent coverage of the many Afghan protests about the repeated killing of local children by the occupying Western military coalition. These protests eventually reached such a pitch that after a 2011 incident in which nine children were bombed and killed even Western satrap President Karzai was forced to publicly embarrass General Petraeus, stating ‘On behalf of the people of Afghanistan I want you to stop the killings of civilians’ and saying that the subsequent apology was ‘not enough’.17 When Yousafzai was rewarded with a Nobel Prize and a day of celebration the BBC also excluded a public-relations response from Adnan Rasheed, apparently representing the Taliban, who rhetorically asked Yousafzai in shaky translated English: …if you were shot but [by] Americans in a drone attack, would world have ever heard updates on your medical status? Would you be called ‘daughter of the nation’? Would the media make a fuss about you? Would General Kiyani have come to visit you and would the world media be constantly reporting on you?… Would a Malala day be announced?… More than 300 innocent women and children have been killed in drones attacks but who cares… [exact numbers unverified].18 Whatever you think of the Taliban it says something about the brutal lived reality in Afghanistan and Pakistan that this message was expected to resonate in the region. In a similar hypocrisy, it is largely considered taboo in the British media to imply a direct link between the astonishing rate of birth defects among the Iraqi population and Western use of depleted-uranium ammunition in the Iraq conquest. The numerous child victims of Western violence in Iraq, such as twelve-year-old Ali Abbass—who lost his arms and most of his extended family to Western bombing—are typically treated as individual tragedies rather than systemic manifestations of oppression or criminality.19 Certainly the question ‘who is the guilty party?’ is never asked. For example, and in stark contradiction to Vietnam War–era reportage standards, after the reprisal killing of soldier Lee Rigby, which once again perpetrators cited as a revenge response to the killing of civilians in Muslim homelands, no British media coverage explored the causalities he or his regiment—the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers—generated during their deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan. These power politics based in ‘Black lives don’t matter’–type racial hierarchies—establishing whose lives count and whose don’t—structure media coverage of other events as well. For example, the BBC led much of the corporate media in splashing a story about pro-Israel protests taking place outside Labour headquarters on 4 September 2018. Independent sources and stock-photo-library material available for media access indicate that only ten pro-Israel protesters were present.20 By contrast, the presence of hundreds of protesters at a posthumous vigil for Black youth Mark Duggan, killed by police, was buried in BBC online reports and never equivalently highlighted or headlined in BBC News 24 coverage. Similarly, after the death of another Black youth, Rashan Charles, at the hands of police, hundreds protested and rioted in Hackney, only to have their actions buried: there was no BBC News coverage, with the incident again ghettoised on the BBC website. Full article: https://arena.org.au/the-unspoken-wog-slur-by-gavin-lewis/ |
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