Coming & Recent Shows/Interviews

Class and Sect in the Middle East, interview with Anne Alexander.
The Yacoubian Building: the novel and the film.
Can Hamas Liberate Palestine?
The US Elections and the Middle East
Katherine C. Donahue, author of Slave of Allah - Zacarias Moussaoui vs The USA (Pluto Press September 2007)
Ibrahim Abu Rabi, author of Contemporary Arab Thought

Recent
19 December 2007 show
Iraqi Oil for Beginners, a comic book by Jon Sack. Israel: the longest teachers strike in the history of Israel.
05 December 2007 show : Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files - The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (PLuto Press, November 2007)
Interview with Arun Kundnani, author of "The End of Tolerance - Racism in 21st Century Britain".
28 November 2007: InterviewArun Kundnani on his book The End of Tolerance - Racism in 21st Century Britain. Also in the show: Dubai, Wealth and Workers' Plight.
21 November 2007 show
14 November 2007 show: Pakistan,Turkey and the Kurds
31 October 2007 show
24 October 2007 show
Listen to the interview with the Egyptian historian Mahmood Ibrahim, author of Merchant Capital and Islam.
17 October 2007 show: Part of a talk by Norman Finkelstein author of On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005).
Overcoming Zionism: Interview with Joel Kovel, 04July 2007
Joel Beinin on Workers Struggles in Egypt, 30 March 2007
Assaf Adiv on Arab Workers plight and struggle in Israel, 23 March 2007
"Iran on the Brink - Rising Workers and Threats of War", Part 1, Part 2, 16 March 2007
Lara Deeb on Hizballah, Part 1, Part 2, 09 March 2007

Audio - Articles - Books - Shows
Related Audio on Archive.Org
Films

Middle East Panorama on Resonance FM Radio
Wednesday between 21:00 to 22:00 GMT
(repeated on Sunday between 12:00 - 13:00 GMT)
104.4 FM or http://www.resonancefm.com/

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.” In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people. Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps

Putting a Racist in Their Place

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

NM's blog

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