Listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-gaza-92659388 To discuss the implications of Israel’s onslaught on global politics in an increasingly multipolar world, how the rift between the imperialist countries and the rest of the world has never been more stark, the US’s frightening reaction to the decline of American hegemony and what it means for Gaza and the rest of us, Rania Khalek was joined by Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany who is currently ...
Nov 10, 2023•41 min
Listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/ukraine-to-gaza-92464031 So what’s new with the war in Ukraine? Is anyone winning? How will it impact the future of Europe and NATO? What are the similarities to the war on Gaza? How will escalation in the Middle East impact Ukraine? And how is the war on Gaza exposing all the hypocrisy of the EU in particular? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by prolific writer and author Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director at...
Nov 07, 2023•35 min
Listen to the extended version of this interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/audio-genocidal-91798227 Israel’s genocide in Gaza has shocked the conscience of the entire world, with an endless flow of videos and images of Palestinian children cut into pieces by American bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes deliberately intended to destroy a civilian population. Despite the explicitly genocidal rhetoric of Israeli officials, Western leaders continue to proclaim their support for Israel...
Oct 28, 2023•1 hr 2 min
With the death toll climbing by the hour in Gaza, including over 1000 children, the whole world is wondering if there will be a ceasefire or if a larger war is likely. Rania Khalek asked Osama Hamdan, a senior representative of Hamas located in Lebanon, about what happens next. Watch the full interview for free on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/hamas-rep-will-91415177
Oct 21, 2023•45 min
As Israel’s war on Gaza heats up with the potential to escalate into a regional fight, Rania Khalek hosts a special live episode of Dispatches w/ Ali Abunimah, executive director of the @TheElectronicIntifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Link to Ali Abunimah's article discussed in the interview: https://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-forces-shot-their-own-civilians-kibbutz-survivor-says/38861...
Oct 19, 2023•1 hr 33 min
Listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-not-w-90192326 The West African countries of Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali are in rebellion against their former colonial masters, while the imperialists of the Global North try desperately to contain the situation. But the portrayal of these developments as mere “coups” hides the depth of popular anger, particularly against the French? What almost no one else is telling is the story of popular movements and organiza...
Oct 02, 2023•35 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-china-89625885 Four of the six new BRICS countries - Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE - are in the Middle East. What does this mean for the region, for multipolarity, for the Cold War between the US and China and for the future of the Saudi-Iran rivalry? How does a country like Saudi Arabia, which has such a long record in service of the West, fit in? How might it impact Israel? How will Washington react now ...
Sep 21, 2023•44 min
Listen to the full interview on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-can-w-88623146 How much of a challenge to Western hegemony does the expansion of BRICS actually pose? How much of this has been brought on by the West’s own hubris? What should we make of the ideological differences among the BRICS countries? Could India and Saudi Arabia act as spoilers? Or are we witnessing the symptomatic decline of American hegemony, with US allies turning toward Washington’s rivals? What do...
Sep 01, 2023•32 min
Listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-how-88285425 We’re told that countries across the Global South are poor and plagued by violence not because of colonialism, imperialism, never ending Western wars, resource theft and destabilization campaigns. Rather, it’s because they’re ruled by corrupt and greedy people who seem to be innately authoritarian and backwards due to some sort of cultural deficiency that prevents respect for human rights and causes stat...
Aug 26, 2023•41 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-party-88241590 The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) is the second largest party in Russia, yet their views are often ignored in Western media. How do they view the war in Ukraine, the nature of the Russian state under Putin, and the character of the Ukrainian state under Zelensky? What’s their position on Russia’s foreign policy more generally? How about domestic policy? Where do they stand on the r...
Aug 20, 2023•35 min
Listen to the full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-of-of-87855875 To discuss the brutal history of NATO intervention in the Third World and CIA infiltration of education in targeted countries, Rania Khalek was joined by Essam Elkorghli, a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he researches the impact of contemporary imperialism on education with a particular focus on Libya. This is just the first half of this episode. The second hal...
Aug 18, 2023•36 min
Border policy in the Global North has been crafted to intentionally cause people to die of thirst in the Arizona desert and drown in the Mediterranean sea as a form of deterrence. But why are people picking up and leaving their countries in the first place? Why are they being subjected to so much cruelty on their journey no matter who’s in charge in Europe or the U.S.? Where does the Israeli occupation of Palestine fit in? How about climate change? And how is this feeding in to the rise of the f...
Aug 12, 2023•35 min
Breakthrough News journalist Eugene Puryear joins Rania Khalek for a special live episode of Dispatches on Tuesday August 8 at 12pm ET to discuss the latest developments in Niger following threats of military intervention by Western governments and their regional allies meant to reverse an explosion of anti-colonial sentiment across Africa’s Sahel.
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 25 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-east-87132481 East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is remembered in the West as the antithesis to freedom and democracy. But the history and reality of the GDR was far more complex. Not only was the GDR a socialist state built on antifascist principles following the Second World War. It also practiced solidarity with other socialist states, countries and liberation movements fighting for independe...
Aug 03, 2023•30 min
Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-is-us-86956303 Western sanctions on Russia, previously Europe’s biggest natural gas supplier, has lowered European living standards in the sweltering heat while exacerbating fuel and food shortages around the world. And that’s not all — military spending has increased while social budgets have been cut. To discuss this downplayed aspect of the war in Ukraine and its horrific consequences, Rania Khalek is again jo...
Jul 31, 2023•38 min
Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-and-w-86459089 The Red Scare is back. This new era of McCarthyism depends on loose and selective interpretation and enforcement of existing legal measures with some racial profiling and guilt-by-association mixed in. People are being accused of being foreign agents based on their political views. Chinese nationals have been chased out of academia. And wild and easily disproved stories about China, often sourced t...
Jul 21, 2023•35 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-anti-86303559 For decades anti-Palestinian fanatics have harassed and attacked professors and students who dare to speak out against Israeli apartheid, going after their reputations and livelihoods with media smears and legal assaults. Why is it so important to document and understand such attacks on academic freedom? How does it fit into the context of Zionism and imperialism? What is the role of imperial feminism...
Jul 18, 2023•41 min
Listen to the full interview on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-on-86104940 The US is escalating a bipartisan Cold War, pumping up the military industrial complex, fueling proxy wars and gutting what’s left of the welfare state. But there is a split in the ruling class on how best to guarantee US hegemony. On one side is the far-right America First crowd led by Trump, who claim to want out of Ukraine. That’s only because they want to divert the country’s Cold War resourc...
Jul 14, 2023•33 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-on-of-85896805 France is on fire after police were filmed shooting and killing unarmed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a French citizen of Moroccan and Algerian descent, in the suburbs of Paris during a traffic stop. This shocking display of French state violence triggered large-scale protests, particularly amongst the country’s Muslim, African, and Arab populations, long boiling over racist and classist structures stau...
Jul 10, 2023•32 min
Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-or-us-85690029 In 2003, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, a Lebanese-American, was sentenced to 155 years in prison on allegations of "providing material support" to the Lebanese organization Hezbollah with funds garnered from cigarette smuggling. Characterized by prosecutors as an “enemy combatant” and “terrorist financier,” he was the first person in the United States to be charged for material support to an all...
Jul 06, 2023•32 min
Access the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-rise-84975377 The power of the dollar sustains U.S. imperialism. But rising multipolarity, an overuse of U.S. sanctions, the rise of alternative trading arrangements that sidestep the dollar, and a very obvious crisis of western capitalism have led to panic about a decline in dollar hegemony. What gives the dollar so much power in the first place? What would a world without dollar hegemony look like? What would it m...
Jun 22, 2023•35 min
Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-wins-84859698 In popular culture, Canada is seen as the nicer version of the US, the harmless northern neighbor. Behind that shiny exterior is a country that plays a crucial supporting role in US aggression abroad and providing it with a layer of liberal respectability. Canada remains the “good cop” to the US “bad cop” in wars and coups from the Middle East to Latin America. This is no great departure for a count...
Jun 20, 2023•36 min
Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-84510217 The Gulf states have been reliable partners of U.S. imperialism since their inception. But that hasn’t stopped them from deepening their ties with Russia and China, leading to tectonic shifts across the Middle East that have many DC insiders losing sleep. What’s behind these shifting alliances across the Gulf? Will they continue to oppose the new Cold War? Or are they too wedded to the U.S. to truly forge paths independent o...
Jun 13, 2023•52 min
Why is Iran under constant US attack? Is it really about women’s rights and democracy? Or is it because Iran, since its revolution, has been a staunch supporter both ideologically and materially, of resistance to US imperialism across the Middle East? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Nina Farnia, Assistant Professor of Law at Albany Law School, a longtime activist and a scholar of Critical Race Theory, with a focus on US imperialism and its impact on domestic law. This is jus...
Jun 08, 2023•41 min
Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-how-w-83919972 After Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the British Labour Party, the right wing of the party joined with the Israel lobby and the Israeli state to bring down Corbyn and purge the party of leftists using false accusations of anti-semitism. The witch-hunt continued even after Corbyn’s downfall. No reporter has covered the weaponization of anti-semitism in British politics as rigorously as Asa Winstanley, associate edito...
Jun 01, 2023•39 min
It’s a new era of global power dynamics where countries sometimes have the option to say no to the U.S. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East. Almost 12 years after being kicked out of the Arab League, Syria has been welcomed back into the fold by many of the U.S.-allied countries that tried to destroy it. All this time Israel was banking on normalization with Saudi Arabia and the opposite happened, with China overseeing a Saudi peace deal with Iran. Why? What does this multipola...
May 26, 2023•45 min
According to U.S. politicians, military leaders and the media, everything China does on the international stage – brokering peace deals, expanding economic initiatives, building ports — is part of an aggressive campaign to weaken the United States. While China is becoming more assertive diplomatically, is the U.S. interpretation of why accurate or is it projection and delusion? And how does it relate to China’s internationalist past? What does it mean for the future of the Global South and the w...
May 23, 2023•35 min
See full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/83205814 Collaboration between the US and fascists is a pattern that stretches back to the end of World War II and NATO’s founding, when the US and British intelligence services established secret far-right terror network armies across NATO countries made up of fascists, Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis. This is just the first half of this episode. The second half is available for Breakthrough News Members only. Become a member at htt...
May 18, 2023•51 min
In the U.S. we’re taught that North Korea is a horrible backwards dictatorship where every person is captive to an evil regime run by a mad man who has an inexplicable hatred of the U.S., freedom and democracy – and is always on the edge of launching a nuclear missile to destroy the world. This, we’re told, is the reason we have to isolate the country and occupy South Korea with thousands of U.S. soldiers. The purpose of such a simplistic narrative is to prevent Americans from getting curious ab...
May 10, 2023•49 min
Last April, Pakistan’s Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister, which he blamed on an American-backed coup due to his non-aligned foreign policy. His removal has been followed by political instability that continues to roil the country with some of the largest protests in Pakistan’s history, both in support of him but also in opposition to the traditional ruling elites. The current government has responded by cracking down on Khan and his supporters, and preventing new elections. To help us unde...
May 05, 2023•33 min
