Alternative Radio

Iran: In the Crosshairs of U.S. Aggression

On February 28th, 2026, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. This was a follow-up to the 12 days of bombing of Iran by the U.S. and Israel in June 2025. The claims against Iran are eerily similar to those made against Iraq in 2003. Remember back then, Baghdad supposedly was a great danger. Today, it is Iran we are to fear. It’s an “imminent” threat we are told. No evidence is given. None is needed. The master has spoken. The geopolitical and economic consequences of this war will be felt not just in Iran & the U.S. but around the world for years to come.

Interviewed by David Barsamian

Recorded at KGNU

Speaker: Nader Hashemi

Nader Hashemi is the Director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He was previously the founding Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver. He has been interviewed on PBS, NPR, BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. He is the author of Islam, Secularism and Liberal Democracy and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, The Syria Dilemma, Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East and a four-volume study on Islam and Human Rights. He is a contributor to Retargeting Iran edited by David Barsamian.

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Land Use & Land Control

People struggle for land locally, regionally, and globally. As homelessness increases exponentially, communities the world over seek solutions. Scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, drawing on her rich experience and interactions with grassroots organizations in South Africa, Brazil and Jamaica, offers a multiplicity of perspectives addressing land issues. Everywhere there is a consensus that housing is too expensive. Everywhere that is, except the property-owning ruling class. The rich and powerful continuously look to expand their control over land to build more apartments, condos, houses, and malls while ordinary people struggle to pay rent and can’t afford starter homes. Affordability is a key rallying point. Activists and NGOs the world over are organizing and resisting.

Speaker: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She is the recipient of the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize. She is the author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

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Trauma & Politics: Germany, Israel & Palestine

The word trauma comes from ancient Greek and means wound or hurt. The American Psychological Association Dictionary defines trauma as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning. Traumatic events include those caused by human behavior (e.g., rape, war, industrial accidents) as well as by nature (e.g., earthquakes) and often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe, and predictable place.” Large-scale trauma such as massacres and genocide, which are state-generated, intersects with politics. Sometimes entire communities, regions, and countries are consumed by it.

Speaker: Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté, a Holocaust survivor, is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a special interest in childhood development, trauma and potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, including addictions. He is the author of the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and co-author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Dr. Maté is a recipient of the Order of Canada, Canada’s highest civilian honor.

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Government Repression of the American Indian Movement

The reality of what occurred on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in the 1970s is not reflected in most contemporary histories of the United States. Scores of indigenous people were killed and many more were wounded. Ward Churchill, an activist with the American Indian Movement, draws lessons and inspiration from the events at Pine Ridge as Native peoples continue their struggle for land and dignity. He also discusses the Leonard Peltier case, the subject of the documentary Incident at Oglala.

Recorded at Alfred University.

Speaker: Ward Churchill

Ward Churchill was an author and academic. Among his many books are Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, Indians Are Us?, and A Little Matter of Genocide. He is a co-author of Agents of Repression. He was dismissed from his tenured position at the University of Colorado because of an essay he wrote in his book Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. In 2009, a jury found he was wrongfully fired. He passed away in August 2026.

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Freedom & Equality

Freedom and equality are foundations of democratic societies. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations in 1948, is a milestone document that establishes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Yet despite the lofty aims of the UN Declaration, much of the world is not achieving those goals. Just look around. As Orwell once said, what is right in front of your nose is sometimes the most difficult thing to see. Freedom and equality are under sustained attack by the rich and powerful. This is particularly noticeable in the United States, where the regime in Washington, aided by its mega-corporate allies, is undermining freedom and equality.

Speaker: Peg Birmingham

Peg Birmingham is a Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the editor of Philosophy Today. She is a leading Hannah Arendt scholar. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Glory and Hannah Arendt and Human Rights.

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Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt says lying aids the powerful and leads to public cynicism. She warned that lying by leaders undermines democracy. Truth is an uncontestable fact. Lies are not. Calling things you don’t like a hoax makes it difficult for citizens to cut through the lies, particularly when there is no evidence to support them. To deceive people, lies are wrapped in flags and slogans. In Orwell’s 1984, the main character Winston Smith writes, “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. If that is granted, all else follows.” But Big Brother and the Party have other ideas. They force citizens, through torture and propaganda, to accept that 2 + 2 = 5. Truth is whatever the Party says it is. No, it’s not. The truth matters.

Speaker: Marci Shore

Marci Shore is an award-winning scholar. She is a Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Her articles and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Yale Review, and other newspapers and magazines. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes, The Ukrainian Night, and The Taste of Ashes.

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Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt is one of the most original and influential political thinkers and scholars of this epoch. Her work and her ideas today are as relevant as ever. She wrote about ideology, racism, totalitarianism, imperialism, terror, propaganda, and antisemitism. She is best known for concepts such as the human condition, the banality of evil, and the origins of totalitarianism. She identifies loneliness and isolation as key factors in enabling totalitarianism and for people succumbing to the rantings and ravings of demagogues. Hannah Arendt warns that, in totalitarian regimes, “people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also their capacity to think and to judge. And with such people you can do what you please.” Her magisterial work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, continues to be studied and read today.

Recorded at Erasmus University.

Speaker: Marli Huijer

Marli Huijer is Professor Emeritus of Public Philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. From 2015 to 2017, she was Thinker Laureate of the Netherlands. From 2021 to 2024, she was a regular columnist for the Dutch newspaper Trouw. She is the author of many books, including Thinking Imagination, The Art of Just Living and The Future of Dying.

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Israel, Genocide & Palestine

Genocide has been called “the crime of crimes.” Alas, mass murder is nothing new, but the term genocide is of relatively recent origin. It was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, to describe the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Armenians. The UN passed the Genocide Convention in 1948, and it went into effect in 1951. “Never again” became an empty slogan; witness Bosnia, Rwanda, and most recently Gaza, Palestine. A UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. The panel determined that statements by top Israeli leaders, combined with a systematic pattern of military conduct, demonstrate a clear intent to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Speaker: Omer Bartov

Omer Bartov is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He is an award-winning scholar and historian. He is the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide, Tales from the Borderlands, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine, and Israel: What Went Wrong?

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Christian Zionism

In 1878, William Blackstone published a book titled Jesus Is Coming. The best-selling work popularized the idea held by some Christians that God had given the land of Israel to the Jewish people. In the late 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere, Christian Zionism was gaining followers. This conviction, often taken from an evangelical perspective, draws on the belief that millennia ago, God promised the land to the Jews, who would rule it until the return of Jesus to Jerusalem for the rapture. Christians will be saved upon Christ’s return, while non-Christians who do not convert will face damnation. It’s estimated today that Christian Zionists number in the tens of millions. They exercise considerable political influence.

Speaker: Veronica Sherman

Veronica Sherman was born in Sweden and raised in Israel. She served in the Israeli Air Force. In 1995, she moved to Australia, where she writes and lectures. Her memoirs are Happily Made and Happily Never After.

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International Law & the Case of Gaza

The International Criminal Court is an independent judicial body that hears cases on individuals charged with crimes against humanity, starvation, war crimes and genocide. The Genocide Convention, which the U.S. has ratified, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In November 2024, after court deliberations on Gaza, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant as well as for a Hamas commander who was later confirmed dead. Israel denounced the ICC ruling as “absurd” and “anti-Semitic.” The U.S. response? It not only ignored the ruling but also leveled sanctions against ICC judges and lawyers. For International law to have any credibility, it must be applied equally without fear or favor.

Speaker: Ilan Pappé

Ilan Pappé has been called “the most original, radical and hard-hitting of Israel’s ‘new historians.’” He is the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter and a senior fellow at the University of Exeter’s Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies. He was born in Haifa, Israel. From 1984 to 2006, he taught at the University of Haifa. He moved to the UK in 2007. Among his many books are The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Biggest Prison on Earth, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Lobbying for Zionism, Ten Myths About Israel and Israel on the Brink.

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