UNAPOLOGETIC with Ashfaaq Carim

On this episode of ‪@MEEunapologetic‬ we sat down with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, to talk about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the media that reinforced it and the global systems that enable it. Albanese’s latest report, Truth Under the Rubble, examines media complicity. She argues that destroying a people takes a narrative as well as bombs. She explains how the killing of nearly 300 Palestinian media workers, the destruction of more than 80 percent of Gaza’s media infrastructure and Israel’s daily military censorship worked together to bury the truth. She also describes how Western legacy media barred the word genocide, repeated Israeli army claims and stripped the legal framework out of their coverage. We go beyond the media to the systems around it. Albanese says Israel is the main architect of the genocide, but states and companies are complicit through weapons, finance, political cover and profit. She traces the erosion of international law back through the war on terror. She warns that the methods used against Palestinians are now being turned on protesters, migrants and refugees in Europe, which she calls the Israelisation of our societies. We also discuss the killing of Gaza’s journalists and the story of photojournalist Fatma Hassona. We close on Britain’s shifting stance, the proscription of Palestine Action, the US sanctions against her and her next report, on militarism and the environment. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim. Chapters: 00:00 Intro highlights 02:05 Truth under the rubble 04:03 A system of complicity 09:42 Banning the word genocide 17:04 Is any of this new? 21:41 Israelisation of our societies 27:10 Britain's shifting stance 30:01 Targeting Gaza's journalists 38:19 The mandate's final reports 47:41 The Palestine Action ban

On this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we sat down with Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst the day after Israel’s elections, with Netanyahu’s bloc on course to be the largest and no side close to a majority. David explains why a strike on Iran is now more likely than before the vote, how Ben-Gvir’s armed settler base shapes Netanyahu’s options, what a record Palestinian turnout means for citizens of Israel, and why so many observers got this election wrong. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim. Chapters 00:00 Intro highlights 01:06 No majority: what next? 08:23 Will Netanyahu strike Iran? 14:26 Ben-Gvir’s armed settlers 18:14 A record Palestinian turnout 22:07 Why outsiders got it wrong 24:59 Netanyahu’s annexation mission 27:36 What if Eisenkot had won?

We sat down with Andrew Feinstein, former ANC MP, arms trade investigator and author of The Shadow World, on ‪@MEEunapologetic‬ to talk about his new book, Making a Killing: How the West Profits From Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen. The book began with a question from Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who lost 21 members of his family in an Israeli strike on their home in Gaza: who made the bomb, and who profited? We discuss the UK's West Bank sanctions announcement and why Andrew sees it as symbolic, the Al Yamamah deal and the scale of corruption in the arms trade, Tony Blair's relationship with JP Morgan after Iraq, war profiteering around the bombing of Iran, and the defence tech billionaires reshaping warfare, from AI targeting in Gaza to drone footage too poor to tell a child from an adult. Drawing on his years in the anti-apartheid struggle, Andrew explains why he believes economics, and financial sanctions in particular, will be the tipping point for Israel, just as they were for apartheid South Africa. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

Francesca Albanese spoke to UNAPOLOGETIC on the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, UK sanctions on West Bank settlements, the changing discourse on Israel, and building allyship and solidarity to beat Apartheid in Israel. Chapters: 00:00 Intro highlights 01:41 UK sanctions and Palestinian erasure 07:57 Macklemore and the billionaire backlash 11:33 Building a global BDS strategy 19:34 Yuval Abraham and colonial grift

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold the position, and the author of How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History. On this episode of Unapologetic, we sit down with her in her Cambridge office to take apart one of the most powerful ideas in modern politics: the idea of "civilisations," where it came from, who invented it, and why it's less than 200 years old.We talk about how the concept of "civilisation" was built, how it was used to justify empire and colonial violence, why the Middle East's borders don't fit the myth of the "ancient nation," what the Crusades actually did to Europe, how cities are really just nodes of connection, how a group of homesick miners in Egypt invented the alphabet, why the "Dark Ages" were never actually dark, and how the House of Wisdom in Baghdad ran one of history's great knowledge-gathering operations.We also talk about Gaza, the language of "civilisation vs. barbarism," the rise of civilisational thinking under Putin, Modi, and Trump, and whether that whole framework is starting to collapse.Josephine's book: How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year HistoryUNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

In the latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC we sat down with Faisal Devji in Oxford. Devji is a widely acclaimed scholar of both South Asian history and the history of intellectual thought.In his latest book, Devji presents a novel idea: that "Islam", as many of us commonly use the word today, meaning a single thing with a will and a direction of its own, rather than the faith Muslims practise, is barely 150 years old.Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, people increasingly started using the word Islam not to describe the faith that Muslims follow, but as the name of something that acts. Islam wants, Islam demands, Islam is in decline, Islam will rise. Devji's argument is that this shift happened not because Muslims became more or less devout, but because Muslim political power collapsed under European empire. Once "Islam", or more specifically Muslim political power, was no longer held by kings, caliphs or clerics, it became something anyone could speak for, and many people did.Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. His new book is Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam.We follow that story through the three movements it produced. The modernists, from Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Ameer Ali through Iqbal to Fazlur Rahman. The Islamists, from Maududi to Khomeini. And the militants of the 21st century.Along the way we get into why Maududi thought sovereignty itself was a form of tyranny, why Khomeini told his own president that the state could suspend prayer and fasting, why Iqbal was declared a heretic and then became the intellectual father of a country, why Hamas quoted him in its founding document, and what it means that you can stand at the heart of Islamic ritual in Mecca today and find skyscrapers and fast food.None of this is an argument that Muslim belief is fading. Devji is clear that the people in the movements he describes may be deeply religious, and that this is not a story about secular against religious. It is a story about a word, where it came from, what it made possible, and what a much older and richer tradition of Muslim thought was obscured by it.And when he is asked whether Muslims are in crisis, his answer points somewhere else entirely.UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport became, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." - Sam Dalrymple "The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport becomes, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." — Sam DalrympleWe sat down with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, for UNAPOLOGETIC. His argument: the "Partition" most people know from 1947 was only one of five ruptures that broke apart the old British "Indian Empire" — a single administrative unit stretching from Aden in Yemen to the borders of Thailand — between 1937 and 1971, producing the twelve nation-states of today's South Asia and Arabian Gulf. This was a world where the Sultans of Oman were schooled in Rajasthan and grew up fluent in Urdu, where a Yemeni family's move to the Deccan gave the world haleem (Yemeni harees, remixed with Hyderabadi spice), and where Rangoon in 1933 briefly overtook New York as the world's busiest port of migration. Sam traces exactly how that world got torn apart, piece by piece.We go deep into the personal story behind Pakistan's founding, from Muhammad Ali Jinnah's transformation after the death of his wife Ruttie, to Gandhi's early opposition to a "Greater India," through all five partitions in turn: Burma in 1937, the Arabian states, the Great Partition of 1947, the forced integration of princely states like Hyderabad and Kashmir, and finally the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. We also talk about the scale of the devastation, the myths that have grown up around it, and Sam's own Project Dastaan, reconnecting Partition survivors with the homes they lost.UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

We sat down with Middle East Eye journalist and author Sean Mathews on UNAPOLOGETIC to ask a question that unsettles a lot of assumptions: do Greeks actually have more in common with Arabs and Turks than they do with the rest of Europe? Mathews is the author of The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East, and his answer draws on years of reporting from Istanbul, Cairo and occupied Jerusalem. He argues that Greece's "Western" identity is a relatively recent import, imposed from outside, and that the country's deeper roots, culturally, religiously and geopolitically, lie in the wider Middle East. The episode traces how the Greek revolution, the population exchange with Turkey, and the collapse of cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria all shaped the identity Greece wears today. We also get into the present: Greece's fast-deepening, and increasingly fraught, alliance with Israel, and what that could mean for Turkey, NATO and the wider region. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

The US backed Khomeini's return to power, then a year later greenlit Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, the same country it had just warned Saddam might attack.In this latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, radio host and presenter of The Scott Horton Show, Scott Horton, sat down with MEE's Ashfaaq Carim to discuss the history of the US and its impact in the region. They also touched on Netanyahu's "new Middle East" doctrine and whether real US pressure could actually force him to fall in line. UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

We sat down with Andreas Krieg for the fourth time on UNAPOLOGETIC, this time in the aftermath of the war on Iran, to ask what it has done to the balance of power across the Middle East. His answer is stark: this is the most fundamental shift in regional order in thirty years, and it has undone the American empire in a way he does not think it can recover from.We get into why the Gulf no longer believes the United States can protect it, why its bases have become magnets for attack rather than deterrents, and why nobody in the region has a plan B for the order that is now crumbling. Andreas lays out the battle between the Israel lobby and the Gulf lobby that he believes will decide Washington's approach for years to come, the split between Marco Rubio and JD Vance, and why Iran has emerged able to impose its will without ever building a bomb.We also talk through Iran as a network state, the Strait of Hormuz as a chokepoint, Saudi Arabia's strategic drift, Qatar's network power, Egypt reduced to a beggar state, the violation of Iraqi sovereignty, Syria under Sharaa, and why Andreas argues Israel has become a hammer that sees everything as a nail, isolated and digging itself into a hole it may not climb out of.UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.