Radio Intifada by SWANA (South and West Asia and North Africa) Region Radio

Jess Ghannam (University of California, San Francisco)

Eman Ghanayem (Washington University in St Louis)

Jennifer Mogannam (University of California, Santa Cruz)

The panel was moderated by David Lloyd, Professor of English at UCR, and co-host of SWANA Region Radio.

Nanor Shahin is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst  and Founding Board member of 2BHappy, a non-profit organization. 2Bhappy is dedicated to empowering individuals of all abilities; including but not limited to those with developmental and physical special needs, and individuals on the Autism Spectrum. For the last 3 years, we have been in close collaboration with Artaskh & Armenia, providing free professional trainings to more than 50 professionals as well as free consultations and parent education classes for families with children in Autism Spectrum. One of our major Projects are Annual Autism Awareness Telethon which takes place in April. During our years of working with Armenia and Artsakh we recognized the need for providing professional behavioral services to underprivileged families, and professional enrichment. This Year one of the projects that we have in collaboration with Artsakh/ Armenia is AIM4LAV (lavaguyn behavior).

Nonna Poghosyan is a displaced Artsakh resident. She worked for the American University of Armenia managing a continuous education program in Stepanakert, Artsakh. She is currently working in Yerevan and is actively engaged in regional development of Armenia.

Dr. Adrineh Gregorian works with Sose Women's Issues NGO in the Artsakh/Armenia border city of Goris, as the Director of Development. Her dissertation is on “Peacebuilding and Gender Inclusivity: the case of Nagorno-Karabakh.” 

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook. You can listen to this and our previous shows on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

Last week the ICJ broadly endorsed the validity of South Africa’s claims in an interim ruling, not merely admitting their plausibility, but actually demanding that Israel “refrain from acts under the Genocide convention, prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to genocide, and take immediate and effective measures to ensure the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. Crucially, the Court also ordered Israel to preserve evidence of genocide and to submit a report to the Court, within one month.” While not directly demanding an immediate and enduring ceasefire, as South Africa requested, the ruling seems to accept that Israel is currently engaging in acts of and incitement to genocide. This may prove a more important immediate outcome than a demand for a ceasefire the court has no means of enforcing and that Israel will, as it has before, simply refuse to obey.

We discuss South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel, the definition of genocide under international law and the limits of that legal framework for preventing atrocities and war crimes by powerful or powerfully backed states, the impact of the ruling, both legally and in terms of public opinion, the longer history of legal charges against Israel and of Palestine’s rarely successful efforts to hold the state accountable, and many other topics with Professor John Reynolds of Maynooth University, Ireland. An extended version of this interview will be available as a podcast on anchor.fm/swana and other podcast sites following our live show.

John Reynolds teaches at the School of Law & Criminology at Maynooth University in Ireland. He is the author of Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge University Press) and an editor of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review journal and website. His recent article with Noura Erakat on South Africa's genocide case against Israel can be read on the Jacobin website. The article on the charge of genocide by Darryl Li that John Reynolds mentions can be found here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-charge-of-genocide/

Armenian-American Action Network

Fikra

Mizna

Palestine Festival of Literature

RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers)

WAWOG (Writers Against the War on Gaza)

and Yerazad Coalition

The reading included poems, fiction, and personal essays by featured Armenian and Palestinian writers: Sophia Armen, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Nancy Kricorian, Micaela Kabni Raen, Nelli Sargsyan, Mai Serhan, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Kinder USA: //www.kinderusa.org/

Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net/

1. The Equality Labs website has introductory material on the caste system and why it is a relevant issue in the global north.

2. Books published by Panthers Paw publication, founded by writer Yogesh Maitreya

3. The book “Annihilation of Caste” by B.R. Ambedkar, called the father of the Indian constitution. He played a crucial role in awakening the anti-caste spirit among the caste oppressed masses in India.

4. Many marginalized caste artists on social media educate people about key anti-caste figures, anti-caste history and so on with their brilliant art. Some of them are Siddhesh Gautam, Priyanka Paul, Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar, The big fat bao

Sammitha Sreevathsa is a third year PhD student in the Critical Dance Studies program at UC Riverside. In her research, she is interested in interrogating how the politics of upper caste hetero-patriarchal domestic space have come to structure the contemporary ecosystems of classical dance in India. 

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

For the past few years, @swanaregionradio has devoted our Thankstaking weekend show to conversations between US #Indigenous and #Palestinian scholars and activists. These shows have highlighted the numerous commonalities between both people’s living under settler colonial regimes, from dispossession and genocidal warfare to water protection and combating the walls and fences that divide Indigenous land and communities in Palestine and in Turtle Island.
This week, we broadcast a one-hour conversation that took place at Portland State's School of Gender, Race, and Nations on November 15 between #Lakota historian and activist Nick Estes, Palestinian scholar Eman Ghanayem (who has been a guest on SWANA Region Radio in past years), and SWANA Region Radio collective member and host, David Lloyd. The conversation, From Palestine to Turtle Island: Settler Colonialism, Palestinian Liberation, and Solidarity, was moderated by Stéphanie Wahab, Professor of Social Work at Portland State, who introduces all the guests. Thanks to Portland State University’s School of Gender, Race, and Nations for permission to broadcast this event.

This show is dedicated to the people of Gaza, the West Bank, and to borrow from Palestinian journalist, Mariam Barghouti, to Palestinians in heartland Palestine, and the diaspora. We are joined by Jehad Abusalim, Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund.
For over a month, Gaza has been pummeled by Israeli airstrikes, leveling its cityscapes, turning the densely populated Gaza Strip into a monochromatic gray-zone of concrete and dust, and a mass grave. The Israeli occupation forces have relentlessly and with impunity continued to target and kill a population that is besieged; with air, land, and sea controlled by the Israeli occupier. As a result of the Zionist state’s aerial bombardment since October 7th, over 11,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed by direct assaults alone. This number does not include those killed slowly due to starvation, lack of sanitary conditions, and the denial of food, water, and electricity imposed by the occupying state. According to some reports, nearly 60% of those who have been directly killed by Israeli airstrikes are women and children. In addition, according to Salama Marouf, a spokesperson for Gaza's Government Media Office, nearly 26,000 others have been injured and more than 3,000 Palestinian loved ones are missing. These numbers do not tell the story of life in Gaza over the last month. They are mere signposts of a brutal assault on the besieged population that, despite attempts to force historic amnesia, began over 75 years before the October 7th attack by Hamas.
As the catastrophe unfolds in Gaza, Israel is advancing a ground operation in Gaza and intensifying its assaults in the West Bank where there have been reports of mass arrests and detentions, as well as the targeting and killing of Palestinians.

ehad Abusalim is Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund. He is a PhD Candidate in the History and Hebrew and Judaic Studies joint program at New York University. His main area of research is Palestinian and Arab perceptions of the Zionist project and the Jewish question before 1948.

In this week’s show, we are in conversation with organizers of the ⁠Palestine Writes⁠ literary and cultural festival which will take place at the University of Pennsylvania next weekend, September 22-24. The extraordinary roster of participants include Elias Khoury, Isabella Hammad, Susan Abulhawa, Mosab Abu Toha, Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, Maytha Alhassen, and many, many other Palestinian writers, cultural workers and activists, as well as Palestine solidarity campaigners like Roger Waters, Andrew Ross, Marc Lamont Hill, and others. Regular listeners to SWANA Region Radio will recognize many of these names from our past shows. In addition to individual and group readings and spoken word performances, by a rich array of Palestinian writers, there are panels on publishing, on Palestinian feminism, on writing, immigration and exile, and performances of dabke, a photography exhibition, and events for children.

Palestine Writes 2023’s packed schedule of events showcases to US audiences the wealth of Palestinian culture in so many areas. We will talk to several of the remarkable and hard-working organizers of this event, Susan Muaddi Daraj, Laura Albast, and Huda Fakhreddine, about the history, the goals, and the cultural politics of Palestine Writes, and hopefully get a sneak preview of some of the panels and events schedule for the coming weekend. Susan Muaddi Darraj is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children, including A Curious Land: Stories from Home, The Inheritance of Exile, and the forthcoming Behind You is the Sea. She has won an American Book Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artists Award. In 2018, she was named a 2018 USA Artists Ford Fellow. Huda Fakhreddine is Associate Professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of many books, including The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice and is the co-translator of poet Jawdat Fakhreddine’s Lighthouse for the Drowning and The Sky That Denied Me and of Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat. Her own book of creative non-fiction in Arabic, titled زمن صغير تحت شمس ثانيةzaman sagheer taht shams thaniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. Laura Albast is a Palestinian journalist, photographer, editor, and media analyst. Her publications and appearances include The Washington Post, Arab American News, Doha News, Al Jazeera, KPFA and other outlets. She is also a skilled Arabic/English translator who contributed to dozens of projects in video, audio, and print including Bloomberg Businessweek, The Nation, and Fiasco podcast. Her Arabic poetry has been published in Rumman Cultural Magazine, Sekka Magazine, and the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Anthology. Laura is currently the Senior Editor of Digital Strategy and Communications at the Institute for Palestine Studies-USA in Washington, DC.

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Rana Sharif and David Lloyd. If you miss our live broadcast on kpfk.org, you can listen to this show and our previous shows on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

In this episode, SWANA Region Radio Collective members Ankine Antaram and Rana Sharif host Dr. Lisa Hajjar to discuss her most recent book The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture, out with University of California Press. Dr. Lisa Hajjar is professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. She has an international reputation for her work on sociology of law and conflict, human rights, political violence, and contemporary international affairs. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who contributes to multiple fields in the social sciences and humanities, including Middle East Studies, American Studies, and Law and Society. Her current research focuses primarily on the US “war on terror,” particularly around the issues of torture, targeted killing, and Guantanamo. She is the only social scientist who has traveled to Guantanamo (14 times to date), where she conducts research and writes about the military commissions. Her books include Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza and Torture: A Sociology of Violence and Human Rights. Her journalistic writings have been published by The Nation, Al Jazeera English, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya.  

In this podcast, SWANA Region Radio covers the American Anthropological Association’s ongoing vote on a referendum to boycott Israeli Academic Institutions, which continues through July 14: anthroboycott.org. With some 10,000 members, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) is one of the largest scholarly associations in the country and Anthropology is regarded as “a core discipline”. Since the scholarly organizations that have previously endorsed the academic boycott—for example, the Association for Asian American Studies, The American Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and recently the Middle East Studies Association—have often been tendentiously dismissed by opponents of the academic boycott as marginal or insignificant, AAA’s passage of this measure would be an important milestone in the continuing effort to get US higher education to engage in divestment from Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial regime.

Israeli academic institutions have been shown time and again not only to be complicit with but actually to be integral to the establishment and maintenance of Israel’s supremacist domination of Palestine, from the occupation of Palestinian land to the development of weapon systems, surveillance technology and military doctrine. No Israeli university or even faculty body has expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for human rights, let alone for liberation. At the same time, Israel continues its assault on Palestinian institutions of higher education, from military incursions on campuses and physical destruction of infrastructure to isolation and harassment of scholars and students alike. In the context of Palestinian civil society’s virtually unanimous call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] against Israel, the international movement for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel—as with South Africa decades ago--continues to be a key element in the struggle to end apartheid and decolonize Palestine.

We talk with two organizers of the current campaign within the AAA, Nadia Abu el-Haj and Dan Segal, to discuss the rationale for the academic boycott, the background to the Association’s current round of voting, and the larger question of Israeli Apartheid and BDS as a tactic in the struggle to dismantle its regime. We also discuss the opposition to the boycott, which has been expressed in the familiar terms that greet any movement for justice in Palestine: its supposed violation academic freedom and suppression of debate, its putative relation to antisemitism, its undermining of Israeli liberals’ rare efforts to oppose the occupation or democratize their political society.

Nadia Abu el-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington DC. She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001);The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), and, most recently, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in post-9/11 America, which came out last Fall from Verso.

Dan Segal is Jean M. Pitzer Professor of Anthropology and Professor of History at Pitzer College, Claremont. He is a past secretary of the AAA and the past president of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, one of the largest sections within the AAA. In May of this year he co-led a study tour in Palestine with 14 students and faculty from the Claremont Colleges.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective member David Lloyd. SWANA Region Radio is run by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

The impact of the US’s actual wars and of its ongoing military domination of the region is both direct and indirect.Brown University Watson Center’s invaluable “Costs of War” Project summarizes some of the dismal statistics:

• Over 937,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen) due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war.An estimated 3.6-3.7 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting.
• Over 387,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting
• 38 million war refugees and displaced persons have had to leave their homes. Globally, the proportion of displaced people who were children reached 53% in 2017. 

• More than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. 

On this show, we focus on the impact of US war in Iraq with our guest Dena Al-Adeeb. Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born feminist scholar-activist, artist-cultural worker, and mother. She is a previous UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis (UCD). Her work is on U.S. imperial war geographies, militarism, and racial capitalism as they manifest through collective memory, petroculture, material and visual culture in the Middle East region with an emphasis on SWANA, Diasporic and Queer transnational art and futurisms. She is currently working on her book manuscript, entitled The Architecture of War: The U.S. Destruction of Iraq, Petro-cultural Imaginaries, and Collective Memory in the Persian Gulf Region. As an artist, she is also developing an ongoing multimedia project, entitled “An Archive of Future Memories: Letters To My Daughter." Dena Al-Adeeb will participate in the International People’s Tribunal on US Imperialism in its investigation of the impact on Sanctions on Iraq, June 24 2023.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective members David Lloyd and Rana A. Sharif, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

We are honored to host Chief Mandela, grandson of late South African anti-apartheid leader and political prisoner, Nelson Mandela. This show is in collaboration with U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) as they prepare to host Chief Mandela on a six-city tour across Turtle Island. 

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Nakba ("Catastrophe" in English), when over 750,000 Palestinians were banished from their homes upon the formation of the settler-colonial state of Israel. Today, there are close to five million Palestinian refugees who continue to demand their Right to Return to their homes and lands.

Chief Mandela, also the tribal chief of the Mvezo Traditional Council, holds a degree and a post-graduate diploma in Political Science and International Studies from Rhodes University. Unabashed in his support for the Palestinian people, and a progressive who advocates and fights for justice for oppressed people across the world, just like his grandfather did, Chief Mandela speaks regularly about Palestinian liberation and resistance to zionist settler-colonialism at conferences, rallies, and other events across the world.

In honor of the 75th commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian Feminist Collective releases the following statement:

On the 75th commemoration of the Nakba, we, the Palestinian Feminist Collective, express deep gratitude to the indigenous communities across Turtle Island, the original stewards of this land in deep solidarity with their continued presence and struggle. The PFC stands with its co-strugglers against all forms of racialized and genocidal state violence. 

Since 1948, the Palestinian people have been subjected to these forms of violence. On this day we remember our on-going Nakba, an ever-unfolding catastrophe of dispossession, forced exile, violent subjugation, ruthless military occupation, imprisonment, and death at the hands of the Zionist settler colonial project. Throughout this time, we Palestinians have resisted in multiple ways. Our people remain steadfast in our pursuit and celebration of life, as the indigenous caretakers of our land, even if separated from Palestine. We continue to nurture our social, political and cultural presence as a people in our homeland and across the shatat. This continued practice of resistance reminds us that the past and present are tethered to one another and are central to making a liberated future. This is our method and practice of asserting our history, and our belonging to Palestine, a willful defiance to the act of forgetting, and a challenge to Zionist erasure of Palestine and Palestinians.

Today, and everyday, we affirm that our land and people are one, indivisible watan (homeland and peoplehood). The PFC aims to abolish Zionism’s systemic regime of rightlessness, dispossession, military occupation, apartheid, siege, war, and gendered and sexual violence that have been ongoing since before the 1948 Nakba. We resist erasure, subjugation, and fragmentation through the restoration of lost land, time, peoplehood, and cultures. We are committed to the reunion of our people, communities, and homeland, from the Northern Galilee to the southernmost tip of al-Naqab, from the Mediterranean coastal lands, to the sacred city of Jerusalem, to the terrain west of the Jordan River. Across historic Palestine, throughout the shatat, and through our intergenerational connections, diverse and rich traditions, histories, and organizing practices, the Palestinian Feminist Collective affirms that we are one people. We invite you to get more involved in our work by visiting us at palestinianfeministcollective.org.

Join USPCN, NAARPR, and other community organizations in Orange County on Thursday May 18th at Santa Ana High School at 6pm. RSVP at mandelatour.com. Admission to all speaking tour events is free. You can support this tour with a donation on the reservations page.

SWANA Region Radio is joined by Tarteel Aliman and Ehab Eltayeb, members of the Sudanese Diaspora Network, to discuss the dire situation in Sudan. Tarteel and Ehab discuss with us what they are hearing from family and community members in Sudan, the inadequate and problematic mainstream media coverage of Sudan, and how you, our listeners, can help. Please visit Keep Eyes on Sudan for important information, updates, and ways you can help the people of Sudan.

Tarteel Aliman is the Executive Administrator at CAIR Arizona, a civic rights non-profit organisation. She is part of the Sudanese Diaspora Network, a non-profit that aims to unify, mobilize and empower Sudanese youth towards a more sustainable Sudan. She was born in Omdurman, Sudan, and is the daughter of immigrants. 

Ehab Eltayeb is a Sudanese professional basketball player, activist and entrepreneur based in Dallas, Texas. He graduated from Texas A&M University with a B.S., majoring in Civil Engineering and minoring in Mathematics. Being born in Omdurman Sudan and growing up in Dubai, he’s always been engaged with the historical, political and social changes in his motherland. He is a community leader who’s been part of many Sudanese civil society movements since the revolution in 2019 and has been helping mobilize the diaspora towards the empowerment of Sudan. He is also part of the Sudanese Diaspora Network, and is engaged in many advocacy groups that shape opinion of government outlooks towards Sudan and its ever-changing political scene.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

On this episode of SWANA Region Radio we welcome Azad Essa, author of the very timely and important book, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel out earlier this year from Pluto Press. The publisher shares: 

Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi's India and the governments from which it has drawn inspiration, as well as military and technical support.

India once called Zionism racism, but, as Azad Essa argues in his book Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, the state of Israel has increasingly become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy. Looking to replicate the 'ethnic state' in the image of Israel in policy and practice, the annexation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel's settler-colonial project of the occupied West Bank. The ideological and political linkages between the two states are alarming; their brands of ethnonationalism deeply intertwined.

Hostile Homelands puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of Zionism and Hindutva; India's changing position on Palestine; and the countries' growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s.

Azad Essa is an award-winning journalist and author based between Johannesburg and New York City. He is currently a senior reporter for Middle East Eye covering American foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US. He is the author of The Moslems are Coming and Zuma's Bastard and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and the Guardian. He worked for Al Jazeera English between 2010-2018 covering southern and central Africa for the network. Pick up your copy of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel from Pluto Press or your local bookstore. 

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective members Rana Sharif and David Lloyd. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

In this episode, SWANA Region Radio collective members Nyma Ardalan and Rana Sharif discuss the dire situation facing Syrian refugees in Turkey. Our guests are Yaman Salam and Dina Sharif, members of CORE, Community Organized Relief Effort. CORE is a global crisis response organization that brings immediate aid and recovery to underserved communities. Our mission is to empower communities in and beyond crisis. When an emergency strikes, CORE responds immediately to fill gaps, mobilize resources, and establish trust and collaboration from within communities to respond. Our efforts are fueled by local hands, and we partner with local leaders, organizations, governments, and other stakeholders to bring equitable relief directly to those who need it most. To donate, please visit ⁠Turkey-Syria Earthquake - CORE (coreresponse.org)⁠.

Yaman Salam is CORE Program Manager for our Turkey-Syria EQ response. He is Syrian, worked on the Syria crisis with several humanitarian organizations from 2014-2018 in Turkey, including CARE International and Watan (a regional organization operating in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Egypt.) Since then, Yaman’s humanitarian work has taken him to Sierra Leon, Iraq, Myanmar and Somalia. Prior to his career working with NGOs he was working in private sector. Yaman is completing his 3rd Master’s Degree online in Data Science at the Guglielmo Marconi University in Italy.

Dina Sharif is CORE Director of Global Communications based in Los Angeles, and has traveled to Haiti, Ukraine, across the U.S. and now, Turkey to support CORE’s emergency response efforts and impact storytelling. Prior to CORE, she worked for UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees) for five years and was based in Jerusalem as a Visibility and Communications Officer, overseeing communications projects spanning across Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Before the field of humanitarian work, Dina worked as a Development and Outreach Coordinator with Human Rights Watch in Southern California. She completed her Master’s Degree in Public Diplomacy at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and her undergraduate degree at UCLA in Anthropology, with a minor in Middle East and North African Studies.

Anila Daulatzai is a political and medical anthropologist and a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. She has taught in prisons, and in universities across three continents. She has been conducting research in Afghanistan as well as with Afghan refugees in Pakistan for almost three decades. She has published articles in Jadaliyya, Al-Jazeera, several academic journals, and is a contributing member to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. She is completing her book manuscript provisionally titled War and What Remains. Everyday Life in Contemporary Kabul, Afghanistan. Some of her publications include: “Grievance as Movement: A Conversation on Knowledge Production on Afghanistan and the Left,” “Imperial Salaams: ‘Mainstreaming’ gender, forced handshakes, and colonial violence in Afghanistan,” and “Monsters, Inc: The Taliban as Empire’s bogeyman.”

Alborz Ghandehari is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and a performance poet. His research centers social movements in Iran and Southwest Asia/North Africa (the Middle East), as well as movements in the region’s diasporas. A second research area for Dr. Ghandehari centers around migrant justice struggles transnationally. His forthcoming book is Post/Revolutionary Conditions: Renewed Visions of the Iranian Freedom Struggle. Some of his publications appear in Social Identities, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Jadaliyya, and In These Times. Alborz is also the Instructional Coordinator of the Diversity Scholars program, a cohort program to support first-generation college students and students of color at the University of Utah.

Anna Ohanyan is the Richard B. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Stonehill College. She is the editor of Russia Abroad: Driving Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia and Beyond and her latest book The Neighborhood Effect: The Imperial Roots of Regional Fracture in Post-Communist Eurasia.

This episode is hosted and produced by SWANA Region Radio collective member Ankine Antaram. 

Join SWANA Region Radio collective members Ankine Antaram and David Lloyd as they explore efforts to end US support for the Saudi led war on Yemen with Kevin Martin, President of Peace Action and the Peace Action Education fund. Originating in campaigns against nuclear armaments in the 1950s, Peace Action was formed in 1993 and among its many campaigns, it pressured the Obama administration to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, redirect bloated Pentagon spending to needed social programs and infrastructure, settle the U.S. conflict with Iran through negotiations, and back a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Currently, while Peace Action maintains its efforts to achieve the abolition of nuclear weapons globally, its campaigns also include ending the ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan that continue despite official US withdrawals or draw-downs and, in particular, its efforts to end US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which will be our focus tomorrow. You can join a national call to end the war in Yemen here.

Kevin Martin is President of Peace Action and the Peace Action Education Fund, and joined the staff on Sept 4, 2001. Kevin previously served as Director of Project Abolition, a national organizing effort for nuclear disarmament. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, The Progressive, Z magazine and many other publications. Kevin has traveled abroad representing Peace Action and the U.S. peace movement on delegations and at conferences in Russia, Japan, China, Mexico and Britain.

SWANA Region Radio is honored to be in conversation with Loubna and Amanda from the Palestinian Feminist Collective (PFC), a Turtle Island-based body of Palestinian & Arab women & feminists committed to Palestinian liberation & beyond. SWANA Collective members Ankine Antaram, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook speak with Loubna and Amanda to discuss the PFC's Love Letter to the Palestinian People, the PFC's genesis, the work it envisions, and its recently launched 2023 Palestinian Feminist Futures Calendar and Program!

The Calendar is a perfect holiday gift for you or your loved ones. Please consider ordering a copy today! It features 15 Palestinian artists, anniversaries and commemorations in Palestinian history, the names and contributions of 50 Palestinians women whose lives, contributions, and legacies valued by the PFC, and is organized around 13 Principles. To order your copy, click here: https://palestinianfeministcollective.org/calendar/. Please stay connected with the Palestinian Feminist Collective on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter--they will be hosting an event this December to launch the 2023 Palestinian Feminist Futures Calendar and you are invited! 

This week’s show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Rana Sharif, Ankine Antaram, and Soraya Zarook and edited by Ankine Antaram.

Rana Barakat is Associate Professor of History at Birzeit University in Palestine. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She is currently working on a book monograph titled Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba, which advances an indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. Her essay “Writing/righting Palestine studies: Settler colonialism, indigenous sovereignty and resisting the ghost(s) of history” appeared in Settler Colonial Studies. She is also a member of the Palestian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka and director of the Birzeit University Museum.

Mark Minch-de Leon is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside and a founding member of the California Indian Studies and Scholars Association. He earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His concentrations include Indigenous Studies, Rhetorical Theory, and Narrative and Visual Studies. His current book project, Indigenous Inhumanities: California Indian Revitalizations and Postapocalyptic Research, looks at the anticolonial, non-vitalist dimensions of California Indian intellectual and cultural resurgence.

SWANA Region Radio collective members David Lloyd and Soraya Zarook speak with Archana Ravichandradeva, Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka, or PEARL. 

In recent global news, much attention has been paid to the recent and ongoing protests in the city of Colombo in Sri Lanka, but mainstream news consistently ignores the much longer continuous protests that have taken place in Sri Lanka’s north-east, where Tamil families of the forcibly disappeared have marked over 2000 days--more than five years--of continuous protest demanding knowledge about their loved ones who were disappeared by the Sri Lankan government during a civil war that included two genocides of Tamil people, once in 1983 and again in 2009, at the war’s end. Tamil communities see no end to the impunity enjoyed by Sri Lankan government officials responsible for these war crimes and human rights abuses, and have consistently called on international entities to support their calls for information, justice and accountability. On this show, we discuss the demands of Tamil communities as summarized in the Joint Tamil Civil Society Statement issued on July 14, 2022, gain some insight into the recent UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka, and learn more about the vital political advocacy work done by PEARL.

Archana Ravichandradeva is Executive Director of People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) which was formed in 2005 by Tamil-American volunteers who went to Sri Lanka and witnessed the hardships of Tamil civilians affected by the conflict. Since then, PEARL has grown into a research and advocacy organization working across 5 countries advocating for justice, accountability and self-determination for the Tamil people from the North-East of Sri Lanka. In the US, PEARL works with policymakers and stakeholders to push the U.S. government to play a role in improving human rights in Sri Lanka, and advocating for justice and accountability for victim-survivors. You can learn more about their work, and donate to help support them, here.

To help ongoing relief efforts in Sri Lanka, please visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities, and this article by open-source research collective, Watchdog, that details how to donate directly to the Ministry of Health and to hospitals.

Imaad Majeed is Director and Curator of the trilingual performance platform "KACHA KACHA". They are one part of the artist collective "The Packet" and VJ/DJ of "Packet Radio" (SUPR FM). They are Project Coordinator and Co-Curator of Thattu Pattu, a platform for music from the fringes of Sri Lanka. Their poetry has been published in “CITY: A Journal of South Asian Literature”, as well as the local small-press chapbooks “Lime Plain Tea” and “Annasi & Kadalagotu.” They are currently working on "KANNOORU", exploring Sri Lankan Sufi/Muslim identity, community, memory, erasure, ancestry and mysticism through sample-based music, a project supported by a grant from Experimenter's Generator Co-operative Art Production Fund. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective member Soraya Zarook, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

SWANA Region Radio collective member David Lloyd interviews Palestinian environmental scientist and human rights activist, Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh from Bethlehem University. As we go on air, COP-27, the annual meeting of heads of state and their climate specialists, NGOs, and, of course, representatives of the major oil and gas corporations, gathers in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Most observers anticipate yet another collective effort by the major industrial states to defer action on the increasingly critical and undeniable need to roll back carbon and methane emissions immediately. The UN’s latest IPCC climate report, as UN Secretary Guterres warned, shows that “Global and national climate commitments are falling pitifully short” and that countries’ strongest climate pledges put the Earth on a path to warm by a dangerous 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. But the excuses offered by the war in Ukraine and the related food and fuel shortages, by global inflation, and by economic recession will almost certainly lead to further inaction at this latest round of delay and sabotage by governments and their paymasters, the polluting corporations for whom the current crises have spelt a bonanza of windfall profits.

Meanwhile, hosting the conference will be a propaganda and diplomatic coup for Egypt’s dictatorial President Sisi and his brutal and repressive regime, which currently holds at least 65,000 political prisoners subject to torture and miserable conditions in Egypt’s jails, including blogger and human rights activists Alaa Abd El-Fattah, whose case we have been following here on SWANA Region Radio.This week, more than a dozen Nobel Literature laureates called on world leaders to pressure the COP27 host, Egypt, to free the “thousands” of political prisoners languishing in the country’s prisons, including Abd el-Fattah. Bitter experience tells us that any such effort on the part of world leaders will be minimal at best and that COP-27 may merely offer Sisi another excuse for further crackdowns. Listeners wishing to help in freeing Alaa can get information at https://www.accessnow.org/free-alaa/#what-you-can-do or https://freealaa.net.

On tomorrow's episode, we will focus on what COP 27 and, more importantly, climate change or global heating mean for the Eastern Mediterranean, for historic Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.  What has been the impact on historic Palestine of Israel’s colonization and much vaunted “development” of the region on the delicate and fertile ecology of this ancient land? Does Israel’s spurious and well-worn propaganda claim to have “made the desert bloom” actually mask its ongoing destruction of Palestine’s environment, its uprooting of ancient olive groves, or its extensive plantations of pine forests to rapidly cover the ruins of the Palestinian villages it has destroyed? Is its massive water consumption exhausting the limited groundwater available even as it denies Palestinians equitable access to that precious resource? What is the impact of its intensive agricultural projects on the Jordan Valley, the Naqab and elsewhere on both the ecology and the flora and fauna of this fragile environment? How has Palestine been impacted by the process of desertification that affects the larger region, from Syria to Yemen and East Africa?

Amitis Motevalli is an artist who explores the cultural resistance and survival of people living in poverty, conflict and/or war. Her experience as a trans-national migrant is foundational in her work. Through many mediums including sculpture, video, performance and collaborative public art, her work juxtaposes and contrasts iconography with iconoclasm, memorials with monuments, archive methodologies with canon. Her work intends to ask questions about violence, historical documentation and canonization, while invoking the significance of a secular grassroots struggle. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, exhibiting art internationally as well as organizing to create an active and critical cultural discourse through information exchange, either in art, pedagogy or organizing artists and educators.

Catherine Sameh is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Axis of Hope: Iranian Women's Rights Activism across Borders (University of Washington Press, 2019). She is a former member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.

Fatemeh فاطمه is a video and multimedia artist and cofounder of Rosvaa magazine. 

Hasti is an Iranian-born playwright and director in the bay area. Currently she’s working on getting her MFA.

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Rana Sharif, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

Sana Balagamwala is an author and educator based in Los Angeles. Her novel, House Number 12, Block Number 3 explores class, gender roles, and cultural taboos in Pakistan against the backdrop of political turmoil. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and is pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Regular listeners may recall that Rana and SWANA collective member Soraya Zarook had the honor of interviewing Sana about her debut novel last year. Hidden Shelf Publishing House will be donating a portion of sales from Sana's novel to flood relief, so please consider purchasing a copy or donating directly to the TCF Relief Fund.

Sobia Kapadia is a trained architect with over 17 years of experience in shelter design and programming and is well-versed in sustainable development practices. She focuses on effective governance, and participatory approaches. Sobia has in-depth and extensive experience of working in a variety of thematic areas, including but not limited to shelter, DRR and climate change, along with monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning frameworks in International Development and Humanitarian Aid and related policy and programmatic issues in the context of violence, disaster, fragility, and post conflict. Currently she is the senior manager of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub at Middlesex University, London. She has worked in South Asia and the Middle East with a focus on gender, social justice and human rights.

Insiya Syed is a photographer who lives and works in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in many publications including The Telegraph, The Sunday Times Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Le Monde, Communication Arts Magazine, and the Washington Post. Most recently, we came across her coverage of the floods in Pakistan in the Wall Street Journal. Her accolades include photos in the 2011 best picture of the year special edition of TIME Magazine’s Light Box; In 2014, her work “Not a Bug Splat” won a Bronze Lion at the 2014 Cannes Festival for Creativity, a first for Pakistan; and she has taken one of the “35 Breathtaking Photos Taken By Women Throughout History,” a compilation by Huffington Post in 2016.

Join SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook as we take a look at the environmental and human cost of trash heaps in South Asia. Joining us to discuss these issues are journalists Aaron Clark and Archana Chaudhary. If you miss our live show on kpfk.org, you can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public.

Aaron Clark covers global climate and energy issues for Bloomberg Green in Tokyo. He has used satellite observations to identify methane from fossil fuels from Texas to Turkmenistan, and his articles have triggered investigations in the US and Bangladesh. His methane coverage won the International Reporting award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing.

Archana Chaudhary is an award-winning senior journalist with Bloomberg News based in New Delhi. She writes about climate change, health and government policy. She has won awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia for her stories on dams, the economy and a series on the MeToo movement.

This episode is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective member Ankine Antaram and guest co-host Christopher Atamian. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members David Lloyd and Rana Sharif and edited by Ankine Antaram. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankhashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. We appreciate any amplification of our work. We thank you for listening and sharing!

Join SWANA collective members Ankine Antaram and Soraya Zarook as we focus on the worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen that began in 2015. In the past nearly eight years, Saudi Arabia has imposed a land, air, and sea blockade on Yemen with the intent to prevent the flow of weapons to Houthi rebels. In fact, the result of these blockades, that are supported by the U.S., is the devastation of the civilian population through a lack of food, water, and medical supplies. According to the UN, 23.4 million people now need assistance. Among them, 19 million people will go hungry in the coming months, while more than 160,000 of them will face famine-like conditions. At the height of the crisis, the worst-case estimates were that 400,000 Yemeni children may die per year — one every 75 seconds or more than 1,100 per day. The head of the World Food Programme called the situation "the biggest famine in modern history." Use your voice to help end the war in Yemen: Tell Congress to stop the war in Yemen by passing a War Powers Resolution ending all US participation and support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. You can call your elected officials via 1-833-STOP-WAR.

To discuss these issues today we welcome our guest, Dr. Aisha Jumaan. Aisha Jumaan, MPH, PhD, is the Founder and President of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, which you can donate to at www.yemenfoundation.org. Dr. Jumaan has over 30 years of experience in public health, including in viral vaccine preventable diseases, cancer research, maternal & child health and nutrition, and women in development. She worked with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for over a decade. Jumaan also worked in her native home, Yemen, with UNFPA and UNDP. She also participated in health-related program development, evaluation, and training activities for the Peace Corps. She has served on the faculty of Emory University, as well as Sana’a University. She is currently working as an Independent Consultant coordinating health-related projects in Yemen.

During our show this week, SWANA Region Radio is participating in KPFK's second emergency fund drive this year. This  fund drive is essential to help KPFK and the Pacifica network to  survive what have been immensely challenging times for the station  financially. We know that our listeners have also faced serious economic  as well as other challenges not only during the COVID pandemic, but  also in the wake of ongoing capitalist crises and restructuring and  ever-growing inequity in our society. But there are few radio stations  in California and nationally, even among the so-called liberal media  from NPR to MSNBC, that seek to offer regular analysis and news about  these issues as KPFK does, every day of the year. It is because we  accept no corporate sponsorship or advertising of any kind and do not  trade our audience’s data, that we can bring you such a diversity of  perspectives and insights that you are unlikely to hear anywhere else on  your radio dial. But that means that this station, powered by the  people, depends entirely on your donations to stay on air. Please  consider donating during this fund drive, whatever you can, great or  small, and if you can give more you will be helping others to access  this invaluable public service at a time when many cannot contribute. Call 818-985-5735 during the show or pledge at any time online at https://kpfk.wedid.it.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective member Hamoud Salhi, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our  collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd,  Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

Join SWANA Region Radio in conversation with Pakistani-American journalist Umar Farooq about the global proliferation of drones as a weapon of war. Last week Umar published an essay on Turkey’s TB2 drone  which has been used both in Ethiopia against the Tigray region and in Ukraine as an important weapon against Russia’s invasion. We discuss with him today the expanding use of drones as weapons of war globally and the ambiguous position of the United States with regard to their manufacture, spread, and deployment. If you miss our live broadcast on kpfk.org, you can listen to this show and our previous shows on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public.

Umar Farooq is an independent journalist whose work has covered most of our SWANA Region, from Pakistan to Egypt and Syria. Currently based in New York, where he is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, in 2017 he received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to report from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He has written widely about the impact of drone strikes and targeted assassinations, especially in Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan.His writings have appeared in The Daily Beast, ProPublica, Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and other leading English-language outlets.

This  show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Ankine  Antaram and David Lloyd, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA  Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our  collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd,  Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

On July 9th, thousands of protesters stormed the Presidential Secretariat and the official residences of the President and Prime Minister, demanding that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, resign their posts. Rajapaksa, who fled to Singapore, has since appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as Acting President and officially resigned from his position as President. Meanwhile, ordinary Sri Lankan citizens continue to face the country's worst economic crisis in post-independence history. As of July 7th, sixteen people have died while waiting in line for fuel. To help us complicate the mainstream narratives around the protests and protesters, and to discuss where Sri Lanka is, and should be headed, we are joined by our guest, Ambika Satkunananthan.

Ways to help people survive Sri Lanka's crisis: Please visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities, and this article by open-source research collective, Watchdog, that details how to donate directly to the Ministry of Health and to hospitals. Despite the government's attempt to censor them, Sri Lankan health workers are declaring a dire shortage of medicines and medical supplies, with paediatric doctors resorting to re-using neo-natal endotracheal tubes to help premature babies breathe.

Ambika Satkunananthan is currently a Fellow of the Open Society Foundations. For more than twenty years she has worked with community organizations and communities impacted by human rights violations, in particular, assisting them access remedies. From Oct 2015 to March 2020, she was a Commissioner of the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, where she led the first ever national study of prisons. She continues to work on the rights of imprisoned persons and re-imagining the carceral approach of the criminal justice system. Her current work includes research, advocacy and interventions on drug control, detention and rehabilitation in Sri Lanka, as part of which her research on the issue, the first such study, was published by Harm Reduction International in August 2021. She is a member of the Expert Panel of the Trial Watch Project of the Clooney Foundation and a member of the Network of Experts of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime. She is an affiliate of the Eleos Justice Centre, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia. She has a B.A. and LL.B from Monash University and a LL.M from University of Nottingham where she was a Chevening Fellow.

This show is hosted and produced by SWANA collective member Soraya Zarook, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd, Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

SWANA Region Radio co-hosts Hamoud Salhi and David Lloyd are joined by the Algerian-French novelist, Anouar Benmalek. Anouar Benmalek is an esteemed novelist, journalist, mathematician, and poet and a dual Algerian and French citizen. He has won several of France’s prestigious literary prizes and has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His historical novels examine the lives of ordinary people living in violent times, that is, under conditions of genocide, political repression, racism, and religious fundamentalism, and have at times led to violent recrimination and even death threats against him. His novels available in English include The Lovers of Algeria and The Child of an Ancient People.

Benmalek’s recent novel, Fils du Shéol (Son of Sheol) is, in part, about the Jewish Holocaust, making him the first Arab writer to write a novel about the Holocaust.  Perhaps even more importantly, the novel also encompasses the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples of South West Africa, now Namibia, under German colonial rule in the early 20th century. That genocide and its concentration and labor camps established the template for later genocides, from the Armenian genocide in Turkey to the Holocaust itself.

Today, we talk not only about Fils du Shéol, but also about Benmalek’s latest novel, L’amour au temps des scélérats (Love in the time of scoundrels), which is set mostly in contemporary Syria under the conditions of civil war and ISIS terror. The novel weaves together a number of intersecting narratives: a young couple narrowly saved from stoning by ISIS militants for eloping; a Yazidi family captured by ISIS; an American volunteer with the Kurdish YPG; and, perhaps most intriguingly, a man who is millenia old.

SWANA Region Radio nor KPFK ever accept funding from corporate entities, which is what allows us to do this kind of programming every week. This week KPFK is holding an urgent fundraiser, so please, if you have enjoyed this or our other shows, support the station that allows us to do this important work by donating. Any amount that you can afford will be greatly appreciated.

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Hamoud Salhi and David Lloyd, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA  Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our  collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd,  Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work.

Rana Sharif and David Lloyd are joined by Mosab Abu Toha, the author of a wonderful new book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, that came out this year from City Lights Books. Toha’s poems render some of the most moving and telling accounts of how it is to live under blockade and the constant threat and reality of Israeli bombardment. But these are not only “poems that have bombs and corpses, / destroyed houses and shrapnel-covered streets.” They carry also the hope for a future beyond occupation and settler colonial violence, and “imagine a sky only occupied by birds/ and swollen clouds.” They tell of a world where the people of Gaza “love what we have, no matter how little,/ because if we don’t, everything will be gone.” And we are joined in this conversation by American poet and long-standing Palestine solidarity activist, Ammiel Alcalay, whose fine interview with Mosab is included at the end of the volume, and who had much to do with bringing this book into being.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. A graduate in English language teaching and literature, he taught English at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools in Gaza from 2016 until 2019, and is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nation and Literary Hub. His poems have been published on the Poetry Foundation’s website, in Poetry Magazine, Banipal, Solstice, The Markaz Review, The New Arab, Peripheries, and other journals. They are collected in his new book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.

Ammiel Alcalay, (Amiel Al-calay poet), novelist, translator, scholar, and activist, has  published numerous collections of poetry, including Scrapmetal (2007), from the warring factions (2002; reissued 2012), neither wit nor gold: (from then) (2011), as well as the novel Islanders (2010) and the scholarly monograph After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (1993). Alcalay’s parents were Sephardic Jews from Belgrade (Serbia), and much of Alcalay’s work engages questions of religious identity, language, and culture, particularly the histories and cultures of the Balkans and the Middle East.

This show is co-hosted and co-produced by SWANA collective members Rana Sharif and David Lloyd, and edited by Ankine Antaram. SWANA  Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our  collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd,  Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, & Soraya Zarook. You can also follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We appreciate any amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!

Today, as California yet again faces prolonged drought conditions, severe water shortages, and imminent restrictions on water consumption, we devote the show to a conversation with water protectors in Palestine and in the US Southwest. Both regions are subject to settler colonial regimes that bring with them sustained resource extraction, including the over-consumption of water resources that are a precious and limited element in these arid regions. We discuss the violence of settler colonial regimes that discount both Indigenous understandings of wise water use and the cultural and religious meanings of water and that monopolize and deplete once rich water sources to serve urban and agricultural expansion. We consider the legal and other resistance strategies deployed to protect and preserve water sources in both regions and the growing problem of settler-driven desertification that has harmed the formerly rich ecologies of Palestine and the US Southwest. Our guests are scholar and activist Dr. Muna Dajani, speaking to us from occupied Jerusalem, and Dr. Amrah Salomon J., Amber Ortega, and Napolean Marrietta, members of the O'odham Anti Border Collective.

Dr. Muna Dajani is a Palestinian Jerusalemite and a Research Associate at Lancaster Environment Centre. She holds a PhD in Geography and Environment from the London School of Economics (LSE). Her research focuses on documenting the lived experiences of agricultural communities in the context of settler colonialism in the occupied Syrian Golan and the Galilee (Al-Battuf Valley). She was a Research Officer at the Middle East Centre at LSE, where she led a collaboration project with Birzeit University and Al Marsad (Arab Centre for Human Rights in the Golan) on documenting the untold story of the occupation of the Syrian Golan. She is also a policy member at Al Shabaka, thePalestinian Policy Network.

Amrah Salomon J. is a writer, artist, activist and Assistant Professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice (CIEJ) and the O'odham AntiBorder Collective. Her work has been published in both academic and literary publications in the United States, the U.K., and in Mexico.

Amber Ortega is a member of the Tohono O'odham Nation and is a tribal student, poet, and water protector. She is also a descendant of Hia-Ced O'odham, a band of O'odham currently federally unrecognized. She has been engaged on Indigenous land resistance work protecting Quitobaquito, a sacred water site to all O'odham.

Napolean Marrietta(Akimel O’odham, Tohono O’odham, Pii-Posh) is an enrolled member of the  Gila River Indian Community and serves as the American Indian Student  Support Services Graduate Assistant at Arizona State University (ASU).  Napolean graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Justice Studies  and American Indian Studies with a certificate in American Indian  Governance at ASU. He is currently an ASU Master’s student studying  American Indian Studies with an emphasis on Indigenous Rights and Social  Justice and Public Administration in the Watts College of Public  Service and Community Solutions. Napoleon's interests include Indigenous  education, advocacy in Indigenous activism, Indigenous history of  contemporary and current Indigenous issues and research on critically  engaging on what it means to be a good relative in our Indigenous  communities.

To discuss these issues, we are joined by our guest Minoli Wijetunge, Project Manager of Watchdog, a multidisciplinary team of fact checkers, journalists, researchers and software engineers who hunt hoaxes and misinformation, investigate matters of public welfare, and build software tools that help other similar collectives. You can listen to their podcast, The Doghouse, download their app, and visit Elixir, the software built by Watchdog to help the medical crisis in Sri Lanka. You can also visit this Google doc to donate to various organizations providing cooked food and dry rations to the most vulnerable communities in Sri Lanka. 

Minoli Wijetunge is an academic affiliated with the University of Colombo and the University of Oxford. She is the former editor of Groundviews, a publication by the Centre for Policy Alternatives. If you miss today's live airing of our conversation with Minoli on kpfk.org, you can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify, Anchor, Google Podcasts, Breaker, and Radio Public. The music on our show today is “Nam Parpome,” the Tamil rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge,” sung by Anjana and translated by Ponni and Maangai.

Collective members Ankine Antaram and  Soraya Zarook discuss the terrible industry of baby farms in Sri Lanka,  and its connection to transnational adoption industries. To help us  understand the history and present conditions around Sri Lanka's baby  farms, we are joined by our guest, Priyangika Samanthie, a  writer, philanthropist and activist in the field of adoption. She has  assisted in nearly 300 family reunions over 17 years and has studied the  adoption market in 37 countries. You can find information about her  work on her own instagram account @priyangikasamanthie and @romanticized_immigration, which publishes various forms of adoption criticism.

You can follow our updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. SWANA Region Radio is run entirely by the volunteer efforts of our  collective: Ankine Antaram, Nyma Ardalan, Inara Khankashi, David Lloyd,  Hamoud Salhi, Rana Sharif, and Soraya Zarook. We appreciate any  amplification of our work. Thanks for listening and for sharing!