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

In this episode, we begin by discussing President Trump’s latest proclamation of an agreement with Iran, a statement that may hold beyond the next tweet storm, since Iran has suggested for once that the two sides have at least agreed to sign a “memorandum of understanding.” But with Israel doing its best to sabotage any peace accord, the outlook remains uncertain. David Lloyd speaks with Radio Intifada’s regional expert Hamoud Salhi in the hope of clarifying the elements and prospects of the “deal".We then come much closer to home to Garden Grove in Southern California, where the Palestinian Youth Movement has initiated a campaign with a coalition of other local groups to close down GKN, a corporation notorious for the recent failure of a chemical storage tank that forced the evacuation of 50,000 local residents and threatened an explosion that would have wiped out much of the neighborhood and spread toxic fumes all over Orange County and beyond. Though that immediate danger is over, PYM has drawn attention to GKN’s role as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the F35 bomber that Israel has used to carry out its ongoing genocide and war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon, and for which GKN supplies essential plastics. We speak with two organizers of the campaign, Sofia Awaida and Layal Bata of the Palestinian Youth Movement. The GKN campaign can be contacted at embargoforpalestine.com/LAOCIE where you can join the letter-writing campaign to Garden Grove city council, read the research brief and endorse the campaign. If you are local, you can show up to give public comment at the next Garden Grove city council meeting, Tuesday June 23 @ 6.30 pm and every other Tuesday going forward until the city truly holds GKN accountable. Follow the organizations leading this campaign on Instagram for future calls to action and updates:@PYMLAOCIE@VIETRISEOC@OCJPALESTINE@HARBORINSTITUTEOCTo support Palestinian youth grassroots organizing and our campaigns, donate via venmo to @PYM-LAOCIE ⁠https://venmo.com/u/PYM-LAOCIE⁠. And finally, David Lloyd speaks with Emmaia Gelman, author of the new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League as a Cold War neoconservative institution, just out from the University of California Press. We talk about the political history of the ADL, its anti-communism and, in particular, its use of charges of antisemitism to close down speech and activism by supporters of Palestinian liberation. Emmaia also is the director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She co-produces and often co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism, on Apple podcasts and at the website criticalzionismstudies.org.

Join us for our conversation with Nisreen Jaradat of the No Azure for Apartheid Campaign that seeks to end Microsoft’s complicity with Israeli genocide and apartheid.In what is dubbed the world’s first AI-assisted, algorithmic genocide, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)—or, more accurately, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)—have been using AI systems such as the Gospel and Lavender to accelerate their genocide. The use of these programs against Palestinians in Gaza follows a pattern of Israeli use of AI and Cloud technologies to advance and accelerate oppression against the Palestinian people and to control their demographic and spatial existence. Israel’s regime of domination and oppression against the Palestinian people for over 76 years has been identified by multiple human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even Israel’s own B’Tselem as an apartheid regime according to international human rights law. US-based corporation Microsoft has not only remained silent about the application of AI and other digital technologies in warfare and genocide, but is actively complicit in the ongoing Nakba against Palestinians, supporting and enabling an apartheid state, by continuing to sell cloud and AI services to the IOF. This is in direct contravention of Microsoft’s own Corporate Social Responsibility commitments including a commitment to “protect fundamental rights”: in the corporation’s own words, “respecting human rights is a core value of Microsoft.”Microsoft is, of course, not the only corporation engaged in supplying Israel with the means to sustain its regime of genocide and apartheid, but on Nakba Day, May 15 2024, Microsoft workers began a campaign, No Azure for Apartheid, in the words of their very substantial petition, from which we have drawn extensively in our introduction, to demand several remedies, including: –to end Microsoft’s complicity in Israeli genocide and apartheid by terminating all Azure contracts and partnerships with the Israeli military and government; –to make all its ties to the Israeli military publicly known, including weapons manufacturers and contractors.–to conduct a transparent and independent audit of Microsoft’s technology contracts, services, and investments, and ensure Microsoft products and services are not being used to violate the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, and Microsoft’s own Human Rights Statement, in Palestine or elsewhere.Since this campaign started, Microsoft has fired or otherwise sanctioned numerous of its workers who have spoken out for this campaign, and used arrests and violent methods to suppress protests by current and former workers and concerned community activists. These measures have not silenced the protests and many Microsoft employees have publicly resigned as part of this campaign which goes under the slogan “We will not be cogs in the Israeli genocidal machine.”Today we speak with one of those workers, Nisreen Jaradat about the campaign, Microsoft’s response, and the role of technology in both the Israeli and the US war machine.Nisreen Jaradat is a Palestinian organizer with No Azure for Apartheid, a movement of current and former Microsoft workers demanding that Microsoft cut all ties with the Israeli government and military. Nisreen was fired by Microsoft in August of 2025 following protests at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, where she took part in setting up encampments and establishing the Liberated Zone on the Martyred Palestinian Children's Plaza and the Mai Ubeid Building.

In this episode, we're joined by Aishah Masood from Defence of Human Rights, an organization that advocates for victims of enforced disappearances in Pakistan, to discuss enforced disappearances and the conditions experienced by people detained in prisons in Pakistan. Defence of Human Rights and Public Service trust, or DHR Pakistan for short, is an independent non-governmental, non-profit organization that was born out of personal experience of the deprivation of human rights of the victims of enforced disappearance. Defence of Human Rights offers legal aid, psycho-social accompaniment, economic support, campaign, and lobbying for policy recommendations regarding the issue of enforced disappearances in Pakistan to victims of torture, through active engagement with the stakeholders.

Over the past 26 months of Israel’s still ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have covered the exceptional degree of repression on universities directed at Palestine solidarity activists. National media attention has largely focused on the violent actions taken by campus security forces against student protest encampments and on high profile cases like the arrest and detention of US green-card holder and Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil, still under threat of deportation by the Trump regime. We want to focus on the less widely publicized campaigns of repression directed at faculty which have ramped up over the past few years to a degree that threatens the very structure and mission of the postwar “liberal” university. Universities have long been the target of Zionist efforts to control the discourse on Palestine. For decades, the question of Palestine was rarely taught on US campuses and very few Palestinian faculty were hired nationally. Palestine was the “third rail” of academia as of the media. The work of Edward Said began to make inroads only thirty years after the Nakba and was immediately met with virulent antagonism as it illuminated the colonial nature of the Israeli state. Gradually, both the persistence of scholars and activists on US campuses and the increasingly evident violence of the Israeli settler-colonial regime made Palestine a critical site of study and activism, and students now have a complex and detailed understanding of the workings of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide and a language that informs their activism.Faced with the fact that every debate now forces them to justify the unjustifiable facts of the Israeli supremacist regime, Zionist organizations no longer demand debate, but seek to repress and punish speech about Palestine in schools and universities. California’s “democratic” governor Gavin Newsom recently signed off on Assembly Bill 715 that effectively bans the teaching of Palestinian perspectives in California schools after years of Zionist lobbying. Numerous faculty have been targeted for their speech on Palestine, both on private social media accounts and in the classroom, or for their protection and support of student activists at encampments. They have been targeted by external actors, from right-wing MAGA activists to their Zionist allies such as Silicon Valley Chapter Hillel (as in the case we discuss today) or the ADL, and by their own university administrations. Even Harvard, that is making media capital for its legal defiance of the Trumpian demands, fired an assistant dean in the Divinity School merely for the crime of hosting a program on Christian Zionism.In California, the UC and CSU system’s administrations are behaving in a no less draconian manner, from demanding oversight of syllabi on Palestine and the “Middle East” to undermining longstanding faculty disciplinary proceedings, and from prosecuting or expelling students to sanctioning and even firing faculty. Today we speak with two CSU professors, Ahlam Muhtaseb and Sang Heal Kil, who have been subject to many years of Zionist and administrative harassment, culminating in the firing of one of them, tenured San Jose State University professor Sang Hea Kil. We discuss with them their first hand experience of the collaboration of university administrations and Zionist lobby groups, the overall picture of regression in academia, and Sang’s case in particular. How are faculty and students resisting this new repressive regime? What does it mean for the future of universities that are also threatened from many other quarters, from the advent of AI to the right-wing efforts to control university research and teaching in line with their own agendas? Is Palestine once again the cutting edge of violent reactionary efforts to curtail learning and democracy in the United States?

In this episode, we host Pakistani filmmaker Jawad Sharif to discuss his most recent film, Moklani. Winner of the 2025 Jackson Wild Global Voices prize, the documentary follows the lives of the Mohanas, an Indigenous community that has lived off of Manchar Lake in Sindh, Pakistan for generations. Through the swiftly changing lives of the Mohanas, Sharif explores the deep sense of loss that comes with the ecological destruction of Manchar Lake. This week’s show is hosted by Misha Choudhry and David Lloyd.Jawad Sharif is an award-winning filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer based in Pakistan. Exploring the themes of social change and human rights, his projects focus on reviving the suppressed cultural and indigenous identities of Pakistan. In the past 15 years, Jawad has pushed the boundaries of visual storytelling by documenting stories about the rights of folk musicians, high-altitude porters, climate migrants, and marginalized communities. Some of his films include The Losing Side, The Color of Smog, Natari, and Indus Blues. You can find more information about him and his work at: https://jawadshariffilms.com/

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In this episode, we discuss the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Sudan, which has been called the worse humanitarian crisis of all. Our guest is Khalid Mustafa Medani.Professor Medani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies, Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University. His research focuses on globalization, the political economy of Islamist and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East, with a special focus on Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia. Dr. Medani is the author of Black Markets and Militants: Informal Networks in the Middle East and Africa. It received an award from the American Political Science Association for the Best Book in the Field of Middle East and North Africa Politics by a Senior Scholar in 2022.

In this episode, we turn to Egypt and to its ongoing violations of human rights in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring and the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt that brought the downfall of President Mubarak and the eventual rise to power of the current President Abd el Fatah Sisi, once dubbed by the US President Trump as his favorite dictator. In the wake of Sisi’s seizure of power, thousands of political prisoners were incarcerated in Egypt’s notorious jails, including journalist and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, who has been almost continuously incarcerated for the past dozen years and continues in detention to this day. In May 2022, Radio Intifada spoke with Sanaa Soueif about her brother’s situation and about his extraordinary collection of writings You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, published in 2021. Since then, many world leaders have made ineffectual efforts to persuade Sisi to release Abd el Fattah and other political prisoners with no result and Sisi continues his oppression without any sanctions from his Western allies and sponsors.We speak with Atef Said, an old friend of the family who has just returned from London after visiting with Laila Soueif about her situation, Alaa’s case, and the overall political situation in Egypt. The article on Laila Soueif's hunger strike mentioned by Atef during the interview is here: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/june/day-250⁠Last year, September 29 2024, Alaa Abd El Fattah was due for release and once again the regime denied urgings to end his incarceration, especially on the part of his mother, Laila Soueif, the mathematician and Human Rights activist, herself a former political prisoner, who has advocated tirelessly on Alaa’s behalf. In September 30 2024 Laila Soueif commenced a hunger strike in London on behalf of her son, seeking to pressure the British government to take serious action on behalf of her son who, like herself, is a British as well as an Egyptian citizen. Extraordinarily, Laila has now been on hunger strike for over 250 days, an unheard of duration for such an action. She has lost over 40% of her body weight yet miraculously continues her fight. Her life is clearly now in danger, as she resumed a total hunger strike in May of this year.Atef Said is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His scholarship engages with the fields of sociological theory, political sociology, historical sociology, sociology of the Middle East, and global sociology. His book, Revolution Squared: Tahrir, Political Possibilities and Counterrevolution in Egypt, published by Duke University Press, examines the 2011 Egyptian Revolution to trace the expansive range of liberatory possibilities and containment at the heart of every revolution. He is currently working on the nature of future revolutions as they relate to political and social change and the evolving meanings and practices of democracy today, and on the global rise of neo-liberal authoritarianism over the past two decades, within historically established democracies and non-democracies alike. He has also published in outlets like the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) as well as Jadaliyya and Truthout. He is also a poet. Formerly, Professor Said was a human rights and legal activist in Egypt and in that context knew Laila Soueif, Alaa Abd El-Fattah and their family. He has recently returned from London where he met with Laila Soueif.