Rania Khalek Dispatches

Iran nuclear deal negotiations appear frozen and the Biden administration is busy pouring fuel onto the Ukrainian fire and trying to encircle China.  To help us understand why attempts to salvage an agreement with Iran have not succeeded, Rania Khalek was joined by Mohammad Marandi, professor of English literature and orientalism at the University of Tehran. Prof. Marandi also speaks about recent...

Lebanon’s May 15 elections results were confusing, with contradictory claims of victory and defeat. Much of the mainstream media coverage further obfuscated the results, with journalists celebrating the few self-described independents and reformists as a sign that some kind of change might be coming, while also appearing to cheer the apparent defeat of Hezbollah and its allies. Except they weren’t...

Africa’s Sahel region encompasses Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad and has been an arena of French colonialism, liberation struggles, ongoing imperialist interventions, the war on terror, and coups d’etat.  To discuss this and more Rania Khalek, was joined by Hannah Rae Armstrong, a long-time researcher with years of experience living and working in Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and t...

Libya seems to be trapped in endless conflict between rival militias and outside powers, with migrants trapped in neo-slavery and others drowning in the Mediteranean trying to flee to the European. Prior to the 2011 Arab uprisings and subsequent NATO regime change operation that destroyed the country, most outsiders knew little of Libya except for its caricature as a bizarre authoritarian country...

The Palestinian rap group DAM put Palestinian rap on the map and inspired Arab rap in general with songs like Meen Irhabi (Who’s the terrorist?). DAM did not only address Arabs, however. As Palestinian citizens of Israel, they also had Hebrew lyrics, directly challenging their oppressor. Tamer Nafar, one of the group’s founding members, has since launched a solo career which includes writing and s...

Following the 2019 uprising that deposed longtime leader Omar Bashir, Sudan is suffering from an economic disaster, another military coup, neoliberal rot and foreign interference from countries in the region and the West.  To understand what’s happening and why, Rania Khalek was joined by Magdi El Gizouli, a Sudanese academic and fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, as well as frequent commentator...

When most people think of Sweden, or more broadly, the Scandinavian countries, they imagine a more egalitarian and advanced model to which we should aspire. Some assume without investigating that Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Norway, have figured out how to be prosperous “socialist” countries. But this Swedish model is uglier than it might appear to be, with a brutal his...

Whether or not there was a U.S.-backed coup against Pakistan’s deposed leader Imran Khan is a point of great debate. On a recent episode of Dispatches, Rania Khalek spoke with Pakistani professor Taimur Rahman, who argued that it was not a coup: https://youtu.be/nA5UCTz4oys   But judging by the crowds in the street, many Pakistanis believe that there was in fact a coup and that the US played a maj...

Two months into the war on Ukraine, why have Europeans allowed the US, which is of  course not part of Europe, to dictate reckless policies against Russia over what are purely European issues? Is this a desperate last ditch effort to halt American and Western decline? To discuss the future of Europe and the Western-dominated order, Rania Khalek was joined by Wolfgang Streeck, a sociologist and eme...

One year after Zionist extremists in Jerusalem provoked a defiant response from Palestinians in occupied Gaza, the same scenario is now repeating. Israelis are attacking Palestinian worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque during Ramadan, executing Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and once again bombing Gaza, but without any of the Western sympathy expressed for Ukrainian victims or condemnation agains...

While the world has been distracted by the war in Ukraine, Pakistan is in the middle of massive political upheaval. Imran Khan was removed as prime minister through a parliamentary vote of no confidence, which he blamed on a US-backed coup.  Was it US interference? Or was this just local Pakistani politics? To understand what happened and how Pakistani politics came to be dominated by a right-wing...

The war in Ukraine has led to a closing of the ranks in the West, with media and politicians in lockstep united against Russia, and some self-described leftists have joined in. As with many recent conflicts the left has been riven by divisions over what is the correct position to take, with “Putinism” replacing “Assadism” as the new term used to excommunicate opponents of NATO and American interve...

For those who just discovered Ukraine two months ago, the fact that Ukrainian nationalism has been dangerously intertwined with fascism might sound like Russian propaganda. But is it? How powerful is the Ukrainian far right? Are they really linked to Nazis? Why is the corporate-owned media denying this?  To place this war and the Ukrainian far right in its historical context, Rania Khalek was join...

The war in Ukraine is turning geopolitics upside down, in a global order that already seemed brittle. We have an oil shock, a financial shock, a cold war, a hot war, an ongoing global pandemic all at the same time. Now global supply chains, upon which modern human life depends, have been severed. Supplies of food and fertilizer are threatened for those most dependent on it at a time when global wa...

Mainstream media are whipping up a frenzy against leftists who oppose US imperialism and NATO, smearing them as “Russian agents” for trying to analyze this conflict and its causes with nuance rather than emotion or jingoism. With Western media exclusively focused on Ukraine, simply reminding people that Afghanistan is being starved due to U.S. policies, that Yemen is still being bombed and besiged...

Many experts on Russia and Ukraine are calling for de-escalation and genuine diplomacy but are being drowned out by a unanimous chorus led by the media and a cacophony of hawkish frauds demanding more war.  To break through the war fervor, Rania Khalek spoke to Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal...

The fighting in Ukraine might be a European war but its consequences are global, and it may even cause changes in geopolitical balances, relations and multipolarity. How can we understand this war as anti-imperialists? What will its global economic consequences be? And what will be the result of the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia? To help make sense of it all, Rania Khalek was joined by...

Mainstream media coverage of the war in Ukraine has sought to erase the U.S. and NATO role in setting the stage for the conflict, the Western history of attacking Russia, and Europe’s violent and racist past and present.  Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, joins Dispatches with Rania Khalek to remind us of the hypocrisy and history the...

The impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine isn’t isolated to Europe. As the US and NATO pour weapons into a Ukrainian insurgency, the risk for confrontation between nuclear-armed power is rising. Does this mark the end of unipolarity and the beginning of a multipolar world? If so, what does that mean? How will support for a Ukrainian insurgency feed into the rise of the global far right? What will be...

BreakThrough coverage has emphasized the US and NATO role in instigating the violence in Ukraine, which is precisely what the Western media has tried to obscure in recent weeks. We've also hosted many voices from different segments of the left about the war. One of those voices joining Rania Khalek from the Russian left is Alexey Sakhnin, an anti-war activist, journalist and academic of the S...

It’s not for nothing that the US has been called the “United States of Amnesia.” The same leaders who invaded Iraq and killed a million people, who are starving Yemenis and Afghans, who label Palestinians "terrorists" for throwing rocks, and who took every opportunity to escalate rather than de-escalate the conflict in Ukraine since 2014, have suddenly dusted off their international law...

After weeks of sky-high tension, ambiguity and threats, the Russian military crossed into Ukraine and the country's eight year civil war became a war between two post-soviet armies.   While the extent of Putin's goals in the war are unclear, Western countries have been supplying the Ukrainian military with weapons, launched a brutal economic war on Russia, and will support a NATO-backed...

BT’s Rania Khalek paid a visit to the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, also known as ELAM. Cuba’s socialist government foots the bill for students, who come from all over the world to study medicine for free. Tuition, accommodation and board are free, and they even throw in a government stipend for students to live on. The one condition? Graduates have to return to serve in low-income...

Breakthrough News was on the ground in Havana, Cuba where Rania Khalek spoke with Johana Tablada, General Deputy Director of US affairs at the Cuban Foreign Ministry.  They discussed the US blockade hampering the country’s development, how socialism makes Cuba’s survival possible, why Cuba has such a strong anti-imperialist foreign policy, how Cuba sees the recent left victories across Latin Ameri...

All things having to do with Russia are seen in the West through a renewed Cold War prism, with simplistic portrayals more befitting a Hollywood villain. Western media has been in a panic about an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, while they celebrated a countrywide uprising in Kazakhstan that after a few days was put down.  So what's really happening? Is it all right-wing color revoluti...