Rania Khalek Dispatches

Listen to the full episode on Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-of-of-87855875 To discuss the brutal history of NATO intervention in the Third World and CIA infiltration of education in targeted countries, Rania Khalek was joined by Essam Elkorghli, a Libyan PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he researches the impact of contemporary imperialism on ed...

Border policy in the Global North has been crafted to intentionally cause people to die of thirst in the Arizona desert and drown in the Mediterranean sea as a form of deterrence. But why are people picking up and leaving their countries in the first place? Why are they being subjected to so much cruelty on their journey no matter who’s in charge in Europe or the U.S.? Where does the Israeli occup...

Breakthrough News journalist Eugene Puryear joins Rania Khalek for a special live episode of Dispatches on Tuesday August 8 at 12pm ET to discuss the latest developments in Niger following threats of military intervention by Western governments and their regional allies meant to reverse an explosion of anti-colonial sentiment across Africa’s Sahel. 

Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-east-87132481 East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is remembered in the West as the antithesis to freedom and democracy. But the history and reality of the GDR was far more complex. Not only was the GDR a socialist state built on antifascist principles following the Second World War. It also practic...

Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-is-us-86956303 Western sanctions on Russia, previously Europe’s biggest natural gas supplier, has lowered European living standards in the sweltering heat while exacerbating fuel and food shortages around the world. And that’s not all — military spending has increased while social budgets have been cut.  To discuss...

Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-and-w-86459089 The Red Scare is back. This new era of McCarthyism depends on loose and selective interpretation and enforcement of existing legal measures with some racial profiling and guilt-by-association mixed in.  People are being accused of being foreign agents based on their political views. Chinese nationals...

Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-anti-86303559 For decades anti-Palestinian fanatics have harassed and attacked professors and students who dare to speak out against Israeli apartheid, going after their reputations and livelihoods with media smears and legal assaults. Why is it so important to document and understand such attacks on academic freedom...

Listen to the full interview on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-on-86104940 The US is escalating a bipartisan Cold War, pumping up the military industrial complex, fueling proxy wars and gutting what’s left of the welfare state. But there is a split in the ruling class on how best to guarantee US hegemony. On one side is the far-right America First crowd led by Trump, who...

Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-on-of-85896805 France is on fire after police were filmed shooting and killing unarmed 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, a French citizen of Moroccan and Algerian descent, in the suburbs of Paris during a traffic stop. This shocking display of French state violence triggered large-scale protests, particularly amongst the co...

Listen to the full interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-or-us-85690029 In 2003, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, a Lebanese-American, was sentenced to 155 years in prison on allegations of "providing material support" to the Lebanese organization Hezbollah with funds garnered from cigarette smuggling. Characterized by prosecutors as an “enemy combatant” and “terrorist f...

Access the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-rise-84975377 The power of the dollar sustains U.S. imperialism. But rising multipolarity, an overuse of U.S. sanctions, the rise of alternative trading arrangements that sidestep the dollar, and a very obvious crisis of western capitalism have led to panic about a decline in dollar hegemony. What gives the dollar so...

Listen to the entire interview on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-wins-84859698 In popular culture, Canada is seen as the nicer version of the US, the harmless northern neighbor. Behind that shiny exterior is a country that plays a crucial supporting role in US aggression abroad and providing it with a layer of liberal respectability. Canada remains the “good cop” to the US “bad...

Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-us-84510217 The Gulf states have been reliable partners of U.S. imperialism since their inception. But that hasn’t stopped them from deepening their ties with Russia and China, leading to tectonic shifts across the Middle East that have many DC insiders losing sleep. What’s behind these shifting alliances across the Gulf? Will they contin...

Why is Iran under constant US attack? Is it really about women’s rights and democracy? Or is it because Iran, since its revolution, has been a staunch supporter both ideologically and materially, of resistance to US imperialism across the Middle East? To discuss this and more, Rania Khalek was joined by Nina Farnia, Assistant Professor of Law at Albany Law School, a longtime activist and a scholar...

Full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/full-audio-how-w-83919972 After Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the British Labour Party, the right wing of the party joined with the Israel lobby and the Israeli state to bring down Corbyn and purge the party of leftists using false accusations of anti-semitism. The witch-hunt continued even after Corbyn’s downfall. No reporter has covered the...

It’s a new era of global power dynamics where countries sometimes have the option to say no to the U.S. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East. Almost 12 years after being kicked out of the Arab League, Syria has been welcomed back into the fold by many of the U.S.-allied countries that tried to destroy it. All this time Israel was banking on normalization with Saudi Arabia and the...

According to U.S. politicians, military leaders and the media, everything China does on the international stage – brokering peace deals, expanding economic initiatives, building ports — is part of an aggressive campaign to weaken the United States. While China is becoming more assertive diplomatically, is the U.S. interpretation of why accurate or is it projection and delusion? And how does it rel...

See full episode on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/83205814 Collaboration between the US and fascists is a pattern that stretches back to the end of World War II and NATO’s founding, when the US and British intelligence services established secret far-right terror network armies across NATO countries made up of fascists, Nazi collaborators and actual Nazis.  This is just the first half of...

In the U.S. we’re taught that North Korea is a horrible backwards dictatorship where every person is captive to an evil regime run by a mad man who has an inexplicable hatred of the U.S., freedom and democracy – and is always on the edge of launching a nuclear missile to destroy the world. This, we’re told, is the reason we have to isolate the country and occupy South Korea with thousands of U.S....

Last April, Pakistan’s Imran Khan was ousted as Prime Minister, which he blamed on an American-backed coup due to his non-aligned foreign policy. His removal has been followed by political instability that continues to roil the country with some of the largest protests in Pakistan’s history, both in support of him but also in opposition to the traditional ruling elites. The current government has...

Since taking office in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, has reasserted more state control over Mexico’s natural resources, nationalizing its lithium reserves, while vocally opposing US interference in Mexico. So it’s no surprise that the corporate media in Washington is following along with the program of labeling him a strongman, an authoritarian, and anti-democratic....

With Saudi Arabia and Iran making peace as part of a deal brokered by China, much has been made about the absence of the U.S. and what it means for U.S. hegemony. But what about the implications for the region? What might it look like in practice? Who are the potential spoilers? And why did this happen now? Also, what does it mean for the U.S. empire's greatest global partner, Europe?  To dis...

The historic deal brokered by China for a Saudi-Iran rapprochement reflects not only a changing region, but a shifting world order. While the US focuses on its proxy war in Ukraine, with US officials essentially blocking meaningful peace discussion both there and in Yemen, its “strategic competitor” China now looks like the adult in the room. Its diplomatic initiatives have become a force for stab...

Rania Khalek of Breakthrough News and Zoe Alexandra of Peoples Dispatch sat down with Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, the head of government in Mexico City and one of the founders of Morena, the party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. She is a rising figure in Mexican national politics and a leading contender for the 2024 presidential elections.

Before 2011, Syria was a relatively stable country that had decent electricity, one of the best medical sectors in the region and produced much of its own food and medicine. Today Syria has collapsing infrastructure, dire food insecurity, crippling fuel shortages, severe brain drain and only has control over part of the country’s territory. Mainstream US media places all the blame on President Ass...