UNAPOLOGETIC with Ashfaaq Carim

On this episode of ‪@MEEunapologetic‬ we sat down with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, to talk about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the media that reinforced it and the global systems that enable it. Albanese’s latest report, Truth Under the Rubble, examines media complicity. She argues that destroying a people takes a narrative as well as bombs....

On this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we sat down with Middle East Eye editor-in-chief David Hearst the day after Israel’s elections, with Netanyahu’s bloc on course to be the largest and no side close to a majority. David explains why a strike on Iran is now more likely than before the vote, how Ben-Gvir’s armed settler base shapes Netanyahu’s options, what a record Palestinian turnout means for citiz...

We sat down with Andrew Feinstein, former ANC MP, arms trade investigator and author of The Shadow World, on ‪@MEEunapologetic‬ to talk about his new book, Making a Killing: How the West Profits From Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen. The book began with a question from Palestinian journalist Ahmed Alnaouq, who lost 21 members of his family in an Israeli strike on their home in Gaza: who made the bomb,...

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

Josephine Quinn is Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, the first woman ever to hold the position, and the author of How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History. On this episode of Unapologetic, we sit down with her in her Cambridge office to take apart one of the most powerful ideas in modern politics: the idea of "civilisations," where it came from, who invented it, and why it's less...

In the latest episode of UNAPOLOGETIC we sat down with Faisal Devji in Oxford. Devji is a widely acclaimed scholar of both South Asian history and the history of intellectual thought. In his latest book, Devji presents a novel idea: that "Islam", as many of us commonly use the word today, meaning a single thing with a will and a direction of its own, rather than the faith Muslims practise, is bare...

"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport became, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." - Sam Dalrymple "The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport becomes, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." — Sam Dalrymple We sat down with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asi...

We sat down with Middle East Eye journalist and author Sean Mathews on UNAPOLOGETIC to ask a question that unsettles a lot of assumptions: do Greeks actually have more in common with Arabs and Turks than they do with the rest of Europe? Mathews is the author of The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East, and his answer draws on years of reporting from Istanbul, Cairo and oc...

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

We sat down with Andreas Krieg for the fourth time on UNAPOLOGETIC, this time in the aftermath of the war on Iran, to ask what it has done to the balance of power across the Middle East. His answer is stark: this is the most fundamental shift in regional order in thirty years, and it has undone the American empire in a way he does not think it can recover from. We get into why the Gulf no longer b...

"Now Netanyahu has failed. Iran was not broken. Arab countries now realise that relying on Israel is a death sentence." In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we sat down in studio with Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative and co-founder of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society. Barghouti argues that Israel's two strategic goals, imperial domination of...

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author of Sinews of War and Trade and Extractive Capitalism. She is also Iranian-American, with family members displaced by the current war, a scholar with both the expertise and the personal stakes to speak to this moment with rare authority. In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Ashfaaq Carim sits down with Khalili to un...

Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks, was banned from entering the UK hours before this conversation - blocked by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood for criticising Israel. We speak to him live about what his ban indicates about the West's accelerating collapse, how governments are criminalising dissent on behalf of a foreign state, and whether the freedoms the West claims to stand for are already s...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we sit down with Daniel Trilling - journalist and author of If We Tolerate This: How the British Establishment Made the Far Right Respectable. We discuss who is actually responsible for the rise of the far right and how dangerous the global far right rise could be for freedoms across the globe. From Trump's assault on democratic institutions to Orban gutting Hungar...

UNAPOLOGETIC spoke to Errol Musk, father of Elon Musk, and the result is a conversation is an interesting foray into where ideology is formed and where it is inherited. Errol traces his journey from post-war poverty to building a life of considerable wealth and takes credit for funding the very first company Elon and Kimball started in 1995. But it is his views on race, politics and identity that...

"Palestinians are just the canvas upon which the Jewish psychodrama takes place." Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of IfNotNow and subject of the documentary Israelism, joins UNAPOLOGETIC to examine how Israel's genocide in Gaza has reshaped Jewish identity and politics. Simone traces her own journey from committed Zionist to anti-Zionist activist, describing the personal and communal ruptures that fo...

In this episode of Unapologetic, Hassan Ahmadian, political scientist at the University of Tehran, argues that US-Israeli aggression may inadvertently bring Iran, Turkey and the Arab world closer together. Ahmadian explains why Iran views every negotiation with Washington through the lens of betrayal, and why Tehran sees caving to Trump and Netanyahu as a worse outcome than war itself. He also exp...

"If you go to China, you'll never ever see the world in the same way again. Never." In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Martin Jacques, author of the million-copy bestseller When China Rules the World, makes the case that China has already eclipsed the United States as the world's leading power, and that the West still fundamentally doesn't understand why. This episode explores China's identity as a...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, we speak to Mohsen Kadivar - Iranian scholar, Shia mujtahid, dissident cleric, and former political prisoner - about the Islamic Republic, its origins, and its contradictions. Kadivar offers a rare insider critique of Iran: opposing US imperialism and Israeli aggression, while also challenging the authoritarianism of the Islamic Republic from within Shia theology i...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Norman Finkelstein unpacks the aftermath of the US–Iran war, beginning with the ceasefire and what it actually reveals about both sides. He argues there was no clear victory, before tracing the deeper roots of US strategy toward Iran over decades. The conversation explores Donald Trump’s highly personalised decision-making, the role Israel played in tipping the bal...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, historian Abdallah Marouf connects the dots between the closure of Al-Aqsa, Israel’s ultra-right, Pete Hegseth, the dangerously expanding war in Iran, and the belief in a coming Messiah. He explains how a once-marginal religious Zionist movement now holds real political power in Israel, and how its vision of rebuilding the Temple and hastening the Messiah is shapin...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Mamoun Fandy, former professor of politics at Georgetown University and current head of the Global Strategy Institute in London, breaks down the escalating conflict involving Israel, the United States, and Iran. He argues this is not one war, but three overlapping wars, each with its own logic: regime change, regional dominance, and economic pressure. Together, the...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC, Rabbi Elhanan Beck delivers one of the most striking critiques of Zionism and the current Israeli-US wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, you'll hear. He argues that, according to the Torah, the state of Israel has no right to exist, and goes further—describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “Amalek,” a force that pulls people away from God. The Rabbi also claims that if necess...

In this episode of UNAPOLOGETIC , Dr. Roy Casagranda unpacks 125 years of Iranian history - from the 1901 oil concession and the fall of the Qajar dynasty, to the rise of the Pahlavis, the 1953 CIA-backed coup, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, and the emergence of the IRGC, the reform movement in Iran and the JCPOA. He then connects this history to the present moment - where a US-Is...

Neil Quilliam, who is a political analyst at Chatham House, joined the UNAPOLOGETIC podcast to discuss how Israel is plunging the USA, the GCC and Iran into an all-out war. By continuing to kill credible leaders and hit key economic infrastructure in Iran, it is diminishing the opportunity for this war to end via a settled compromise, and antagonising Iran to lash out with retaliatory strikes agai...