UNAPOLOGETIC with Ashfaaq Carim

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 citizens of Israel, and why so many observers got this election wrong.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.
Chapters
00:00 Intro highlights
01:06 No majority: what next?
08:23 Will Netanyahu strike Iran?
14:26 Ben-Gvir’s armed settlers
18:14 A record Palestinian turnout
22:07 Why outsiders got it wrong
24:59 Netanyahu’s annexation mission
27:36 What if Eisenkot had won?

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, and who profited?
We discuss the UK's West Bank sanctions announcement and why Andrew sees it as symbolic, the Al Yamamah deal and the scale of corruption in the arms trade, Tony Blair's relationship with JP Morgan after Iraq, war profiteering around the bombing of Iran, and the defence tech billionaires reshaping warfare, from AI targeting in Gaza to drone footage too poor to tell a child from an adult.
Drawing on his years in the anti-apartheid struggle, Andrew explains why he believes economics, and financial sanctions in particular, will be the tipping point for Israel, just as they were for apartheid South Africa.

UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

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 colonial grift

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 than 200 years old.
We talk about how the concept of "civilisation" was built, how it was used to justify empire and colonial violence, why the Middle East's borders don't fit the myth of the "ancient nation," what the Crusades actually did to Europe, how cities are really just nodes of connection, how a group of homesick miners in Egypt invented the alphabet, why the "Dark Ages" were never actually dark, and how the House of Wisdom in Baghdad ran one of history's great knowledge-gathering operations.
We also talk about Gaza, the language of "civilisation vs. barbarism," the rise of civilisational thinking under Putin, Modi, and Trump, and whether that whole framework is starting to collapse.
Josephine's book: How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.

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 barely 150 years old.
Sometime in the mid nineteenth century, people increasingly started using the word Islam not to describe the faith that Muslims follow, but as the name of something that acts. Islam wants, Islam demands, Islam is in decline, Islam will rise. Devji's argument is that this shift happened not because Muslims became more or less devout, but because Muslim political power collapsed under European empire. Once "Islam", or more specifically Muslim political power, was no longer held by kings, caliphs or clerics, it became something anyone could speak for, and many people did.
Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. His new book is Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam.
We follow that story through the three movements it produced. The modernists, from Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Ameer Ali through Iqbal to Fazlur Rahman. The Islamists, from Maududi to Khomeini. And the militants of the 21st century.
Along the way we get into why Maududi thought sovereignty itself was a form of tyranny, why Khomeini told his own president that the state could suspend prayer and fasting, why Iqbal was declared a heretic and then became the intellectual father of a country, why Hamas quoted him in its founding document, and what it means that you can stand at the heart of Islamic ritual in Mecca today and find skyscrapers and fast food.
None of this is an argument that Muslim belief is fading. Devji is clear that the people in the movements he describes may be deeply religious, and that this is not a story about secular against religious. It is a story about a word, where it came from, what it made possible, and what a much older and richer tradition of Muslim thought was obscured by it.
And when he is asked whether Muslims are in crisis, his answer points somewhere else entirely.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.