Welcome to Gorilla Radio, recorded March 13th, 2024.
Sunday past marked the beginning of Ramadan, Islam's Holy Month marking the first revelations to the prophet. There had been hope, and some hints by US president Biden, a ceasefire would be agreed, but those hopes died with Israel's bombing of Rafah, the city harbouring more than a million and a half displaced Palestinians - survivors of Israel's now five months-long genocide campaign.
Dimitri Lascaris is an activist, journalist, and lawyer. His interviews for TRNN are at TheRealNews.com, and his articles appear at his website, DimitriLascaris.org, where you can find the recent interviews and videos he’s produced during his "month-long trek across the Middle East." As Hollywood celebrated itself Sunday at the Oscars, and Israel bombed the civilians of Rafah, Dimitri spent the first night of Ramadan in East Jerusalem, outside the gates to Al Aqsa Mosque.
Dimitri Lascaris in the first half.
And; there's been an effort to paint the genocide in Gaza, (and growing pogrom in the communities of the West Bank and East Jerusalem) in the colours of a religious war. The "battle of civilizations" narrative is a familiar one; we've heard it variously intoned during all of the many conflicts the United States and its allies have fomented across the so-called 'Arc of Instability' for the last twenty years and more, and each time it's been a lie. But to what purpose?
Dr. T.J. Coles is the director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of numerous books, including: ‘The War on You’, Manufacturing Terrorism’, ‘Capitalism and Coronavirus: How Institutionalized Greed Turned a Crisis into a Catastrophe ‘, ‘Biofascism: The Tech-Pharma Complex and the End of Democracy’, among others. His essays can be found at CounterPunch, where his recent piece, 'The New Atheism at 20: How An Intellectual Movement Exploited Rationalism to Promote War' appears.
His latest book is, 'The New Atheism Hoax: Exposing the Politics of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens' an indictment of both the weaponization of that "philosophical genre, which argues for secularism over organized religion" and its most famous literary proponents, the so-called "Four Horsemen".
T.J. Coles and the Four Horsemen of the modern apocalypse in the second half.
But first, Dimitri Lascaris in the middle of the Middle East.
Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, broad/webcasting since 1999. Check out the Archive at Gorilla-Radio.com, GRadio.Substack.com, and the GR blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com/
Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Dimitri Lascaris, T.J. Coles March 13, 2024