Excerpt: Interview with Van Jones
Written on April 20th, 2005An excerpt from the Start Making Sense section Understanding the Election.
JONES: This was a very different election than 2000, where you had Democrats versus Republicans while many of the progressives supported [Ralph] Nader, either in their hearts or actively. In 2004 you had the Kerry campaign doing what it was doing, you had the Democratic Party doing what it was doing, and then you had this magnificent outpouring of decentralized disaggregated efforts — America Coming Together, National Voice, Count Every Vote, the League of Independent Voters, the Hip Hop Political Convention. You had this huge flowering from the grass roots of opposition to the Bush regime that was not a part of the Kerry campaign, not coordinated by the Democratic Party. It was alongside, under, and over all of that.
Muslim Refusenik
Written on April 8th, 2005Irshad Manji, author of ‘The Trouble with Islam Today,’ discusses the closemindedness and literalism of present-day Islam and her path to free thinking.
April 8, 2005 | This interview originally aired on Free Forum with Terrence McNally on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio.
At a moment when America is at war in a Muslim country due in part to the electoral muscle of the Christian Right, I agree with those who speak of a clash of civilizations. But I don’t see Jews and Christians versus Muslims. I see fundamentalist, pre-scientific, pre-enlightenment Jews, Christians and Muslims versus Jews, Christians, Muslims and non-believers who, in their search for meaning, ask questions and question answers.
In her controversial best-seller, The Trouble with Islam Today, Irshad Manji, a spike-haired, lesbian Canadian who looks younger than her 36 years, challenges fellow Muslims to revive a lost tradition of free inquiry within Islam. The book has been published internationally, including in Pakistan, and Urdu and Arabic translations can be downloaded free of charge from her web site (www.muslim-refusenik.com.
Her earlier book, Risking Utopia: On the Edge of a New Democracy, called on young people to re-define democracy through new technologies and social networks. Manji produced and hosted “Queer Television” on Toronto’s Citytv, the first program on commercial airwaves to explore the lives of gay and lesbian people. She currently hosts “Big Ideas” in Toronto, featuring innovative thinkers from around the world.
Oprah Winfrey recently honored Irshad with the first annual Chutzpah Award for “audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction.” Ms. magazine has selected her as a “Feminist for the 21st Century.” Maclean’s, Canada’s national news magazine, named her one of ten “Canadians Who Make a Difference,” and in June, she received the Simon Wiesenthal Award of Valor.
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Al Franken’s Nutritional Candy
Written on February 11th, 2005February 11, 2005 | This interview originally aired on Free Forum with Terrence McNally on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio.
After a wonderful career on Saturday Night Live and then debunking right-wing propaganda in his best-selling books and Grammy-winning audio books, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, Al Franken has taken the fight to America’s airwaves on Air America. With co-host Katherine Lanpher, Franken offers three hours a day of commentary and comedy, as well as substantive interviews – last week’s guests included FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmunds, former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, The Innocence Project’s Barry Scheck, David Brock, author of The Republican Noise Machine, and Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse.
The fastest growing network in radio history, Air America is now on in 50 markets, including seven of the top 10, and doing very well against Rush, Hannity and the rest of the rabid right.
And while Franken isn’t yet running for senator of Minnesota, could a leap into politics be too far in the future?
Welcome, Al Franken, to KPFK and Free Forum.
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Matters of Justice
Written on September 29th, 2004September 29, 2004
| Cornel West argues in his new book, “Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism,” that if America hopes to be a steward of democracy around the world, we must first face up to our own history of imperialist corruptions. According to West, these include racism in America, Christian fundamentalism and its political influence, Israeli-U.S. relations, and the weakness of the Democratic Party. And finally he asks of Americans: Do we have what it takes to be citizens in the ancient Greek vision of democracy?
Cornell West is Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University, after a fairly public exit from Harvard in 2002. The author of “Race Matters,” winner of the American Book Award ten years ago, West is a multimedia citizen, featured as Counselor West in “The Matrix” films, and creator of two hip-hop CDs, “Street Knowledge” and “Sketches of My Culture.”
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Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy
Written on September 21st, 2004September 21, 2004 | Over the last few years Arundhati Roy has become a powerful and important global citizen writing and speaking out against the excesses of corporate globalization, privatization of essential resources, and United States imperialism. Naomi Klein says “with her writing and her actions, Roy has placed herself in opposition to anyone who treats people as collateral damage – of a mega-dam, a terrorist attack, or a military invasion,” and Roy has described herself as “a black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience.”
Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “The God of Small Things.” She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.
Roy has also become known internationally for her literate and powerful political essays in books like “Power Politics,” “War Talk,” “The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile” (interviews with David Barsamian), and her latest, “An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire.”
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