August 12, 2012

Broadcast Date: 
Aug 12 2012

Analyzing the attacks on a Wisconsin Sikh temple and Missouri mosque with Rutgers Middle East Studies professor Deepa Kumar; discussing the University of California's latest attempt to chill Israel/Palestine discourse with Students for Justice in Palestine's Rahim Kurwa; and commemmorating the 60th anniversary of the Night of the Murdered Poets with historian Joshua Rubenstein.

Episode segments
  • Hate on the Rampage: Oak Creek and Joplin
    National Politics

    Deepa Kumar is an associate professor of Media and Middle East Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. 

     

     
    Alex Kane and Marissa Brostoff

    Last week a white supremacist army veteran opened fire at a Sikh temple in Oak Park, Wisconsin, killing six, while a mosque in Joplin, Missouri, burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances. Deepa Kumar helps us make sense of these tragedies by placing them in the context of U.S. foreign policy, military culture, Islamophobia in the media.

  • Can the University of California Silence Palestine Speech?
    American Politics, Israel/Palestine
    Rahim Kurwa is a graduate student in sociology at UCLA and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine.
    Alex Kane and Marissa Brostoff

    On July 9, the University of California released reports on the campus climate for both Jewish and Muslim and Arab students. The report on Jewish students has attracted far more attention, particularly for its recommendation that campuses prohibit “hate speech.” Included under that rubric is speech that is “anti-Semitic” under a European Union definition of the word. Critics are worried that the report’s recommendations, if adopted, would lead to a clamp down on speech in solidarity with Palestine. 

  • The Night of the Murdered Poets: August 12, 1952
    Joshua Rubenstein is a Soviet historian and a director of Amnesty International.
    Alisa Solomon

    60 years ago this week, Stalin’s henchmen executed 13 imprisoned Yiddish writers and Jewish activists. In this segment--first aired on the 50th anniversary of the murders--Beyond the Pale’s Alisa Solomon speaks with historian Joshua Rubenstein about what happened at Lubyanka Prison.