Gamal Mansour is a Syrian-Palestinian who was forced to move to Canada in 2012, as the Syrian uprising was turning into a civil war.

Mansour is also a political scientist who is currently researching strategies that the business sector under the Assad regime employed so that they could remain autonomous from the state.

In this marathon three-hour conversation, Gamal Mansour and the host Ashfaaq Carim discuss the genesis of the Syrian uprising amidst the Arab Spring and how it turned into a civil war; what the impact and scale of the war was both in terms of human devastation and in terms of ideological impact it had in the West and the Arab world, as Europe and North America moved to the right and Islamic State was born; and how brutal and devastating Assad's tactics in the war were.

They try to make sense of all the conflicting voices that are clashing over what the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham liberation of Damascus means, and are critical of the reluctance amongst the anti-US-imperial left to embrace the new reality in Damascus as most Syrians are.

“In Israel they are either bigots, fanatics, sometimes murderous ones… and they are cowards… and unfortunately there is no brave figure that I can see” - Offer Cassif, Israeli MP

Israeli MP Offer Cassif has been staunchly against Israel’s long occupation of Palestine and has been highly critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The coalition he is a part of consists of only five seats out of 120 in the Israeli Knesset.

He joined us for a second time on UNAPOLOGETIC to discuss how Israeli society is largely embracing its leadership’s descent into a “fully fledged fascist dictatorship”.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:10 The war and Israeli society’s response

07:37 Understanding the thinking of the Israeli government - subjugation plan

16:58 The genocide and the international reaction to it

23:02 How can this war be scaled back and ICC warrants?

28:52 The make-up of the Israeli Knesset

34:02 Going back to Rafah

36:58 Unpacking the forged documents scandal

42:00 Would Gantz or Lapid be any different?

52:58 How a negotiated peace can occur - South Africa

1:03:03 Unpacking resistance inside Israel

1:07:00 Internal repression in Israel

01:11:07 Is Israel sustainable?

01:16:30 Juxtaposing Palestinian dignity with Israel

Professor Roy Casagranda is an expert in history and political science.

He has hosted a series of lectures that are available on YouTube explaining the history of the Americas, the slave trade, colonialism, and the Arab world and the Middle East.

In this extended interview, Casagranda takes us on a history lesson that includes the Sykes-Picot agreement, CIA-orchestrated coups in Syria and Iran, various wars, doctrines, betrayals and policies that show just how damaging and cynical US meddling in the Middle East has been over the last century.