Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the raising of the Palestinian flag at the U.N. today and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s declaration at the U.N. that he was no longer bound by the Oslo Peace Accords which is the basis of the two-state peace accord with Israel. Khaled Elgindy, who previously was an advisor to the Palestinian leadership on permanent status negotiations with Israel and was a key participant in the Annapolis negotiations in 2007 joins us to discuss whether this is an expression of frustration with the Israeli occupation and the stalled, if not fraudulent peace talks, or whether this is serious and will mean an end to Palestinian security cooperation with Israel.

Part 2

Then we look into the capture of Afghanistan’s third largest city Kunduz by the Taliban in a humiliating blow to the government of Ashraf Ghani which has forced the U.S. to rethink its military exit strategy and consider leaving a few thousand more American troops in Afghanistan beyond 2016. A leading expert on Afghanistan, Thomas Barfield, a professor of Anthropology at Boston University and President of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies, joins us to explain the significance of this military defeat which is a boost for the new Taliban leader and how fragile the security situation is in the country after 14 years of U.S. and NATO military intervention.

Part 3

Then finally we are joined in the studio by Ani Zonneveld, the Founder and President of Muslims for Progressive Values and Dr. Sheikh Maytham al-Salman, a prominent Shia cleric and Islamic Scholar. He is the author of “Non-Muslims in the Eyes of Islam” and we discuss the criticism being leveled at the Saudi ruling family over their handling of the crane crash and then the horrific stampede at the hajj in Mecca that has the countries whose citizens died, questioning the casualty figures and demanding the return of the bodies. We also discuss the broader issue of Sharia Law and its relationship to the tenets of Islam.

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the dueling speeches at the U.N. from President Obama and Russia’s President Putin where each blamed the other for the mess in Syria. Gordon Hahn, a Professor and Senior Researcher at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterrey and author of “Russia’s Islamic Threat” and “Russia’s Revolution From Above”, joins us. We discuss Putin’s call for “a genuinely broad international coalition” to fight the Islamic State, and the extent to which Russia is threatened by the Islamic State given that most of the jihadists in Russia’s Caucasus have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and that two of the top commanders in the Islamic State are brothers from Russia.

Part 2

Then we go to London to speak with a specialist on India, Cleo Paskal, who is a visiting Trudeau Fellow at the University of Montreal’s Center for International Studies and a Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. We discuss India’s Prime Minister Modi’s remarks to the U.N. today that were preceded by a trip to the Silicon Valley where Modi pushed his “Digital India” project and met with the leaders of the giant tech companies, many of which are headed by Indians or Indian Americans.

Part 3

Then finally we get an assessment of the damage done to the environmental movement by the massive deceit carried out by the world’s largest car manufacturer, Volkswagen. Joe Romm, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and the Founding Editor of Climate Progress where he has an article “We May Have Just Bought Ourselves an Extra Decade to Avoid Catastrophic Climate Change”, joins us. We discuss the bad news in terms of VW’s cheating, but the good news today with Shell abandoning its plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean and India’s pledge to join in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses, following the recent announcement by China that is was adopting a cap and trade CO2 reduction regime.