Podcasts about Bosnian

Episode 232: Book talk: The history of queer life in Bosnia and HerzegovinaIn this episode, Adam and Nina cover several key developments from the region, including the latest from Ukraine, breaking news from Moldova, far-right marches across Poland, and the EU's adoption of its 18th package of sanctions against Russia. Later in the episode, Alexandra and Nina are joined by Matej Vrebac, Programme Coordinator at the Sarajevo Open Centre, who researches queer history in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Matej is one of the authors of the recent publication The History of Queer Life in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The conversation explores the motivation behind documenting queer history in the region, how queer lives have appeared in Bosnia and Herzegovina's past, including in folk traditions, and the importance of conducting such research and making it accessible. The book is available here in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS), with plans to publish an English edition in the future: https://soc.ba/historija-kvir-zivota-u-bosni-i-hercegovini-prva-publikacija-koja-sveobuhvatno-dokumentuje-prisustvo-zivote-i-otpor-kvir-osoba-u-bih/Support Talk Eastern Europe. Join our Patreon community! www.patreon.com/talkeasterneuropeCheck out the latest of issue of New Eastern Europe – Rebalancing the Baltics Sea Region

Send us a textThirty years after the Srebrenica genocide, we sit down with Bosnian community leader Kenan Mahmutovic to explore an extraordinary story of resilience, healing, and successful integration into American society. What You'll Discover:First-hand accounts from Srebrenica survivors who rebuilt their lives in AmericaHow the Bosnian-American community preserved their culture while embracing new opportunitiesThe role of faith and community support in healing from unimaginable traumaSuccess stories of integration in cities like St. Louis, Detroit, and beyondHow younger generations balance honoring their heritage with American identityThe importance of remembering history while building hope for the futureFrom the darkest chapter in European history since WWII to thriving American communities, this conversation reveals the incredible strength of the human spirit and the power of community support in overcoming adversity. Key Topics Covered:The lasting impact of the Srebrenica genocide on survivors and familiesChallenges and triumphs of starting over in a new countryHow Bosnian-Americans have contributed to their adopted communitiesThe role of education and entrepreneurship in successful integrationPreserving memory while building new traditionsPerfect for: Anyone interested in immigrant success stories, historical awareness, community resilience, and the power of hope over hatred. SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS: How can communities better support survivors of trauma? What lessons can we learn from the Bosnian-American experience? CONNECT: Visit Ozmedia313.com SUBSCRIBE to OZ Media for more powerful conversations about community strength, cultural identity, and stories of triumph over adversity.Follow us on social media:- Instagram: @motivateme313 or @ozmedia313- Website: ozmedia313.com- Facebook: ozmedia313-TikTok: @ozmedia313-Apple Podcast: ozmedia-Spotify Podcast: ozmediaThis show was sponsored by:-Holy Bowly http://www.myholybowly.com-Jabal Coffee House jabalcoffeehouse.com-Malek Al-Kabob malekalkabob.com-Juice Box Juiceboxblend.com-Hanley International Academy Hanleyacademy.com-Wingfellas thewingfellas.com-Royal Kabob  #Srebrenica #BosnianAmericans #GenocideSurvivors #CommunityResilience #ImmigrantStories #MuslimAmericans #HistoryMatters #NeverForget #HopeOverHate #CulturalIntegration

This week's show features stories from Radio Deutsche-Welle, France 24, NHK Japan, and Radio Havana Cuba. http://youthspeaksout.net/swr250718.mp3 (29:00) From GERMANY- The death toll in Gaza as presented by the Hamas Ministry of Health is often reported with disclaimers in the western media suggesting they are exaggerated. Recent research from the University of London, led by Professor Michael Spagat, says the Hamas figures are short by 40%, meaning that the current death toll of Gazans is 100,000, or 4% of the entire population. Britain and France have agreed to coordinate their nuclear weapons without US involvement. This pact, known as the Northwood Declaration, is discussed by Scottish Professor Phillips O'Brien- he describes the pact as a decoupling from the US without saying it. From FRANCE- First a press review about the announcement by French President Macron that to be free we must be feared and a large increase in military spending. A press review on the 30th anniversary of the massacre of 8000 muslim men and boys in Srebrenica by Serbian forces during the Bosnian war. International comments after Israel dropped nearly 500 bombs on Syria, including Damascus, as punishment for battling with Druze forces who are Israeli allies. From JAPAN- Japanese electronics firm Panasonic opened a $4 billion plant in Kansas building batteries for electric vehicles. Australian PM Anthony Albanese met with Chinese President Xi during a 6 day visit to the country- they agreed to treat each other equally, though they critiqued each others large military exercises. A new law banning children under 16 from using social media in Australia comes into effect in December. From CUBA- 30 countries are meeting at a summit in Colombia to find a way to stop the war on Gaza- the collection of countries is called the Hague Group and were addressed by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. A new Freedom Flotilla has left Italy to try to bring aid to Palestine- the crew includes a trade unionist from the US and several Parliamentarians. Available in 3 forms- (new) HIGHEST QUALITY (160kb)(33MB), broadcast quality (13MB), and quickdownload or streaming form (6MB) (28:59) Links at outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml PODCAST!!!- https://feed.podbean.com/outFarpress/feed.xml (160kb Highest Quality) Website Page- < http://www.outfarpress.com/shortwave.shtml ¡FurthuR! Dan Roberts "War itself is, of course, a form of madness. It is hardly a civilized pursuit. It is amazing how we spend so much time inventing devices to kill each other and so little time working on how to achieve peace." -- Walter Cronkite Dan Roberts Shortwave Report- www.outfarpress.com YouthSpeaksOut!- www.youthspeaksout.net

‘War and conflict is not something that is not familiar to me. It is not an essay title, it is not a theoretical exercise. It's very real.' Campaigner Baroness Helic is the latest guest on Lord Speaker's Corner as she warns that society has become numb to sexual violence in war. Arminka Helic, Baroness Helic, campaigns to raise global awareness of rape as a war crime. Here she shares her extraordinary journey from fleeing the Bosnian war as a refugee to becoming special adviser to the then Foreign Secretary William Hague (now Lord Hague of Richmond) via a researcher job in the House of Commons library.  ‘It's a weapon that is part of ethnic cleansing and genocide… Survivors are stigmatised. Perpetrators are not. That's what we have to flip. Some of the victims are as young as two months old. And the world does nothing. We have become globally desensitised.' While working for Lord Hague, she persuaded him to join forces with Angelina Jolie to highlight the proliferation of warzone sexual violence. The Hollywood actor and then UNHCR Special Envoy and actor had written, produced and directed a harrowing 2011 film ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey', which underscored the pervasive nature of sexual violence in war. Following this, the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) was created, which has continued across multiple governments and is now supported by Labour minister and special envoy Lord Collins of Highbury. ‘I heard reports of some of my friends from school being detained in what became known as rape camps. We need to understand that war is not just about armies - it's about lives torn apart. Peace agreements don't end trauma.' In this episode, Baroness Helic warns that rising global conflict, weakened international institutions, and public desensitisation have dulled reactions to atrocities that once would have mobilised urgent action. She also discusses Israel/Gaza, and raises concerns about Russian influence in the Balkans, describing the region as a potential ‘second front' of destabilisation through proxy actors.  See more from the series https://www.parliament.uk/business/lords/house-of-lords-podcast/  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Debbie Monterrey talks with Attorney Nedim Remic and Elvir Ahmetovic who survived it about it what is happening at Soldiers Memorial.

This week marks three decades since a massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically killed by Serb forces in 1995. Some survivors and victims' families say they're still looking for justice. Also, after decades of insurgency against the Turkish government, the PKK has ceremonially laid down its arms. And, residents of Tehran who fled during the recent war with Israel are rebuilding, but they say that nothing feels the same. Plus, flower deliveries become a viral sensation in Mexico.Listen to today's Music Heard on Air. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On July 11, 1995, Srebrenica – a small Yugoslav spa town, now located in Bosnia and Herzegovina – became the site of Europe's last genocide of the 20th century. Thirty years later, the town, whose population is now 60 percent Bosniaks and 40 percent Serbs, has not regained its former glory and remains haunted by the memory of one of the worst crimes of the Yugoslav wars. FRANCE 24's Laurent Rouy, Edward Godsell and Nikola Vrzic report.

What role does art play in times of war? Is it a tool of resistance, a witness to destruction, or a space for imagining the future? War transforms the conditions of making, sharing, and experiencing art. It forces new responsibilities onto artists but also opens unexpected freedoms. In the midst of destruction, creative work becomes a form of survival, memory, and resistance.Throughout history, war has shaped and been shaped by art. In moments of violence and turmoil, artists confront devastation, mourn loss, challenge dominant narratives, and preserve fragments of threatened cultures. Their work raises urgent questions – can art intervene in the course of war? Does it document reality or create its own truths? And how does conflict alter the very language and purpose of artistic creation?This conversation will bring together artists from different cultural backgrounds sharing their experiences and perspectives.About the speakersTetyana Ogarkova (1979) is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, and essayist whose work focuses on themes of memory, cultural resistance, and the impact of conflict on societies. She has written extensively on the intersections of violence, politics, and art, with a particular interest in the role of creative expression during times of crisis.Anton Varga is part of the Ukrainian artists' collective Open Group, known for their exploration of displacement, memory, and the social consequences of war. In 2024, they represented Poland at the 60th Venice Biennale with Repeat After Me II, an installation that engaged audiences in reflecting on the sounds of war. For this conversation Anton Varga will join.Elma Čavčić, a Bosnian-born artist, explores war, memory, and inherited trauma through figurative painting. Her dreamlike yet unsettling works reflect stories absorbed in childhood—quiet but deeply felt. Using soft tones and layered symbolism, she creates a visual archive of collective memory, preserving what must not be forgotten across generations.Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Lebanon; lives and works between Beirut and Amsterdam) is a visual artist whose practice spans installation, painting, sculpture, video, drawing, text, embroidery, and performative gestures. Her work delves into equality, while it adopts manners such as micro-history, to bear witness to the impact of conflict and displacement. Al Solh's work is socially engaged while being political and poetically escapist simultaneously. Her practice utilizes oral documentation, multidisciplinary collaboration, and wordplay to explore themes of memory and loss. Motivated by acts of sharing and storytelling, change, and resistance, Al Solh strives to craft a sensory language that transcends nationality and creed.Moderator: Ianthe MosselmanThis programme is part of the Forum on European Culture 2025 in Amsterdam.Zie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Bosnian refugee population exploded in the late 90s, and now numbers between 60-75K! But what happened all those years ago that brought our neighbors here, and how have they been thriving in St. Louis ever since?

30th Anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide is this week. Debbie Monterrey discusses it's meaning with Elvir Ahmetovic and Nedim Ramic. https://neverforgetsrebrenica.org/

In a desperate attempt at a last stand to halt the Rwandan backed army of Laurent Desire Kabila, Mobutu hires mercenaries composed of members of the infamous 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb army, responsible for some of the worst atrocities in the Bosnian war, under the command of French intelligence asset "Yugo Dominic". Subscribe to patreon.org/tenepod @tenepod.bsky.social  + x.com/tenepod

The Muslims of Bosnia in southeast Europe treasure a centuries-long tradition of writing about the journey to Mecca. These treatises and travelogues help us trace the changing ways in which the hajj was experienced and described by these European Muslims who lived under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, then socialist Yugoslavia, before the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s. To explore these different meanings of the hajj for the Bosnian Muslims—or Bosniaks—this episode looks at the fascinating texts they wrote in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as well as the Bosnian language. We'll follow not only the impact of changing political conditions, but also the way new forms of transport and changing literary fashions reshaped the experience and interpretation of a pilgrimage which both was and wasn't the same over the centuries.  Nile Green talks to Dženita Karić, author of Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

A sociopsychologist, a lawyer, an engineer and an urban planner walk into a room. This is not the setup to a riddle, but an innovative multidisciplinary approach to peacebuilding. Peace has long been approached through high level peace agreements and rational plans for growth. But, it is high time for a new approach: locally led multidisciplinary teams that jointly define needs and action, with a strong role for the private sector and with mental health included in reconstruction.But how can we set up inclusive multidisciplinary teams? How can we produce joint analyses and action in a divided country like Bosnia-Herzegovina? In this episode, we discuss a new report published by MIRCURY on the "Multidisciplinary Method - Innovative Approach for Sustainable Peace: Connecting People, Power, and Prosperity." We will discuss the report with Patrick de Vries (MIRCURY), who further developed this multidisciplinary approach, and Vjekoslav Domljan (Sarajevo School of Science and Technology), who has a leading role in translating this to the Bosnian context.  Click ⁠⁠⁠⁠here ⁠for more information about the Fragile Truths podcast.

St. Louis' Bosnian community is observing the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. A local coalition is leading efforts to commemorate the massacre and its 8,000-plus victims with a series of events and a July 12 walk in downtown St. Louis. The genocide changed the lives of many Bonsians, including Elvir Ahmetovic, who lived through the Srebrenica massacre as a child and is now a St. Louis teacher. Ahmetovic, attorney Adna Nedim Ramic, and Center for Bosnian Studies Director Adna Karamehic-Oates share their stories and insight into the terrible events of the genocide, alongside accounts from other survivors.

Curtis Wilkerson is back for a LIVE episode of The Pod At The Palace to react to Arkansas' addition of Bosnian big man Elmir Dzafic for the upcoming season! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

June '95: the new Rapid Reaction Force | Sarajevo on its knees | The prelude to extermination

Hull City have some serious work ahead of them to be prepared for the new Championship season, even after bringing in new head coach Sergej Jakirovic. The Bosnian left Turkish side Kayserispor over the weekend to seal a move to the MKM Stadium, and he will need to hit the ground running to get his new-look squad ready for the Championship season. In the latest episode of the 1904 Club, Baz, Kathryn, and Fletch look at the latest developments and what comes next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast we react to Day 6 at the French Open 2025. Carlos Alcaraz faced a tough test from Bosnian player Damir Dzumhur as the 2 players put on a late night show of brilliance! Iga Swiatek will be happy that Ostapenko was defeated by Rybakina! ❤️ SUBSCRIBE TO GTL: https://bit.ly/35JyOhz ▶️ JOIN YOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://bit.ly/3Fk9rSr

Benji is joined by Zephyr FC and Bosnian international winger, midfielder, and magician Emina Ekić. They talk about Emina's journey as a player from Louisville to Australia and now Spokane. Then, Emina provides her unique perspectives about the incredible turn in form for Zephyr FC the last few months and how the team's commitment to a playoff run became a reality. Finally, Emina responds to questions from the community and 509 Syndicate.Host: Benji WadeGuest: Emina EkićSupport the show with a donation:⁠⁠https://www.spokanesoccershow.com/donate⁠⁠Follow on ⁠Instagram⁠:⁠https://www.instagram.com/spokanesoccershow/

I'm fresh off an amazing trip through the Balkans—Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro—and I've got some travel tips you definitely want to hear, especially if you're living with diabetes. From nonstop stairs and fortress hikes to wild blood sugar swings thanks to a sneaky sausage (yes, really), this episode is packed with real-talk lessons I learned the hard way so you don't have to. Let's chat travel, activity, insulin sensitivity, mystery carbs, and everything in between.   Want the best blood sugars you've ever had while enjoying great food? Peep this: https://www.yourdiabetesinsider.com/coaching   RESOURCES: Download these FREE guides that will help you on your diabetes, nutrition, and exercise journey! https://www.yourdiabetesinsider.com/free-stuff Join our EXCLUSIVE Facebook group! https://www.facebook.com/groups/266766620895432 Watch my food breakdowns here → https://www.youtube.com/@yourdiabetesinsider   LET'S TALK! Instagram: @manoftzeel Tiktok: @manoftzeel  

Richie and Alec break down Rutgers Basketball's newest addition in 2025 Bosnian guard Harun Zrno (0:00). The guys then go on to talk about what he brings to the team and what his role will be (1:24) along with talk about how he ended up with the Scarlet Knights (10:55). They wrap it up by talking about the Big Ten Hoops schedule release (13:14) and a quick update on Rutgers Football's outgoing transfers (20:00).

Sarajevo's luge track was the pride of the city during the 1984 Olympics, but now it's overgrown with weeds and riddled with bullet holes from the Bosnian war. A new film called The Track, screening at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto, explores how a group of young athletes and their coach are trying to bring this piece of their city's history back to life.

Bosnian translation of Friday Sermon delivered by Khalifa-tul-Masih on April 25th, 2025 (audio)

The Center for Bosnian Studies has a new home base. Two decades after its founding as the Bosnian Memory Project at Fontbonne University, the Center is in the process of moving artifacts to St. Louis University. The Center's director Adna Karamahic-Oates, Bosnian Memory Project founder Benjamin Moore and Jennifer Nutefall, dean of libraries and museums at St. Louis University, share what this transfer means for the Center for Bosnian Studies, for SLU and for the legacy of St. Louis' Bosnian population.

Bosnian translation of Friday Sermon delivered by Khalifa-tul-Masih on April 11th, 2025 (audio)

An exciting knowledge and cultural exchange has begun between the National Theatre of Republika Srpska and Visually Impaired Creators Scotland (VICS) to improve theatre accessibility across Scotland and Bosnia. Amelia spoke to Mario Lukajic from The National Theatre of Republika Srpska and Kirin Saeed from VICS to learn more. Learn more about eh National Theatre of Republika Srpska on their website - Добро дошли | Народно позориште РС Learn more about VICS on their website - Visually Impaired Creators Scotland Image shows the RNIB Connect Radio logo. On a white background ‘RNIB' written in bold black capital letters and underline with a bold pink line. Underneath the line: ‘Connect Radio' is written in black in a smaller font. 

This episode is brought to you in association with FIFA+. Click below to get your free FIFA+ account and watch live club and international football from around the world: ⁠www.tinyurl.com/FIFAPlusSweeper In Part 1, the award-winning football journalist and author James Montague joins us in the studio to tell us about Neom Sports Club, the trillion-dollar team in Saudi Arabia's second division, and their futuristic home city that will have flying cars and robots. But why do the richest club in the world play in the Saudi lower leagues? What do they want to achieve as part of their five-year plan? And how are they viewed by the rest of the country? It's back to Europe in Part 2. There's UEFA Conference League chat about Borac Banja Luka – the champions of Bosnia & Herzegovina who feel more Serbian than Bosnian. Elsewhere, the 2025 Faroe Islands season is under way, the world's only country with undersea roundabouts and the same champion of its first and second tiers. And finally, there's a incredible moment in Bulgaria as Arda hold a minute's silence for an ex-player, who is very much alive and well. Patreon: Join us on Patreon at patreon.com/SweeperPod to listen to our bonus episode with James Montague (out on 9 April) all about his adventures with ultra groups across the world and to enter the giveaway to win one of three copies of his book 'Engulfed'. All patrons can also read Lee's new blog about African football over the international break, while members of our 'Ultra' and 'Board Member' tiers will also have exclusive access to 'A Steppe Too Far', Paul's serialised blog about his time accidentally owning a football club in Mongolia.The Blizzard:Get 10% off subscriptions to 'The Blizzard' by entering the code 'sweeper10' at checkout: https://forwardpress.imbmsubscriptions.com/sweeper10/Editor:Ralph Foster Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello to you listening in Jasper, Indiana!Coming to you from Whidbey Island, Washington this is Stories From Women Who Walk with 60 Seconds for Thoughts on Thursday and your host, Diane Wyzga. In the early 1990s a cellist in Sarejevo, Vedran Smajlovic, went out into the square when the bombs were dropping and started playing his cello. A journalist asked him, "Why are you out here playing your cello while the bombs are dropping?" The cellist replied, “Why are they dropping bombs while I'm playing the cello?”In the face of tragedy art and beauty might be all some of us have to offer. Art and beauty give us hope, remind us of our humanity even when someone else denies it, as well as help shape the stories of the society they reflect.Walking life's path can be made a bit more hopeful when we have art, music and brave souls to walk along with us.Whether the voice of a child singing a tune from the movie, Frozen; Vera Lytovchenko, violinist and teacher playing in a bomb shelter dressed in an evening gown; a piano player outside a train station; or men singing their country's anthem.Click HERE to listen a 2 minute broadcast from 2 years ago. It's the voices and music of a determined nation fighting for its unbowed Ukranian soul and winning albeit at great cost. But music alone won't do it. Hear us, world leaders: if Ukraine maintains its determination and gets necessary external military support, it can win this war of attrition!  NOTE: During the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo that ended in 1996, Vedran Smajlovic played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor on his cello in ruined buildings, including the Vijecnica, the Bosnian capital's destroyed city hall. He also played at funerals despite the threat of sniper fire. His powerful music became a sign of resilience and of the triumph of humanity over brutality. You're invited: “Come for the stories - stay for the magic!” Speaking of magic, I hope you'll subscribe, share a nice shout out on your social media or podcast channel of choice, (including Android, Amazon Music, Audible & Pandora Radio) and join us next time! Remember to stop by the Quarter Moon Story Arts website, check out the Services I offer, arrange a Discovery Call, and Opt In to stay current with Diane and Quarter Moon Story Arts as well as on LinkedIn and Substack as Wyzga on Words Stories From Women Who Walk Production TeamPodcaster: Diane F Wyzga & Quarter Moon Story ArtsMusic: Mer's Waltz from Crossing the Waters by Steve Schuch & Night Heron MusicAll content and image © 2019 to Present: for credit & attribution Quarter Moon Story Arts

This week's episode of Parsing Immigration Policy reminds listeners of the threats that made President Trump's recent Executive Order, "Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats," necessary. The Center for Immigration Studies maintains a comprehensive database detailing examples of preventable federal government vetting failures which resulted in the entry of individuals who posed a threat to national security. Todd Bensman, the Center's national security fellow, has recently added new cases into the database, highlighting the need for the improvement of U.S. vetting processes. “The Center's database offers valuable insights for preventing future threats,” said Bensman. “I hope this crucial tool for understanding past failures will be useful to the Trump administration's renewed robust security vetting efforts.”Key Highlights:Purpose: The database identifies fail points in the complex immigration security screening system, providing insights for homeland security agencies and congressional overseers to strengthen future vetting processes.Analysis: Each entry includes an after-action report detailing what went wrong, offering lessons to improve future vetting procedures. Users can access all primary research materials used in the analyses.Notable Cases Highlighted: The database contains over 50 entries revealing the entry of foreign threat actors, including a Brazilian ex-police officer who had committed mass murder; a Bosnian war criminal who ran prison camps and was involved in brutal interrogations, torturing, and the killing of inmates; and an Egyptian student who was involved in a plot to bomb the Israeli embassy.Historical Context: The 9/11 attacks prompted a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration vetting processes. The year 2008 was chosen as the starting date for collecting vetting failure cases on the assumption that the first series of 9/11 visa vetting reforms would have fully vested by then and because significant new process improvements were implemented that year.In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, the Center's executive director and podcast host, highlights President Trump's success in securing the border, achieving the lowest level of apprehensions recorded in history. Will this administration and future administrations stay vigilant?HostMark Krikorian is the Executive Director of the Center for Immigration StudiesGuestTodd Bensman is a National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.RelatedDatabase: National Security Vetting FailuresEgyptian Student Added to CIS National Security Vetting Failures DatabaseAfghan Evacuee Added to CIS National Security Vetting DatabaseBrazilian Mass Murderer Who Slipped through U.S. Vetting Three Times Is Added to CIS DatabasePanel: A New Database of Vetting FailuresCommonplace: They Said It Couldn't Be DoneThe Greatest Mass MIgration Border Crisis in U.S. History Is OverIntro MontageVoices in the opening montage:Sen. Barack Obama at a 2005 press conference.Sen. John McCain in a 2010 election ad.President Lyndon Johnson, upon signing the 1965 Immigration Act.Booker T. Washington, reading in 1908 from his 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech.Laraine Newman as a "Conehead" on SNL in 1977.Hillary Clinton in a 2003 radio interview.Cesar Chavez in a 1974 interview.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaking to reporters in 2019.Prof. George Borjas in a 2016 C-SPAN appearance.Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2008 comments on the Senate floor.Charlton Heston in "Planet of the Apes".

Berlin, Detroit, Birmingham and, of course, Sarajevo. Bosnian-built and -bred Sev Dah may be a Swedish expat, but the Balkan blackness clings strongly to the bleak percussions and rigidly uneasy synthetics that unwillingly fuse into his strongly individual take on techno. Authentically purveying the pulsations of the nakedly throbbing and ugly world, far away from Starbucks and H&M. Signed to respected labels such as Random Island, Mote-Evolver and Kaiser's KSR, he quickly gnawed his way into the scene's core of DJs and producers. Sev is even managing new projects on his own label Proletarijat since 2016. Like a rabid mongrel, since 1998 he has been chewing and belching new bastard beats that are aching to scream out. Consequently there's a steaming and steady stream of vinyl releases coming. With influences ranging from Stigmata and Mills to Master Reese and Petar Dundov, Sev Dah is a versatile but headstrong DJ that can gently ease a thumb in at midnight or fervently thrust it down the hatch at peak time. Tracklist via -Spotify: bit.ly/SRonSpotify -Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/Slam_Radio/ -Facebook: bit.ly/SlamRadioGroup Archive on Mixcloud: www.mixcloud.com/slam/   Subscribe to our podcast on -iTunes: apple.co/2RQ1xdh -Amazon Music: amzn.to/2RPYnX3 -Google Podcasts: bit.ly/SRGooglePodcasts -Deezer: bit.ly/SlamRadioDeezer   Keep up with SLAM: https://fanlink.tv/Slam  Keep up with Soma Records: https://linktr.ee/somarecords    For syndication or radio queries: harry@somarecords.com & conor@glowcast.co.uk Slam Radio is produced at www.glowcast.co.uk

Bosnian translation of Friday Sermon delivered by Khalifa-tul-Masih on February 14th, 2025 (audio)

Bosnian translation of Friday Sermon delivered by Khalifa-tul-Masih on January 31st, 2025 (audio)

Bosnian translation of Friday Sermon delivered by Khalifa-tul-Masih on January 17th, 2025 (audio)

Step inside the tiny A-frame cottage where local bakery Burek and Cake makes fresh Bosnian baked goods on the daily — and always with love. Owner Fatina Hodzic opened it two years ago and already has a slate of regulars, whom she greets by name.

Fatima Hodzic opened Burek and Cake just over two years ago. Since then, the tiny Bosnian bakery in the Northland has become a destination to gather over cakes, coffee, and bureks, a traditional Bosnian snack made with pastry dough and savory fillings.

Part 1 is all about the drama of the 2024/25 UEFA Conference League. Bosnia & Herzegovina, Iceland and Ireland have their first-ever representatives in a European knockout stage, Portugal's Vitoria de Guimaraes set a new continental away day record, Omonia's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" coach is sacked & the reserves of English giants Chelsea run riot. To help us review the action, we have a panel of experts from across Europe: Andy Brassell from On The Continent in the UK, Hinrik Wöhler from Vísir in Iceland & Massimo Solari of Corriere del Ticino in Switzerland.   In Part 2, Lee and Paul have their world football knowledge put to the test by Joe McAuliffe of the excellent Career We Go football trivia podcast. Finally, we review our favourite stories, topics and trips of 2024 – from the Marítimo-Nacional derby on the island of Madeira to San Marino's first win in 20 years over Liechtenstein in the UEFA Nations League – and look ahead to our plans for 2025. Finally, a big thank you from us to our editors, partners, collaborators, listeners and patrons. We wish you a happy Christmas & all the best for the new year! Remember that if you don't want to wait until 8 January for your next dose of Sweeper goodness, you can sign up to our Patreon at patreon.com/SweeperPod and listen to our bonus podcast on New Year's Day. Becoming a member of our Patreon means you are supporting our independent journalism and getting access to a load of great content, such as bonus episodes, blogs, a weekly World Football Newsletter, access to our Discord server and entry into our football shirt giveaways. There are no contracts, no sign-up fees, no minimum stays and no advertisements. Watch back our UEFA Conference League final matchday watch-along on ⁠X⁠ or ⁠Facebook⁠. RUNNING ORDER: 00:00 – Intro 02:45 – Shamrock Rovers with Andy Brassell 08:06 – Conference League or Nations League? 10:26 – Víkingur Reykjavík with Hinrik Wöhler 14:38 – A trigger-happy Bosnian club president 17:50 – Lugano with Massimo Solari 23:44 – Crazy European away day records 27:25 – World football trivia with Career We Go 46:34 – Our best stories, matches & trips of 2024 Please leave us a rating or review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It means a great deal to us and will make it easier for other potential listeners to discover our show. Thanks for your support! Editor: Ralph Foster

Thirty years after the war in Bosnia, survivors and their descendants find themselves permanently displaced in their own country. BBC reporter Lauren Tavriger visits the Tuzla region where families fleeing atrocities, including the Srebrenica massacre, have been living for decades in makeshift settlements originally designed as temporary. She talks to families about their experience, discovering why traumatised people are still living in a state of internal exile and reports on controversial efforts by the Bosnian authorities to clear camps and rehouse their inhabitants.

Jeremy Robbins is the Executive Director of the American Immigration Council. Previously, Jeremy spent more than a decade building New American Economy, the think tank and advocacy organization founded by Michael Bloomberg to make the economic case for smarter immigration policies, as NAE's first and sole Executive Director. Prior to that, Jeremy served as a policy advisor and special counsel in the Office of New York City Mayor, a judicial law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals, a Robert L. Bernstein International Human Rights Fellow working on prisoners' rights issues in Argentina, and a litigation associate at WilmerHale in Boston, where he was part of the firm's team representing six Bosnian men detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Jeremy received a JD from Yale Law School and a BA in political science from Brown University. In this episode, you'll hear about: Challenges and reforms in U.S. immigration policy Examination of border management and immigration efficiency Impact of enforcement spending and immigration court backlogs Role of undocumented workers in the U.S. economy Advocacy for a startup visa and immigration change American Immigration Council's efforts in supporting immigrant communities Follow and Review: We'd love for you to follow us if you haven't yet. Click that purple '+' in the top right corner of your Apple Podcasts app. We'd love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast. Supporting Resources: Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-adam-robbins Website - https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/  Email - jrobbins@immcouncil.org Alcorn Immigration Law: Subscribe to the monthly Alcorn newsletter Sophie Alcorn Podcast: Episode 16: E-2 Visa for Founders and Employees Episode 19: Australian Visas Including E-3 Episode 20: TN Visas and Status for Canadian and Mexican Citizens Immigration Options for Talent, Investors, and Founders Immigration Law for Tech Startups eBook Alcorn Academy course for best practices for securing the O-1A visa, EB-1A green card, or the EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card—the top options for startup founders. Use promotion code EAB20 for 20% off the enrollment fee.

Felice Gaer, esteemed Director of AJC's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, was an internationally respected human rights advocate who dedicated more than four decades to championing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enforcing international commitments to prevent severe human rights violations globally. On November 9, Felice passed away after a prolonged battle with metastatic breast cancer. In honor of her legacy, we revisit her insightful conversation on People of the Pod, recorded last year during Women's History Month and on International Women's Day. As we remember and celebrate Felice's profound contributions, we share this interview once more. May her memory continue to be a blessing. __ Music credits: Drops of Melting Snow (after Holst, Abroad as I was walking) by Axletree is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License. Learn more about Felice Gaer: Felice Gaer, Legendary Human Rights Champion Who Inspired Generations of Global Advocates, Dies at 78 Listen – AJC Podcasts: The Forgotten Exodus: with Hen Mazzig, Einat Admony, and more. People of the Pod:  What the Election Results Mean for Israel and the Jewish People The Jewish Vote in Pennsylvania: What You Need to Know Sinwar Eliminated: What Does This Mean for the 101 Hostages Still Held by Hamas? Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod You can reach us at: peopleofthepod@ajc.org If you've appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. __ Transcript of Conversation with Felice Gaer: Manya Brachear Pashman:   This past weekend, AJC lost a phenomenal colleague. Felice Gaer, the director of American Jewish Committee's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, was an internationally renowned human rights expert who, for more than four decades, brought life and practical significance to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international commitments, to prevent grave human rights abuses around the world.  She died on November 9, following a lengthy battle with metastatic breast cancer. I had the honor of interviewing Felice last year during Women's History Month and on International Women's Day.  We bring you that interview now, as we remember Felice. May her memory be for a blessing.  _ Felice is with us now to discuss today's human rights challenges and the challenges she has faced as a woman in the Human Rights world.  Felice, welcome to People of the Pod.  Felice Gaer:   Thank you, Manya. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So let's start with the beginning. Can you share with our listeners a little about your upbringing, and how Jewish values shaped what you do today? Felice Gaer:   Well, I had a fairly ordinary upbringing in a suburb of New York City that had a fairly high percentage of Jews living in it–Teaneck, New Jersey. I was shaped by all the usual things in a Jewish home. First of all, the holidays. Secondly, the values, Jewish values, and awareness, a profound awareness of Jewish history, the history of annihilation, expulsion, discrimination, violence. But also the Jewish values of universality, respect for all human life, equality before the law, sense of realism, sense that you can change your life by what you do, and the choices that you make. These are all core Jewish values. And I guess I always have found the three part expression by Rabbi Hillel to sum up the approach I've always taken to human rights and most other things in life. He said, If I'm not for myself, who will be, and if I'm only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? So that's a sense of Jewish particularism, Jewish universalism, and realism, as well. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You went to Wellesley, class of 1968, it's an all-women's college. Was there a strong Jewish presence on campus there at a time? And did that part of your identity even play a role in your college experience?  Felice Gaer :  Well, I left, as I said, a town that had a fairly sizable Jewish population. And I went to Wellesley and I felt like I was in another world. And so even as long ago as 1964-65, that era, I actually reached out to Hillel and participated in very minor activities that took place, usually a Friday night dinner, or something like that. But it really didn't play a role except by making me recognize that I was a member of a very small minority. Manya Brachear Pashman:   Here on this podcast, we've talked a lot about the movement to free Soviet Jewry. As you pursued graduate work at Columbia, and also during your undergrad days at Wellesley, were you involved in that movement at all? Felice Gaer:   Well, I had great interest in Russian studies, and in my years at Wellesley, the Soviet Union movement was at a very nascent stage. And I remember arguments with the Soviet Ambassador coming to the campus and our specialist on Russian history, arguing about whether this concern about the treatment of Soviet Jews was a valid concern.  The professor, who happened to have been Jewish, by the way, argued that Jews in the Soviet Union were treated badly, but so was everybody else in the Soviet Union. And it really wasn't something that one needed to focus on especially. As I left Wellesley and went to Columbia, where I studied political science and was at the Russian Institute, now the Harriman Institute, I found that the treatment of Soviet Jews was different in many ways, and the capacity to do something about it was serious.  We knew people who had relatives, we knew people who wanted to leave. The whole Soviet Union movement was focused around the desire to leave the country–not to change it–that was an explicit decision of Jewish leaders around the world, and in the Soviet Union itself. And so the desire to leave was something you could realize, document the cases, bring the names forward, and engage American officials in a way that the Jewish community had never done before with cases and examples demanding that every place you went, every negotiation that took place, was accompanied by lists of names and cases, whose plight will be brought to the attention of the authorities. And that really mobilized people, including people like me.  I also worked to focus on the agenda of internal change in the Soviet Union. And that meant also looking at other human rights issues. Why and how freedom of religion or belief was suppressed in this militantly atheist state, why and how freedom of expression, freedom of association, and just about every other right, was really severely limited. And what the international standards were at that time. After I left Columbia, that was around the time that the famous manifesto from Andrei Sakharov, the world famous physicist, Nobel Prize winner, was made public. It was around the time that other kinds of dissident materials were becoming better known about life inside the Soviet Union post-Khrushchev. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So you left Colombia with a master's degree, the Cold War ends, and you take a job at the Ford Foundation that has you traveling all around Eastern Europe, looking to end human rights abuses, assessing the challenges that face that region. I want to ask you about the treatment of women, and what you witnessed about the mistreatment of women in these regions. And does that tend to be a common denominator around the world when you assess human rights abuses? Felice Gaer:   Well, there's no question that the treatment of women is different than the treatment of men. And it's true all over the world. But when I traveled in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the height of those years, height of the Cold War, and so forth, the issues of women's rights actually weren't one of the top issues on the agenda because the Soviet Union and East European countries appeared to be doing more for women than the Western countries.  They had them in governance. They had them in the parliament. They purported to support equality for women. It took some years for Soviet feminists, dissidents, to find a voice and to begin to point out all the ways in which they were treated in the same condescending, patriarchal style as elsewhere. But in those years, that was not a big issue in the air.  It was unusual for me, a 20-something year old woman from the United States to be traveling around Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, meeting with high officials and others, and on behalf of the Ford Foundation, trying to develop programming that would involve people to people contacts, that would involve developing programs where there was common expertise, like management training, and things of that sort. And I was really an odd, odd duck in that situation, and I felt it. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I mentioned in my introduction, the Beijing World Conference on Women, can you reflect a little on what had a lasting impact there? Felice Gaer:   Well, the Beijing World Conference on Women was the largest, and remains the largest conference that the United Nations has ever organized. There were over 35,000 women there, about 17,000 at the intergovernmental conference. I was on the US delegation there.  The simple statement that women's rights are human rights may seem hackneyed today. But when that was affirmed in the 1995 Beijing Outcome Document, it was a major political and conceptual breakthrough. It was largely focused on getting the UN to accept that the rights of women were actually international human rights and that they weren't something different. They weren't private, or outside the reach of investigators and human rights bodies. It was an inclusive statement, and it was a mind altering statement in the women's rights movement.  It not only reaffirmed that women's rights are human rights, but it went further in addressing the problems facing women in the language of human rights.  The earlier world conferences on women talked about equality, but they didn't identify violations of those rights. They didn't demand accountability of those rights. And they said absolutely nothing about creating mechanisms by which you could monitor, review, and hold people accountable, which is the rights paradigm. Beijing changed all that. It was a violations approach that was quite different from anything that existed before that. Manya Brachear Pashman :  Did anything get forgotten? We talked about what had a lasting impact, but what seems to have been forgotten or have fallen to the wayside? Felice Gaer:   Oh, I think it's just the opposite. I think the things that were in the Beijing conference have become Fuller and addressed in greater detail and are more commonly part of what goes on in the international discourse on women's rights and the status of women in public life. And certainly at the international level that's the case.  I'll give you just one example, the Convention Against Torture. I mean, when I became a member of the committee, the 10 person committee, I was the only woman. The committee really had, in 11 years, it had maybe said, four or five things about the treatment of women. And the way that torture, ill treatment, inhuman, degrading treatment may affect women.  It looked at the world through the eyes of male prisoners in detention. And it didn't look at the world through the eyes of women who suffer private violence, gender based violence, that is that the state looks away from and ignores and therefore sanctions, and to a certain extent endorses.  And it didn't identify the kinds of things that affect women, including women who are imprisoned, and why and where in many parts of the world. What one does in terms of education or dress or behavior may lead you into a situation where you're being abused, either in a prison or outside of prison. These are issues that are now part of the regular review, for example, at the Committee Against Torture, issues of of trafficking, issues of gender based violence, the Sharia law, the hudud punishments of whipping and stoning, are part of the concern of the committee, which they weren't before. Manya Brachear Pashman:   In other words, having that woman's perspective, having your perspective on that committee was really important and really changed and broadened the discussion. Felice Gaer:   Absolutely. When I first joined the committee, the first session I was at, we had a review of China. And so I very politely asked a question about the violence and coercion associated with the population policy in China, as you know, forced abortions and things of that sort. This was a question that had come up before the women's convention, the CEDAW, and I thought it was only appropriate that it also come up in the Committee Against Torture.  In our discussion afterwards, the very stern chairman of the committee, a former constable, said to me, ‘You know, this might be of interest to you, Ms. Gaer, but this has nothing to do with the mandate of this committee.' I explained to him why it did, in some detail. And when I finished pointing out all of those elements–including the fact that the people carried out these practices on the basis of state policy–when I finished, there was a silence.  And the most senior person in the room, who had been involved in these issues for decades, said, ‘I'm quite certain we can accommodate Ms. Gaer's concerns in the conclusions,' and they did.  That's the kind of thing that happens when you look at issues from a different perspective and raise them. Manya Brachear Pashman:   You talked about being an odd duck in your 20s, as a woman traveling around Eastern Europe, trying to address these challenges. I'm curious if that woman in her 20s would have been able to stand up to this committee like that, and give that thorough an explanation? Or did it take some years of experience, of witnessing these issues, perhaps being ignored?  Felice Gaer:  Well, I think as we go through life, you learn new things. And I learned new things along the way. I learned about the universal norms, I learned about how to apply them, how they had been applied, and how they hadn't been applied. And in that process, developed what I would say is a sharper way of looking at these issues.  But the Bosnian conflict in particular, made the issue of gender based violence against women, especially in war, but not only in war, into a mainstream issue, and helped propel these issues, both inside the United Nations and outside, the awareness changed.  I remember asking the International Red Cross representatives in Croatia, just across the border from Bosnia, if they had encountered any victims of gender based violence or rape, and they said, ‘No.' And I said, ‘Did you ask them about these concerns?' And they sort of looked down and looked embarrassed, looked at each other and looked back at me and said, ‘Oh.' There were no words. There were no understandings of looking at the world this way. And that has changed. That has changed dramatically today. I mean, if you look at the situation in Ukraine, the amount of gender based violence that has been documented is horrifying, just horrifying, but it's been documented. Manya Brachear Pashman   So is the world of human rights advocacy male-dominated, female-dominated, is it fairly balanced these days? And has that balance made the difference in what you're talking about? Felice Gaer:   You know, I wrote an article in 1988, the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, about why women's rights weren't being addressed. And one of the points I drew attention to was the fact that the heads of almost all the major organizations at the time were all male. And that it wasn't seen as a concern. A lot of that has changed. There's really a real variety of perspectives now that are brought to bear. Manya Brachear Pashman:   So we've talked a lot about the importance of [a] woman's perspective. Does a Jewish perspective matter as well? Felice Gaer:   Oh, on every issue on every issue and, you know, I worked a great deal on freedom of religion and belief, as an issue. That's a core issue of AJC, and it's a fundamental rights issue. And it struck me as surprising that with all the attention to freedom of religion, the concern about antisemitic acts was not being documented by mainstream human rights organizations. And it wasn't being documented by the UN experts on freedom of religion or belief either. I drew this to the attention of Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, who was recently ending his term as Special Rapporteur on Freedom of religion or belief. And he was really very struck by this. And he went, and he did a little bit of research. And he found out that since computerized records had been prepared at the United Nations, that there had been no attention, no attention at all, to cases of alleged antisemitic incidents. And he began a project to record the kinds of problems that existed and to identify what could be done about it. We helped him in the sense that we organized a couple of colloquia, we brought people from all over the world together to talk about the dimensions of the problem and the documentation that they did, and the proposals that they had for addressing it. And he, as you may recall, wrote a brilliant report in 2019, setting out the problems of global antisemitism. And he followed that up in 2022, before leaving his position with what he called an action plan for combating anti semitism, which has concrete specific suggestions for all countries around the world as to what they can do to help combat antisemitism and antisemitic acts, including and to some extent, starting with adopting the working definition on antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but also activities in in the area of education, training, training of law enforcement officials, documentation and public action. It's a real contribution to the international discourse and to understanding that freedom of religion or belief belongs to everyone. Manya Brachear Pashman:   And do you believe that Dr. Shaheed's report is being absorbed, comprehended by those that need to hear it that need to understand it? Felice Gaer   I've been delighted to see the way that the European Union has engaged with Dr. Shaheed and his report has developed standards and expectations for all 27 member states, and that other countries and other parts of the world have done the same. So yeah, I do think they're engaging with it. I hope there'll be a lot more because the problem has only grown. Manya Brachear Pashman:   On the one year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, JBI issued a report that sounded the alarm on the widespread violations committed against Ukrainians, you mentioned the amount of gender based violence Since that has taken place, and the other just catastrophic consequences of this war. Felice, you've been on the front row of Eastern European affairs and human rights advocacy in that region. From your perspective, and I know this is a big question: How did this war happen? Felice Gaer:   I'll just start by saying: it didn't start in 2022. And if you have to look at what happened, the events of 2014, to understand the events of 2022. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, or even during the breakup, there was a period where the 15th constituent Union republics of the Soviet Union developed a greater national awareness, really, and some of them had been independent as some of them hadn't been, but they developed a much greater awareness. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the 15 countries, including Russia, as one of the 15, became independent entities. And aside from having more members in the United Nations and the Council of Europe and places like that, it led to much more robust activity, in terms of respecting human rights and other areas of endeavor in each of those countries.  The situation in Russia, with a head of state who has been there, with one exception, a couple of years, for 20 years, has seen an angry desire to reestablish an empire. That's the only thing you can say really about it.  If they can't dominate by having a pro-Russian group in charge in the country, then there have been invasions, there have been Russian forces, Russia-aligned forces sent to the different countries. So whether it's Georgia, or Moldova, or Ukraine, we've seen this pattern.  And unfortunately, what happened in 2022, is the most egregious and I would say, blatant such example. In 2014, the Russians argued that it was local Russian speaking, little green men who were conducting hostilities in these places, or it was local people who wanted to realign with Russia, who were demanding changes, and so forth. But in the 2022 events, Russia's forces invaded, wearing Russian insignia and making it quite clear that this was a matter of state policy that they were pursuing, and that they weren't going to give up.  And it's led to the tragic developments that we've all seen inside the country, and the horrific violence, the terrible, widespread human rights violations. And in war, we know that human rights violations are usually the worst.  And so the one good spot on the horizon: the degree to which these abuses have been documented, it's unprecedented to have so much documentation so early in a conflict like this, which someday may lead to redress and accountability for those who perpetrated it. But right now, in the middle of these events, it's just a horror. Manya Brachear Pashman:   What other human rights situations do we need to be taking more seriously now? And where has there been significant progress? Felice Gaer:   Well, I'll talk about the problem spots if I may for a minute. Everyone points to North Korea as the situation without parallel, that's what a UN Commission of Inquiry said, without parallel in the world. The situation in Iran? Well, you just need to watch what's happened to the protesters, the women and others who have protested over 500 people in the streets have died because of this. 15,000 people imprisoned, and Iran's prisons are known for ill treatment and torture.  The situation in Afghanistan is atrocious. The activities of the Taliban, which they were known for in the 1990s are being brought back. They are normalizing discrimination, they are engaged in probably the most hardline gender discrimination we've seen anywhere where women can't work outside the home, girls can't be educated, political participation is denied. The constitution has been thrown out. All kinds of things. The latest is women can't go to parks, they can't go to university, and they can't work for NGOs. This continues. It's a major crisis.  Well, there are other countries, from Belarus, to Sudan to Uzbekistan, and China, that we could also talk about at great length, lots of problems in the world, and not enough effort to expose them, address them and try to ameliorate them. Manya Brachear Pashman   So what do we do about that? What can our listeners do about that, when we hear this kind of grim report? Felice Gaer:   Work harder. Pay attention when you hear about rights issues. Support rights organizations. Take up cases. Seek redress. Be concerned about the victims. All these things need to be done. Manya Brachear Pashman:   I don't know how you maintain your composure and your cool, Felice, because you have faced so much in terms of challenges and push back. So thank you so much for all you have done for women, for the Jewish people, and for the world at large. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Felice Gaer:   Thank you, Manya.

Learn how to travel more responsibly, engage with the experiences of refugees, and merge human rights with tourism. ____________________________________ Subscribe to The Maverick Show's Monday Minute Newsletter where I email you 3 short items of value to start each week that you can consume in 60 seconds (all personal recommendations like the latest travel gear I'm using, my favorite destinations, discounts for special events, etc.). Follow The Maverick Show on Instagram ____________________________________ Sibu Szymanowska joins Matt over a bottle of wine and shares her experience growing up in Costa Rica before moving to China at age 17. Sibu reflects on attending University in China, learning fluent Mandarin, and starting multiple businesses over her 7 years living there. She shares the impact of her travels throughout Asia and then her experience moving to Poland and re-connecting with her Polish heritage. Sibu then talks about her experience working for an NGO, living in a remote village in Nicaragua, developing a passion for human rights, and eventually doing a Master's Degree in “International Conflict and Human Rights”. She also talks about co-founding The Hybrid Tours and explains how it centers the experiences of refugees and displaced people in the various destinations. Sibu shares how her tours help people learn about Palestine through the stories of refugees living in Jordan, and help people learn about the Bosnian genocide by meeting with survivors and former prison camp inmates during the tour of Bosnia. She also explains how you can join a Hybrid Tour and get a special Maverick Show discount. FULL SHOW NOTES WITH DIRECT LINKS TO EVERYTHING DISCUSSED ARE AVAILABLE HERE. ____________________________________ See my Top 10 Apps For Digital Nomads See my Top 10 Books For Digital Nomads See my 7 Keys For Building A Remote Business (Even in a space that's not traditionally virtual) Watch my Video Training on Stylish Minimalist Packing so you can join #TeamCarryOn  See the Travel Gear I Use and Recommend See How I Produce The Maverick Show Podcast (The equipment, services & vendors I use) ____________________________________ ENJOYING THE SHOW? Please Leave a Rating and Review. It really helps the show and I read each one personally.  You Can Buy Me a Coffee. Espressos help me produce significantly better podcast episodes! :)

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My guest today is Nina Maglic. Nina Maglic is on a mission to bring peace and healing to the world. As a marketer, healer, and international speaker, she is dedicated to helping others create thriving healing empires that touch millions of hearts and elevate humanity. Growing up during the Bosnian war, Nina experienced life without electricity, running water, or food, living in constant fear for her and her family's lives. These challenging circumstances instilled in her a deep resilience and a burning desire to help others heal, inspire, and change lives. Nina's passion for marketing and consumer behavior, combined with her love for spirituality and energy healing, led her to a new path. After overcoming a personal health crisis in 2018 through energy healing, she dedicated herself to teaching and building her own healing business. She has since helped numerous healers build successful businesses, turning their passions into thriving enterprises.Through her world-class online programs, Nina supports healers at every stage of their journey. Her offerings include the Illuminated Offer workshop for those on a tight budget or seeking to test her methods, and a roadmap to a six-figure healing business for established healers ready to scale. Additionally, her full-service marketing agency provides comprehensive support for those who need expert assistance. In this episode we discuss marketing, healing, the importance of story, spirituality and relationships in business.Website - https://ninamaglic.com/IG - https://www.instagram.com/iamninamaglicFB - https://www.facebook.com/transformyourlifewithenergy/LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamaglicYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@ninamaglicFREEBIE - In this episode you will learn:1. Strategies to help build and foster trust and loyalty among consumers and clients.2. Tips to help build and strengthen relationships in business.3. Advice for someone who is just starting out in the world of marketing. "I want to be very honest with you. When we started business, we had no money, no connections, no email list, nothing. We were just like moved to another country and we didn't have a social media presence." - 00:06:18"For me, the most important thing is like to be in integrity, to do what I say I will do and get people results."- 00:25:18"Whatever you're passionate about, go for it and make that happen. Your brain is going to stop you. Your soul is going to push you." - 00:49:32Are you an author speaker coach or entrepreneur building a brand in today's very crowded marketplace? How do you stand out? Join me on Sept 27th and learn how to empower your message and shine as a guest on podcasts for just $97. Imagine stepping into that interview with clarity and conviction, connecting deeply with listeners who are eager to hear what you have to say. Imagine the satisfaction of knowing you've nailed it, leaving your audience inspired and wanting more. This would position you as an authority to thousands of people in your industry. Let's turn those nerves into excitement and make sure you shine on your podcast appearance. Together, we'll boost your confidence, polish your messaging for impact, and get you ready to deliver an interview that makes people fall in love with your from the first words. Ready to shine on podcasts? Let's do this! Click the link below to register.https://empowerographypodcast.com/empower-your-messageContact Brad:WebsiteInstagramLinkedInYouTubeX (Twitter)TikTok#empowerographypodcast #women #womensempowerment #empowherment #entrepreneurship #womeninentrepreneurship #empoweredwomen #empowerelevateeducate #findingyourpurpose #podcast #womensupportingwomen #soulalignment #heartcentered #selflove #resilience #personalgrowth #mindset #spirituality #healing #heartspace #integrity #alignment #transformation #intuition #marketing #marketer #advertising #story #storytelling #energy

In an era of increasing global connectivity and persistent social divisions, the concept of human dignity stands as a cornerstone of our shared humanity. Through ongoing conflicts and social challenges, we can build bridges of understanding and preserve human dignity. It is not just a moral imperative but a practical necessity for building sustainable, peaceful communities. Rachel Miner from Bellwether International delves into how we can recognize, protect, and nurture human dignity in our daily lives and broader society.

Ambassador Ken Hackett was nominated by President Barack Obama on June 14, 2013 to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. The United States Senate confirmed Ambassador Hackett on August 1, 2013, and he was sworn in on August 20, 2013. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Hackett was President of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), an international humanitarian agency supported by the U.S. Catholic community, from 1993 to 2012. As President, Mr. Hackett led 5,000 CRS employees in over 100 countries. He joined CRS in 1972, starting his career in Sierra Leone. Mr. Hackett also held CRS assignments overseas in the Philippines and Kenya. As regional director for Africa, he led CRS's response to the Ethiopian famine (1984-1985) and supervised CRS's operations during the crisis in Somalia in the early 1990s. It was under his leadership that CRS responded to recovery efforts such as those following the Rwanda genocide, the Bosnian and Kosovo emergencies, the Asian tsunami, and the Haiti earthquake. Equally notable was CRS's work during his tenure as President on behalf of people living with HIV/AIDS. After a 40-year career with CRS, Mr. Hackett joined the University of Notre Dame's Institution for Global Development in 2012 where he served as an advisor. Prior to joining CRS, Mr. Hackett served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana. Mr. Hackett served on the Board of Directors of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (2004-2010), a U.S. foreign aid agency dedicated to fighting global poverty. He was also a member of the Global Poverty Task Force led by the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. From 1996-2004, Mr. Hackett was Vice President of Caritas Internationalis, the confederation of Catholic humanitarian organizations. He has also served as a Member of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum – the Vatican body that coordinates the Church's charitable work – and on the Boards of the Africa Society and Jesuit Refugee Services. Mr. Hackett holds many distinguished honors. In 2004, he was named a Knight Commander of the Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great, one of the highest papal honors. He holds 16 honorary doctorate degrees from various U.S. universities and was the 2012 recipient of the Laetare Award from the University of Notre Dame, the oldest and most prestigious award for American Catholics. Mr. Hackett has received recognition for his humanitarian work from foreign governments, including the National Order from the Republic of Benin (2008) and the National Medal of Honor from Sierra Leone (1998). Mr. Hackett, originally of West Roxbury, Massachusetts, earned his undergraduate degree from Boston College.

Samantha Irby is a humorist, a TV writer, and the author of an incredible new essay collection, Quietly Hostile. In this episode, we talk about so many things: Chicago pizza, living in Michigan, Bosnian food in Grand Rapids, car wash dudes in Kalamazoo, and what it's like to write lines for Carrie Bradshaw (as well as give her diarrhea). Clare de Boer is the chef-owner of Stissing House, a restaurant located in New York's Hudson Valley that we like very, very much. Clare is also the chef-owner of two New York City restaurants, King and Jupiter. In this episode, we speak with Clare about her time cooking at the River Café in London and her journey to the United States to open some of the country's best restaurants. We also talk about her great Subtack, The Best Bit. Do you enjoy This Is TASTE? Drop us a review on Apple, or star us on Spotify. We'd love to hear from you. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today we bring you another story from NPR's Next Gen Radio project held in St. Louis about a local restaurant owner, whose Bosnian heritage and the food she makes create her sense of home. Plus, STLPR's Statehouse Reporter Sarah Kellogg breaks down the races for MO Treasurer and Secretary of State.

Today, we're talking with veteran activist and theologian, the one and only, Lisa Sharon Harper! The conversation covers:-        Lisa's journey finding Jesus outside of Whiteness and White evangelicalism-        The centrality of advocating for political and institutional policy change to our faith in Jesus-        How respecting the image of God in all people is the starting point for following Jesus to shalom-        The unavoidable job we have to speak truth, even when it is costly-        Where Lisa finds her hope and motivation to keep going-        And after that, we reflect on the interview and then talk all things Springfield, Ohio and Haitian immigrants.Mentioned on the episode:-            Lisa's website, lisasharonharper.com/-            Lisa's Instagram and Facebook-            The Freedom Road Podcast-            Lisa's books, Fortune and The Very Good Gospel-            Make a donation to The Haitian Community Support and Help Center in Springfield, Ohio via PayPal at haitianhelpcenterspringfield@gmail.com.Credits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Lisa Sharon Harper: I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. Massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We have a great one for you today. We are talking to veteran organizer and theologian Lisa Sharon Harper, someone who a lot of you probably know and who was pretty big in both of our individual kind of stories and development as people who care about faith and justice when we were younger people, which you will hear about as we talk to her. We are going to be talking to her about the centrality of our voting and policy choices to our witness as Christians, the importance of integrity and respecting the image of God in all people when making difficult decisions about where to spend your resources as an activist, where Lisa gets her hope and motivation and a whole lot more.And then after the interview, hear our reactions to it. And we're also going to be getting into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our weekly newsletter that we send out to our subscribers. This week it will be all about Haitian immigrants to America in Springfield, Ohio. You will want to hear that conversation. But before we get started, Jonathan.Jonathan Walton: Please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and get access to everything that we do. We're creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on politics, faith and culture that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are resisting the idols of the American church by centering and elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have a lot of experience doing this individually and in community, and we've been friends [laughs] for a good long time. So you can trust it will be honest, sincere, and have some good things to say along the way.If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to all of our bonus content, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats with me and Sy, and the ability to comment on posts and chat with us. So again, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber today.Sy Hoekstra: Our guest today, again, Lisa Sharon Harper, the president and founder of Freedom Road, a groundbreaking consulting group that crafts experiences to bring common understanding and common commitments that lead to common action toward a more just world. Lisa is a public theologian whose writing, speaking, activism and training has sparked and fed the fires of reformation in the church from Ferguson and Charlottesville to South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Ireland. Lisa's book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All was named one of the best books of 2022 and the book before that, The Very Good Gospel, was named 2016 Book of the Year by The Englewood Review of Books. Lisa is the host of the Freedom Road Podcast, and she also writes for her Substack, The Truth Is…Jonathan Walton: Alright, let's jump into the interview.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yay, I'm so excited to be here, and I'm here with a little bit of a Demi Moore rasp to my voice. So I'm hoping it'll be pleasant to the ears for folks who are coming, because I got a little sick, but I'm not like really sick, because I'm on my way, I'm on the rebound.Sy Hoekstra: So you told us you got this at the DNC, is that right?Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes, I literally, literally, that's like what, almost three weeks ago now?Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.Jonathan Walton: You've got a DNC infection. That's what that is.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I have a DNC cough. I have a DNC cough, that's funny.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So before we jump into our questions, I wanted to take a momentary trip down memory lane, because I have no idea if you remember this or not.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Sy Hoekstra: But in January of 2008, you led a weekend retreat for a college Christian fellowship that Jonathan and I were both in.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, I do remember.Sy Hoekstra: You do remember this? Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I remember almost every time I've ever spoken anywhere.Sy Hoekstra: Wow, okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: I really do. And I remember that one, and I do remember you guys being there. Oh my gosh, that's so cool.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You remember that. That's amazing.Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no.Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Hang on. Wait a minute [laughter]. We don't just remember it. Because, so you gave this series of talks that ended up being a big part of your book, The Very Good Gospel.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And you talked specifically about the difference between genuine and pseudo-community and the need to really address each other's problems that we face, bear each other's burdens, that sort of thing. And you did a session, which I'm sure you've done with other groups, where you split us up into racial groups. So we sat there with White, Black, and Latine, and Asian, and biracial groups, and we had a real discussion about race in a way that the community had absolutely never had before [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: And it actually, it is the opening scene of Jonathan's book. I don't know if you knew that.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God, I didn't know that.Jonathan Walton: It is.Lisa Sharon Harper: Which one?Jonathan Walton: Twelve Lies.Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow, I didn't know that. Oh my gosh, I missed that. Okay.Sy Hoekstra: So it was a… Jonathan put it before, it was a formative moment for everybody and a transformative moment for some of us [laughter] …Lisa Sharon Harper: Oooooo, Oh my goodness.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: …in that we learned a lot about ourselves and what we thought about race, what other people thought about race. I will tell you that in the five minutes after the session broke up, like ended, it was the first time that my now wife ever said to me, “Hey, you said something racist to me that I didn't like.” [laughs] And then, because of all the conversation we just had, I responded miraculously with the words, “I'm sorry.” [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God!Sy Hoekstra: And then we went from there.Lisa Sharon Harper: Miraculously [laughs]. That's funny.Sy Hoekstra: So I have lots of friends that we can talk about this session with to this day, and they still remember it as transformative.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my Gosh. Wow.Sy Hoekstra: All of that, just to lead into my first question which is this, a lot of people in 2016 started seeing kind of the things about White evangelicalism that indicated to them that they needed to get out. They needed to escape in some way, because of the bad fruit, the bad political fruit that was manifesting. You saw that bad fruit a long time ago.Lisa Sharon Harper: A whole long time ago.Sy Hoekstra: You were deep in the Republican, pro-life political movement for a little bit, for like, a minute as a young woman.Lisa Sharon Harper: I wouldn't… here's the thing. I wouldn't say I was deep in. What I would say is I was in.Sy Hoekstra: Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: As in I was in because I was Evangelical, and I identified with itbecause I was Evangelical and because my friends identified with it. So I kind of went along, but I always had this sense I was like standing on the margins looking at it going, “I don't know.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You know what I mean? But I would say literally for like a minute, I was a believer. Maybe for like, a year.Sy Hoekstra: But my question then is, what were the warning signs? And then, separately from what were the warning signs that you needed to get out, who or what were the guiding lights that showed you a better way?Lisa Sharon Harper: My goodness. Wow. Well, I mean, I would say that honestly… Okay, so I had a couple of conversations, and we're talking about 2004 now. So 2004 also, this is right after 2000 where we had the hanging chads in Florida.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: Yep.Lisa Sharon Harper: And we know how important voting is, because literally, I mean, I actually believe to this day that Gore actually won. And it's not just a belief, they actually counted after the fact, and found that he had won hundreds more ballots that were not counted in the actual election, in Florida. And so every single vote counts. Every single vote counts. So then in 2004 and by 2004, I'm the Director of Racial Reconciliation for greater LA in InterVarsity, I had done a summer mission project that wasn't really mission. It was actually more of a, it was a pilgrimage, actually. It was called the pilgrimage for reconciliation. The summer before, I had done the stateside pilgrimage. And then that summer, I led students on a pilgrimage through Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia asking the question, “How is shalom broken? And how is shalom built? How is it made?”And through both of those successive summer experiences, it became so clear to me, policy matters, and it matters with regard to Christian ethics. We can't say we are Christian and be, in other words, Christ-like if we are not concerned with how our neighbor is faring under the policies coming down from our government. We just can't. And as Christians in a democracy, specifically in America, in the US where we have a democracy, we actually have the expectation that as citizens, we will help shape the way that we live together. And our vote is what does that our vote when we vote for particular people, we're not just voting for who we like. We're voting for the policies they will pass or block. We're voting for the way we want to live together in the world.So in 2004 when I come back from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, I'm talking with some of my fellow staff workers, and I'm saying to them, “We have to have a conversation with our folks about voting. I mean, this election really matters. It's important. ”Because we had just come through the first few years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Iraq had just erupted a couple years before that, Afghanistan the year before that. And we were seeing young men coming back in body bags and this war, which had no plan to end, was sending especially young Black men to die because they were the ones…and I know, because I was in those schools when I was younger, and I alsohad been reading up on this.They're the ones who are recruited by the Marines and the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, especially the army, which is the cannon fodder. They're the ones who are on the front lines. They are recruited by them more than anybody else, at a higher degree than anybody else, a higher percentage ratio. So I was saying we have to have a conversation. And their response to me in 2004 was, “Oh, well, we can't do that, because we can't be political.” I said, “Well, wait, we are political beings. We live in a democracy.” To be a citizen is to help shape the way we live together in the world, and that's all politics is. It's the conversations we have and the decisions that we make about how we are going to live together.And so if we as Christians who have an ethic passed down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and we have the 10 Commandments, which is like the grand ethic of humanity, at least of the Abrahamic tradition. Then, if we don't have something to say about how we should be living together and the decisions we make about that every four years, every two years, even in off year elections, then what are we doing here?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: Who are we? Like, what is this faith? What is this Christian faith? So that was my first real rub, because I had experienced the pilgrimage to reconciliation. I had seen, I had rolled through. I had walked on the land where the decisions that the polis, the people had made, had killed people. It had led to the death of millions of people. Thousands of people in some case. Hundreds of people in other cases. But when coming back from Bosnia, it was millions. And so I was just very much aware of the reality that for Christians, politics matters because politics is simply the public exercise of our ethics, of our Christian ethic. And if we don't have one, then we're… honest, I just, I think that we are actually turning our backs on Jesus who spent his life telling us how to live.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And so that was, for me, literally that conversation with that staff worker was kind of my first, “Aha! I'm in the wrong place.” I needed to learn more about how this public work works. How do systems and structures and policies and laws work? So that's what actually brought me, ended up bringing me a year later, to Columbia University and getting my master's in human rights. And I knew, having had the background in the two pilgrimages and the work that we did on the biblical concept of shalom at the time, which was nascent. I mean, it was for me, it was, I barely, really barely, understood it. I just knew it wasn't what I had been taught. So I started digging into shalom at that time, and then learning about international law and human rights and how that works within the international systems.I came out of that with a much clearer view, and then continued to work for the next 13 years to really get at how our Christian ethics intersect with and can help, and have helped shape public policy. And that has led me to understand very clearly that we are complicit in the evil, and we also, as Christians, other streams of our faith are responsible for the redemption, particularly in America and South Africa and other places in the world.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think I'm placing myself in your story. So I think we intersected in that 2005, 2008 moment. So I've traveled with you.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, we had a good time. It was so much fun.Jonathan Walton: We did. It was very good. So getting to follow, watch, learn, just for me, has been a huge blessing. First with the book, with New York Faith and Justice, reading stuff with Sojourners, grabbing your books, gleaning different wisdom things for… it's something that I've wondered as I'm a little bit younger in the journey, like as you've operated in this world, in the White Evangelical world, and then still White Evangelical adjacent, operating in these faith spaces. And now with the platform that you have, you've had to exercise a lot of wisdom, a lot of patience and deciding to manage where you show up and when, how you use your time, how you manage these relationships and keep relationships along the way. Because you didn't drop people.Lisa Sharon Harper: I have. I have dropped a few [laughter]. I want to make that really clear, there is an appropriate space to literally shake the dust.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: I think what I have not seen you do is dehumanize the people in the places that you left.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, thank you. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And that's hard to do, because most people, particularly my generation, we see the bridge we just walked across, and we throw Molotov cocktails at that thing [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Y'all do. Your generation is like, “I'm out! And you're never gonna breathe again!” Like, “You're going down!” I'm like, “Oh my God…” [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's quite strong with us [laughs]. And so could you give any pieces of wisdom or things you've learned from God about navigating in that way. Things that we can and folks that are listening can hold on to as things shift, because they will shift and are shifting.Lisa Sharon Harper: They always shift, yeah, because we are not living on a book page. We're living in a world that moves and is fluid, and people change, and all the things. So I think that the best advice that I got, I actually got from Miroslav Volf. Dr. Miroslav Volf, who is a professor at Yale University, and he wrote the book that really kind of got me into, it was my first book that I ever read that was a book of theology, Exclusion&Embrace. And when we went to Croatia, we met with him. We met with him in the city of Zadar on the beach [laughs], literally over lunch. It was just an incredible privilege to sit down with him. And I've had many opportunities to connect with him since, which has been a privilege again, and just a joy.But he said to our group, our little InterVarsity group. And that's not at all to minimize InterVarsity, but we had a real inflated sense of who we were in the world. We thought we were everything, and we thought we were right about everything. And so here we are going through Croatia, which had just experienced a decade and a little bit before, this civil war. And it wasn't really a civil war, it was actually a war of aggression from Serbia into Croatia, and it was horrible. And it turned neighbor against neighbor in the same way that our civil war turned neighbor against neighbor. So literally, these towns, you literally had neighbors killing each other, you just were not safe.So basically, think Rwanda. The same thing that happened in Rwanda, around the same time had happened in Croatia. And so Miroslav is Croatian, and the lines by which things were drawn in Croatia was not race, because everybody was White. So the lines that they drew their hierarchy on was along the lines of religion. It was the Croats, which were mostly Catholic, mostly Christian. Some not Catholic, they might have been Evangelical, but they were Christian. And then you had the Bosniaks, which were Muslim, and the Serbs, which were Orthodox. So that was the hierarchy. And when you had Milošević, who was the president of Yugoslavia, who was trying to keep that Federation together, Yugoslavia was like an amalgamation of what we now understand to be Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.So he was trying to keep all of that together, and when he then crossed the lines, the boundary between Serbia and Croatia and invaded and just began to kill everybody, and the Serbs then went to his side, and the Croats went over here, and the Bosniaks were caught in the middle, and people just died. And they chose sides and they killed each other. And so we sat down to do lunch with Miroslav Volf, and in that context, interfaith conversation was critical. It was and is, it continues to be. One of the main markers of where you find healing, it's where you find interfaith conversation in Croatia and also Bosnia and Serbia. And so we, in our little Evangelical selves, we're not used to this interfaith thing.We think of that as compromising. We think of that as, “How can you talk to people and gain relationship with and actually sit down and…?” And he was challenging us to study this scripture with other people of other faiths, and study their scriptures. He was like, “Do that.” And so our people were like, “How can you do that and not compromise your faith?” And here's what he said. He said, “It's easy. Respect. It's respect, respecting the image of God in the other, the one who is not like me. That I, when I sit down and I read their scriptures with them, allowing them to tell me what their scriptures mean.” Not sitting in a classroom in my Evangelical church to learn what the Muslim scriptures say, but sitting down with Imams to understand what the Muslim scriptures say and how it's understood within the context of that culture.That's called respect for the image of God. And there's no way, no way for us to knit ourselves together in a society, to live together in the world without respect. That's baseline. That's baseline.Jonathan Walton: As I'm listening, I'm thinking, “Okay, Lisa made choices.” She was like, “We are gonna not just do a trip. We're gonna do a trip in Croatia.” And so as you're going on these trips, as you were having these conversations, you're making choices. There's decisions being made around you, and then you get to the decision making seat. And how that discernment around where to place your energy happens. So something that's at the top of mind for me and many people listening is Palestine.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, yeah.Jonathan Walton: So how did you decide at this moment that, “Hey,this is where my energy and time is coming. I'm going to Christ at the Checkpoint. I'm going to talk with Munther. I'm going to be there.”How did that rise to the surface for you?Lisa Sharon Harper: It's funny, because I have, really have been advised, and in the very first days of the conflict, I was advised by some African American leaders, “Don't touch this. Don't do it. You're going to be blacklisted.”Jonathan Walton: I heard the same thing, yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: “Don't do it. You're gonna find you're not invited to speak anywhere.” Da da da da. Sometimes these decisions are just made to say, “I am going to act in the world as if I don't know what the repercussions are, and I'm just going to do the thing, because my focus is not focused on the repercussions.” I mean, in some ways, in that way, I do think that my constitution is the constitution of a warrior. Warriors go to battle knowing that bullets are flying all around them, and they just choose to go forward anyway. Somebody who cared, and not just cared, but I think there's a moment where you begin to understand it's that moment of no turning back. It's the moment when you stand at the freshly buried graves of 5000 Muslim boys and men who were killed all in one day by bullet fire in Srebrenica.It's the moment that you drive through Bosnia and you see all of the graves everywhere. Everywhere, especially in Sarajevo, which experienced a siege, a multiyear siege by Serbia. And they turned the soccer field, which at one point was the focal point of the Sarajevo Olympic Games, they turned that into a graveyard because they ran out of space for the graves. When you roll through Georgia, and you go to Dahlonega, Georgia, and you go to the Mining Museum, which marks the very first gold rush in America, which was not in California, but was in Dahlonega, Georgia, on Cherokee land, and you hear the repercussions of people's silence and also complicity.When they came and they settled, they made a decision about how we should live together, and it did not include, it included the erasure of Cherokee people and Choctaw people and Chickasaw people, Seminole people, Creek people. And you walk that land, and the land tells you. It's so traumatic that the land still tells the story. The land itself tells the story. The land bears witness. When you stand on that land and the land tells you the story, there's a moment that just happens where there's no turning back and you have to bear witness to the truth, even with bullets flying around you. So with regard to Palestine, having done what now goodness, 20 years of research on this biblical concept called shalom, and written the book, The Very Good Gospel, which really lays it out in a systematic way.I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. Two thirds. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. I mean, massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire. So we actually need international law. We need the instruments of international law. That's what stopped the war there. And they failed there too, but they also have been an intrinsic part of keeping the peace and also prosecuting Milošević. Solike making sure that some measure of justice on this earth happens, some shadow of it.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And what are we told in scripture in Micah 6:8, walk humbly with God. Do justice. Embrace the truth. So I think that when I saw on October 7, the breach of the wall, the breach of the gate and then the massacre at the festival, I grieved. I really grieved. And I was scared, really scared for the nation of Israel, for the people who were there. And I began to ask questions, because I've learned the discipline of not dehumanizing. Because to dehumanize is to break shalom. It's one of the first things that happens in the breaking of shalom and the eradication of it. And so part of what I had to do if I was going to consider Palestinian people human was to ask what has happened to them that would cause them to take such violent and radical action. How did we get here? Is the question.And the narrative that I heard from Israel, from the state of Israel, from the leaders of the state of Israel, which had been marched against by their own people just the week before that, and weeks for like a month or two before that, they were trying to depose the leadership of Israel because they were trying to turn their state into a fascist state. I was watching that as well. Trying to take the power of the judiciary away so that they could increase the power of the Prime Minister. So what does it mean then? What does it mean that this happened? And I was listening to the way that the narrative that Netanyahu was giving and his generals and the narrative they were giving is, “These are monsters. They are terrorists. They are evil. They are intrinsically, they are not human.”And I knew when I saw that, when I heard that, I thought Bosnia. I thought Rwanda, where they called the other cockroaches. I thought South Africa, where they called Black people not human, monsters, who need to be controlled. I thought Native Americans, who were called savages in order to be controlled, in order to have the justification of genocide. I thought of people of African descent who were brought in death ships across the Atlantic to South America and Central America and Mexico and North America in order to be used to build European wealth and they were called non-human. And even according to our own laws, our constitution declared three fifths of a human being.So when I heard Netanyahu and his generals dehumanizing the Palestinians, I knew, that for me was like the first signal, and it happened on the first day. It was the first signal that we are about to witness a genocide. They are preparing us. They are grooming us to participate in genocide. And I, as a theologian, as an ethicist, as a Christian, would lose my credibility if I remained silent and became complicit in that genocide through my silence. Because having studied the genocides that I mentioned earlier and the oppressions that I mentioned earlier, I know that most of those spaces were Christian spaces.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And they happened, those genocides and those oppressions were able to happen because Christians were silent.Jonathan Walton: Gathering all that up, I think… I mean, we've had Munther on this podcast, we've talked with him throughout the years. When he said, “The role of Christians is to be prophetic, to speak prophetic truth to power,” something clicked for me in that as you're talking about our witness being compromised, as you are saying, “Hey, let's ask this question, who does this benefit? What is happening?”Lisa Sharon Harper: That's right.Jonathan Walton: The reality that he said, “All of us are Nathan when it comes to empire. We are supposed to be the ones who say this is wrong.” And that resonates with what you said, like how can I have integrity and be silent? Genocide necessitates silence and complicity in that way from people.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And here's the thing. How are you gonna go to church and sing worship songs to Jesus on Sunday and be silent Monday through Saturday witnessing the slaying of the image of God on earth. You hear what I'm saying?Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Like my understanding of shalom now is not just we do these things in order to be nice and so we live together. It is that shalom is intricately connected with the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: It is the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And the kingdom of God flourishes wherever the image of God flourishes. And the image of God is born by every single human being. And part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that humans who are made in the image of God exercise agency, stewardship of the world. And the most drastic example or practice of warfare against the image of God is war.Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. Absolutely.Lisa Sharon Harper: War annihilates the image of God on earth. It is a declaration of war, not only on Palestinians or Gazans or even Israel or the empire anywhere. It is a declaration of war against God. It is a declaration of war against God.Sy Hoekstra: A phrase that has stuck in my head about you was from one of the endorsements to your last book Fortune. Jemar Tisby described you as a long-distance runner for justice.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That's awesome.Sy Hoekstra: That always struck me as accurate.Jonathan Walton: That is great.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Not a sprinter.Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: Not a sprinter.Lisa Sharon Harper: That was really pretty cool. I was like, “Oh Jemar, thank you.” [laughter]Jonathan Walton: I need that. We just in here. That's great [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So here's the question then, where does your hope and sustenance, how do you get that? Where does it come from?Lisa Sharon Harper: Honestly, it comes from focusing on the kingdom. Focusing on Jesus. Focusing on doing the kingdom of God. And when you do it you witness it. And when you witness it, you get hope. I mean, I've learned, even in the last year, an actual life lesson for me was hope comes in the doing. Hope comes in the doing. So as we do the kingdom, we gain hope. As we show up for the protests so that we confront the powers that are slaying the image of God on earth, we gain hope. As we speak out against it and form our words in ways that do battle with the thinking that lays the groundwork for ethics of erasure, we gain hope because we're doing it. We see the power.The kingdom of God exists wherever there are people who actually bow to the ethic of God. Who do it. Who do the ethic of God. You can't say you believe in Jesus and not actually do his ethic. You don't believe in him. What do you believe? He never said, “Believe stuff about me.” He said, “Follow me.” He literally never said, “Believe stuff about me.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: He said, “Follow me. Do what I do. ”And that's ethics. That's the question of, how do we live together in the world?? So we do and we gain hope.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: I like that. That reminds me of Romans 5: There'll be glory in our suffering. Suffering produces perseverance, character, and character hope. It's like, it's not an intuitive thing necessarily, if you haven't done it before. But that's great, and that's a really, I like that a lot as a place for us to end [laughs]. To get out there and do it, and you will find the hope as you go.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell us where people can find you or work that you would want people to see of yours?Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely. Well, hey, first of all, thank you guys so much for having me on, and it's been really a joy to start my day in conversation with you. Y'all can follow what I'm up to at Lisasharonharper.com. I live on Instagram, and so you can [laughter], you can definitely follow on Instagram and Facebook. And Freedom Road Podcast is a place where a lot of people have found the conversation and are tracking with it. And I'm always trying to have guests on that are pushing me and causing me to ask deeper questions. And so I really, I welcome you to join us on Freedom Road.Sy Hoekstra: Yes. I wholeheartedly second that.Lisa Sharon Harper: And of course, the books [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And of course, the books.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Fortune, Very Good Gospel, all the rest.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, exactly.Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a delight.Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much.Lisa Sharon Harper: Thank you Sy. Thank you, Jonathan.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, that was a fantastic discussion. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it?Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think one, is just it's just really helpful to talk with someone who's been around for a while. I think most of us… I'm 38 years old, but let's just say millennials and younger, we don't consume or receive a lot of long form content.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: And we don't also engage with people who are willing and able to mentor us through difficult situations. We're getting sound bites from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and we don't get the whole of knowledge or experiences. So listening to Lisa talk about, “I grabbed this bit from L.A., I grabbed this bit from Palestine, I grabbed this bit from Croatia, I grabbed this bit.” We cannot microwave transformation. We cannot have instant growth. There is no, let me go through the side door of growing to maturity in my faithfulness and walk with Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: There is just doing it. And so when she said, “I find the hope in the doing,” you don't learn that unless you have done stuff. That's a big takeaway. I also appreciated just her take on the genocide in Palestine. And because she was mentored and has talked with Miroslav Volf, she knows what it smells like, because she's done the work in her own history of her own background. If you have not read Fortune, go read the book. The reason Black folks cannot find who we [laughs] come from is because they were enslaved and killed. The reason we cannot find the indigenous and native folks we were related to is because there was genocide. So there's these things.And she goes through that in her book, and to talk about how to wield our stories when we don't have one, or how to wield a story of tragedy to turn it into something transformative, is something I admire, appreciate and hope that I can embody if and when the time comes for myself, when I have collected and grown and have asked similar questions. I'm appreciative of what she had to say. And you know, I know I asked her the question about not burning things down, and so I appreciated that [laughs] answer as well. Like, there's just a lot of wisdom, and I hope that folks listening were able to glean as well.Sy Hoekstra: I totally agree with all that. I think all that was very powerful. And there isn't it… kind of reminds me of when her book we've mentioned a few times, The Very Good Gospel, came out. It came out in 2016, but like I said, when we were talking to her, the stuff that was in that book she had been thinking about for more than a decade at that point. And it was very clear. When I was reading it, I was like, “Oh, this is Lisa's bag—this is what she was talking to us about when we were in college in 2008.”Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: At that camp, but she'd been thinking about it for even longer than that. It was just like, you can tell when something isn't like, “Oh, I had to research this because I was gonna write a book about it, so I had to learn about it.” You know what I mean? You can tell when someone does that versus when someone's been soaking in a subject. It's like marinating in it for 12, 15, years, or whatever it was. She just has a lot of that stuff [laughs]. You know what? I just used the image of marinating and marinating and microwaving are very different things [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes, that is true.Sy Hoekstra: One takes a lot longer.Jonathan Walton: Put a steak in a microwave, see if you enjoy it [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I totally agree with all that. I came out of it thinking a lot about how the things that she said thematically kind of connected to some thoughts that I've had, but also just in terms of historical events. Because I told her this after the interview, when I moved to Switzerland in 2001 I was 13, my family moved over there. It was just at the end of the Yugoslavian Civil War, which was what she was talking about Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia. And Switzerland took in a ton of refugees from that war.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So my neighborhood, there was a big apartment complex. I mean, big for Swiss standards, kind of small honestly for American standards. But there's an apartment complex around the corner from my house that they had put a bunch of Bosnian refugees in. And their school was right down the road, the public school. And so my neighborhood in high school was like the kids playing around in the streets and in the playground or whatever were Bosnian refugees. And the combination of the three countries, Serbian, Croatia and Bosnia, used to be one big thing called Yugoslavia, right.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the first two syllables of the word Yugoslavia were in Switzerland, a slur for anyone who was from that country. And there was just a ton of bigotry toward them, basically because they displayed poverty [laughter]. Like they were one of the most visible groups of poor people in Zurich. And again, like Lisa said, this wasn't about racism. Everybody's White. But you're talking about like there were ethnic differences and there was class differences. And people dismissed them for their criminality, or for how the young men would get in fights in bars and on the streets or whatever, and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know how a lot of refugees from the Somalian war ended up in Minneapolis and St Paul, just like where a lot of them were placed in the US, and then a lot of them moved into North Dakota.It's like, a lot of… which is where my family's from. I've been there a lot. I hear a lot of people talking about the politics in that region. And you would hear similar stuff about them, except that it was about race. That it was, “Oh, we have crime now because we have Black people and we haven't before.” I mean, obviously Minneapolis, they did, but not really in the parts of North Dakota that my family's from. And so it was this lesson for me about the thing that Lisa was talking about, respect for the image of God in all people and how when you bring people who are somehow differentiable [laughter] from you, somebody who's from another grid, you can call them a different class, a different race, whatever, we will find any excuse to just say, “Oh, these are just bad people,” instead of taking responsibility for them, loving our neighbor, doing any of the stuff that we were commanded to do by Jesus, to the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant in our midst.We will find whatever dividing lines we can to write people off. It can be race, it can be poverty, it can be, it doesn't matter. It's not what we should actually be saying about poverty or violence, or the fact that people are getting mugged or whatever. What we should be saying is we have a bunch of people who just got here from a war torn society. They were cut off from education and job skills and opportunities and all kinds of other things. And this is, when you just stick them in a society that treats them like garbage, this is what happens every single time, without fail. And so what we need to do is [laughter] be good neighbors.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Treat people well and forgive when people wrong us and that sort of thing. And we just will find any excuse in the world not to do that. And it's because we are not starting from that place that Miroslav Volf, who I love by the way, said to Lisa, is the place where you have to start everything when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, which is respect for the image of God in other people. The fact that they didn't do that in Yugoslavia led to slaughter en masse, but it still happens when you leave and you put yourself in a different context. There's still that lack of respect, and it's still harming people, even when there's quote- unquote, peace.Jonathan Walton: This opens up another can of worms. But I thought to myself…Sy Hoekstra: Go for it.Jonathan Walton: …it's much easier to say, “I just don't want to help,” than it is to say, “This person's evil,” or, “These people are bad.” Because I think at the core of it, someone says, “Is this your neighbor?” Jesus says, “Is this your neighbor?” And the Jewish leader of the day does not want to help the Samaritan, whatever the reasoning is. Right?Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: We're trying to justify our innate desire to not help our neighbor. As opposed to just dealing with the reality that many of us, when we see people who are broken and messed up, quote- unquote broken, quote- unquote messed up, quote- unquote on the opposite side of whatever power dynamic or oppressive structure that is set up or has just made, quote- unquote poor choices, some of us, our gut reaction is, I don't want to help them. And if we would just, I think just stop there, be like, “My first inclination is, I'm not interested in helping them.” And paused it there and reflected on why we don't want to do that internally, as opposed to turning towards them and making them the reason. Because they were just sitting there.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The person on the street who's experiencing homelessness was just sitting there. The one in 10 students in New York City that is homeless is just sitting there. They're just there. And so if we were able to slow down for a second and say, “Why don't I want this person to live in my neighborhood, in my own stuff? Well, I don't like change. I'm afraid of this being different. I'm uncomfortable with different foods. I'm afraid of my favorite coffee shop or restaurant being taken away. I'm uncomfortable around people of different faiths. I feel weird when I don't hear my language being spoken.” If we were able to turn those reflections inward before we had uncomfortable feelings, turned them into actions, and then justified those actions with theology that has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus, then I wonder what would be different. But that that slowing down is really hard, because it's easier to feel the feeling, react, and then justify my reaction with a divine mandate.Sy Hoekstra: Or just plug those feelings into stereotypes and all of the existing ways of thinking about people that we provide for each other so that we can avoid doing that very reflection.Jonathan Walton: That's all that I thought about there [laughs]. I'm going to be thinking about that for a while actually. So Sy, which tab is still open for you? We're going to talk about a segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And remember, you can get this newsletter for free just by signing up for our mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts and other media that both of us have found that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus you'll get reflections to keep us grounded, from me and Sy that help keep us grounded every week as we engage in just this challenging work and together in the news about what's happening and all that.You can get everything I'm just talking about at KTFPress.com and more. So go get that free subscription at KTFPress.com. So Sy, want to summarize that main story point for us?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, because when I wrote about this, which is the story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, it was two days after the debate, and the story has only exploded since then, and I think a lot of people kind of probably have the gist of it already. But some completely unfounded rumors based on fourth hand nonsense and some blurry pictures of people that have nothing whatsoever to do with Haitian immigrants started spreading online among right wing conspiracy theorists saying, for some reason, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Stealing, kidnapping and eating the resident's pets.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And the absurdity of this story was immediately apparent to me being someone who married into a Haitian immigrant family, Haitians do not eat cats and dogs [laughs]. It's a ridiculous thing to have to say, but I say it because I understand, maybe you have no, maybe you know nothing whatsoever about Haiti and you think, “Well, I don't know. There are some cultures around the world where they eat animals that we think of as pets or that we don't think of as food or whatever.” And like, okay, fine, that's true. It's not Haiti, though.Jonathan Walton: Right [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: The idea of eating a cat or a dog to a Haitian is as weird to them as it is to us. I promise you, I've had so much Haitian food [laughter]. So basically this rumor spread, Donald Trump mentions that the debates and now there are Proud Boys in Springfield, Ohio, marching around with cat posters and memes. There are people calling in bomb threats to schools and to government buildings, to all other institutions in Springfield. The Haitian population is very afraid of Donald Trump. At this point, we're recording this on Friday, September 20, he has said that he will travel to Springfield, and basically everyone there has said, “Please do not do that. You're only going to stoke more problems.”And every last piece of evidence that has been offered as evidence, which was always pretty weak in the first place, has been debunked at this point. There was one, the Vance campaign just recent, the past couple days, gave a police report to the Washington Post and said, “See, we found it. Here's a woman who actually filed a police report that says that my Haitian neighbors took my cat and ate my cat.” And the Washington Post did what, for some reason Republicans never expect journalists to do, and actually did their job and called up the woman who said, “Oh, yeah, I filed that report, and then I found my cat in my basement, and they were fine.” [laughs]Jonathan Walton: Yes. In her house.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And so I don't know, there have been a couple of blips like that where somebody is like, “See, I found evidence,” and then someone was immediately like, “That's not actually evidence.” There have been rumors of other rallies or whatever. It's basically just becoming a focal point and a meme for all of Trump and his supporters, immigration resentment.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: There was a story today about people in Alabama being concerned about, some small town in Alabama being concerned about becoming the next Springfield because they had 60 Haitian immigrants in their town of 12,000 people [laughs]. I don't know. It's all just bizarre. The main actual point though, around the actual immigration policy stuff, Gabrielle and a few other people, my wife's name is Gabrielle, and a few other Haitians that I've seen comment on this, keep bringing up the Toni Morrison quote about how racism is a distraction from actual issues.Jonathan Walton: That is literally what I was gonna read.Sy Hoekstra: There you go. Okay [laughs]. So the actual issue here is that there's this community of about 60,000 people in Ohio that has had an influx of about 15,000 Haitian immigrants, and so it's a lot of strain on the schools and housing and stuff like that, which those are real questions. But also, the Haitian immigrants are there because the local economy revitalization efforts led to a bunch of manufacturers coming into Springfield and having more jobs than laborers, and explicitly saying, “We need you to bring in more laborers.” And so they were Haitian immigrants who are legally in the country [laughs], who have social security numbers and temporary protected status at the very least if not green cards or whatever, have been filling these jobs, and not remotely even a majority of these jobs.They're just filling in the extra 10, 15 percent or whatever the workforce that these manufacturers thought they needed. And the story has become, “Haitians are taking our jobs,” which is absolute nonsense.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So those are the main points of the story. Sorry, I talked a while. I have a lot of feelings about this one [laughs].Jonathan Walton: No, I mean…Sy Hoekstra: But Jonathan, what are your thoughts?Jonathan Walton: For a good reason. Let me just say this quote by Toni Morrison, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, and you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” So along with that Toni Morrison quote, I want to put that side by side with this quote from Robert Jones Jr.'s National Book of the Year, The Prophets.“To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by the Toubab.” Toubab is a Western and Central African word for colonizer, European. “They push people into the mud and then call them filthy. They forbade people from accessing knowledge of the world, and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted and bleeding and can do no more, than they called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs, and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts and called the pieces savages. They stepped on people's throats with all of their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.”“And then when people made an attempt to break the foot or cut it off one they screamed, “Chaos,” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order. They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry a stain. They bled the color from God's face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then when they were done breaking things, they pointed to the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin, [black]. And then the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel's [or Black] people. Especially some of Samuel's people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn't a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.”That to me, like those two quotes together. So the Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr, great follow on Substack and that quote from Toni Morrison, an iconic Black female writer, wrote Beloved, The Bluest Eye, those two things together, like what racism does to a person. The giving up, the I just, “What can I do?” and the distraction for the people who do have effort, are just two roads that I wish we just didn't have to go down. But most people will spend our energy either resigned because we've spent too much or pushing against the lie as the powers that be continue to carry out genocide, continue to extract limestone from Haiti, continues to extract resources from Haiti, continue to destroy African economies through extraction in the Congo and Benin and all the places.And so my prayer and longing is that the resilience of the Haitian people and the legacy of Toussaint and all of that would be present in the people that are there and the diaspora. And I believe that is true. And I pray for safety for all of the people that still have to live in this, what is fastly becoming a sundown town.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: It's a very real thing. And I talked to someone else. Oh, actually [laughs], it was a DM on Instagram that I sent to Brandy, and she agreed that there's a lot of PTSD from when Trump was president, because things like this got said every day.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: All the time. And downstream of rhetoric are real actions, like lawyers and taxi drivers being mobilized to go to the airport to try and get the, quote- unquote, Muslim banned people now representation and get them to their destinations. You had very real terrible child separation that happened, that children are still separated from their families right now. And so downstream of all this stuff, are real, real concrete actions. And I am praying that… my daughter asked me this morning, Maya, she said, “Do I want Trump to win, or do I want Harris to win?” And I said, “Maya, I hope that Trump does not win.” She goes “Well, if Harris wins, will it be better?”I said, “It depends on who you ask, but I think there will be a better chance for us to move towards something more helpful if Trump does not win.” And then she said she knew some people who are supportive of Trump, and I told her things that her eight year old brain cannot handle.Sy Hoekstra: But wait, what does that mean? [laughs]Jonathan Walton: I just started breaking down why that is because I couldn't help myself.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, why people support him.Jonathan Walton: Why people would support him.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, okay.Jonathan Walton: And then she quickly pivoted back to Story Pirates, which is a wonderful podcast about professional improvisational actors telling kid stories like Cecily Strong and things like that. It's hilarious. But all that to say, I think this is a prime example of the type of chaos and environment that is created when someone like Trump is president and the cameras are on him at all times. And I hope that is not the reality, because he absolutely does not have any meaningful policy positions besides Project 2025. I don't know if you saw… I'm talking a lot. He was in a town hall in Michigan, and someone asked him what his child care policies were. Like what actionable policy does he have? And he said a word salad and a buffet of dictionaries that you don't know what he was talking about.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It was nonsense that somehow ended up with immigration being a problem.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so I think that the worst factions of our country will have a vehicle to live out their worst fantasies about deportations and violence and racism, White supremacy and patriarchy and all those things, if he becomes president. And that's really sad to me, and I think it's a preview of that is what's happening in Springfield right now.Sy Hoekstra: Here's another angle on this. And it fits into everything you just said, but it's just from a different angle, bringing a little bit of Haitian history here. The Haitian Revolution is probably, I can't say that I've read everything to guarantee this, is probably the greatest act of defiance against White supremacy that the world has ever seen. For those who don't know, it happened right after the American Revolution, it was just the enslaved people of the island of Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti in the Dominican Republic, rising up and overthrowing the French and taking the island for themselves and establishing, like writing the world's second written constitution and establishing basically the world's second democracy.Really the world's first actual democracy [laughs] if you think about how American democracy was restricted to a very small group of people. If you read things that people in colonial governments or slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere wrote and like when they spoke to each other about their fears over the next decades before slavery is abolished, Haiti is constantly on their minds.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: They never stop talking about it. It's actually mentioned in some of the declarations of secession before the Civil War. When the states wrote why they were seceding, it was like, “Because the Union wants Haiti to happen to us.” For the plantation owners to be killed. It was an obsession, and so the colonial powers in Europe, you may have read some of the work that the New York Times did in the New York Times Magazine last year, maybe it was two years ago, about this. But the amount of energy from European powers that went into making sure that Haiti as a country never had access to global markets or the global economy, that they were constantly impoverished.They were still finding ways to extract money from Haiti, even though it was an independent country. The fact that the US colonized Haiti for almost 20 years in the early 20th century, like the ways that we have controlled who is in power in their government from afar. We've propped up some of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, honestly. We have been punishing and making sure that everybody knows that the defiance of white supremacy that Haiti showed will never be tolerated.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And so it is so easy for Haitians at every stage to become a scapegoat for whatever anxiety we have about the world becoming less White, the world becoming less of like under our control. Haitian immigrants were the reason that we started using Guantanamo Bay as a prison. They were the first people that we ever imprisoned there. We changed our policies, we like… Do you know for a long time, they wouldn't let Haitian people donate blood in America?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Because we said they'd had HIV. They had dirty blood, is what we said about them for years. Haiti is not at the bottom because of its choice. That's what we're constantly telling ourselves. Pat Robertson went on his show after the earthquake in 2010, and said the reason that these things still happen to Haiti is because they did Voodoo before their revolution, because they're pagans or whatever. We will make up any reason to not just take responsibility. Again, like with the Bosnians, the Somalis, we make up any reason to not just take responsibility for our actions.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And this is just a continuation of that. And I don't know that I have a further point beyond that, other than to say, everything that Trump and Vance and the Proud Boys and all of them are doing in Springfield right now is just a continuation of that. “You're immigrants that we will call illegal, even though you're not right and you are Black. Your whole pride in your culture and your history is about the way that you defied White supremacy, and you're foreign to us, and you are strange. And we will say that you do things like eat cats that you don't do, and we will just believe it, because we don't actually want to know anything about you other than that you are a monster who defies the way that the world should be ordered.”Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: I'm trying to stop myself from tearing up right now, and I don't know that I have points beyond this. Do you know what I mean? I'm just angry because this is like people, this is my wife and my daughter. I'm probably just taking time now to do what I should have done earlier in this process, which is just feel all the sadness and the anger. But that is what I feel. The Trump and Vance and the people that are a part of his movement are just horrifying. The fruit of their way of seeing the world is just evil, and I think that's where I'm leaving it for now [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. And the very thing that Haitian people are called, evil, voodoo all those things, is what White supremacy is.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: That is evil, and that is wicked, and it has been at work for centuries. And in Jesus name, as Connie Anderson would pray in the work she does with White people around White supremacy and leaving that behind, and she says she just prays that it would be overthrown. That demonic power would be overthrown, and people would be disobedient to that leaning.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I pray the same would be true for many, many people before and after the polls close on November the 5th.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So in the newsletter, I put an email address where you could send a PayPal donation to the local Haitian community center. We'll have a link to that in the show notes too. The Haitians on the ground, especially some of the pastors and the churches there, are doing some incredible work to try and keep the peace. I think people have been overlooking that. There was a decent Christianity Today article on kind of what's going on the ground in Ohio, but it really focused on what the local White churches are doing to help [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I really need people to focus on the Haitians, like what is actually happening there, and the fact that there are White supremacists marching around the town. And how terrifying that has to be for them, and how the people who are doing the work to keep the peace there are heroic, and they should not have to be. And they deserve all of our support and all our prayers. So I appreciate anything that you can, any intercession that you can do, any money that you can give. Any support that you can be. Any help that you can be just spreading the truth to people who may not be wanting to hear it or who might not be hearing it from their news sources right now,Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: We're gonna end there, then. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and support everything we're doing, the media that we're making here. Get the bonus episodes to this show, come to our monthly Zoom calls to have a chat with me and Jonathan about everything that's going on in the election. Bring us your questions, get access to comments on our posts and more pl

This is a very special episode of Dead Pilots Society. It's our interview with Damir and Dario Konjicija, and in it, you'll hear perhaps the most interesting Hollywood origin story we've ever encountered. Damir and Dario discuss their journey from being Bosnian refugees to arriving in America in 1997 and falling in love with American television. They talk about starting school in America as Bosnian immigrants, how they quickly found their artistic passion, and the pact they made to move to Los Angeles and try to make it. They also discuss their humble beginnings in Los Angeles, how they started writing together, and the development of their pilot I Hate Myself. This is a terrific interview that we know you're going to love.For more Dead Pilots Society episodes and information about our live shows, please subscribe to the podcast!Make sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, and Twitter, and visit our website at deadpilotssociety.com

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to one of the world's greatest empires, in June 1914, set in motion a series of events that would culminate in the First World War, where more than 15 million people would lose their lives. Franz Ferdinand's assassin, Gavrilo Princip, did not share the same illustrious lineage. A Bosnian serb of humble origins who dreamed of a greater Yugoslavia, he was prepared to do anything to help advance his cause, and free his country from the clutches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire… Join Tom and Dominic in the first part of our series on history's most consequential assassination, as they dive into rural Serbia, early 1900s Sarajevo, and the life of Gavrilo Princip, a boy who would join the Black Hand, a sinister, mysterious underground organisation, and sow the seeds of world war with two shots of his gun. _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York.  *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history's greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices