habibti please nashwa lina khan

This week Habibiti Please is focused on a favorite topic of the show: disarmament. Nashwa and Geneviève host Jeremy Corbyn and Paul Rogers in advance of Selling Death: Why the International Arms Trade Must be Controlled, an upcoming event hosted by Egypt Watch and Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project. Join Jeremy Corbyn, Paul Rogers, and Geneviève at the event on Saturday, July 17th, 2021, at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and 4 p.m. London time here. 

We discuss the Peace and Justice Project, an initiative that works to bring people together for social and economic justice, peace, and human rights in Britain and across the world.

This episode explores the arms trade and why we must move towards disarmament. The international arms trade fuels forever wars, bloody occupations, and the military-industrial complex. The detritus of war and occupation will linger long after militaries leave the countries they ravage. As this episode highlights, COVID-19 serves as a canary in the coal mine; a warning for how things can only get worse if change does not happen now. A virus cannot be nuked, yet the rush to create and sell arms from the imperial core has continued without challenge even during the pandemic. 

The Corbyn Peace and Justice Project illustrates why domestic and international problems and injustices cannot be separated. We also explore how we build solidarity beyond borders and across communities. 

This episode also draws links between the arms trade, the climate crisis, and other ongoing struggles, including the growing number of refugees. Industrialists selling weapons and war promoters are akin to the mythical hydra, where chopping off one head sprouts another. This hydra is a monster, directly supported by Western governments. And blowback is to be expected. Continued death and destruction fuelled by the imperial core through tradecraft will have global consequences,

Forward-looking movements are needed now. Join Egypt Watch and Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project for Selling Death: Why the International Arms Trade Must be Controlled this Saturday on July 17th. We look forward to seeing you there. Now, more than ever, we must stand in solidarity to stop our governments from funding mass death throughout the world. 

Head over to thecorbynproject.com/armscontrol to sign up for Saturday’s event. 

Habibti Please is proud to be part of the Harbinger Media Network and we are grateful to partner with Canadian Dimension on this episode.

Organizations to check out: 

Egypt Watch 

Egypt Watch is a media services company based in London and was founded in 2019 by Osama Gaweesh, a well known Egyptian journalist and TV Presenter.

Their mission is to put Egypt under the international spotlight and to raise global awareness about the declining situation in Egypt; to advocate for freedom of press, for human rights, and for upholding democracy. 

Corbyn Peace and Justice Project 

An organization founded by longtime activist for social justice and former Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to bring people together for social and economic justice, peace, and human rights, in Britain and across the world.

The Event

Selling Death: Why the International Arms Trade Must be Controlled

War is big business. The international arms trade is worth hundreds of billions, and arms deals brokered by the rich and the powerful continue to extend human misery around the world. 

The UK is the world’s second-largest arms exporter in the world, fuelling conflicts like the war in Yemen which has claimed a quarter of a million lives to date. 

We must come together across borders and backgrounds to fight back against this economy of war and suffering, and demand real security for all. 

The Peace and Justice Project is proud to support Egypt Watch’s upcoming event: Selling Death: Why the International Arms Trade Must be Controlled, an international conference that aims to shed light on the horrific abuses of the arms

Two weeks ago hundreds of police officers and parapolice descended upon Trinity Bellwoods park in Toronto to violently evict the residents living there, displacing people from their homes and severing communities. Toronto has been cruel and brutal to the people living in this city. The austerity measures put in place using the pandemic as an excuse for imposing cruelty will not suddenly dissipate after the pandemic “ends.” It is important to note how the pandemic continues to ravage other places in the world. Many are under the illusion that it is near the end because of the inequitable global vaccine rollout and apartheid. While companies thrived, many have died. 

This episode was done in collaboration with the Encampment Support Network (ESN) in Toronto. We worked with Charlotte, an outreach volunteer with ESN. We discussed the evictions at Lamport Stadium that took place in May which involved a bulldozer to forcibly remove residents. 

Throughout the pandemic Encampment Support Network Toronto has provided help for people in encampment sites. Right now in the city, there is increasing pressure to re-open, and we must reckon with what reopening and “back to normal” means for those most disenfranchised. 

Public officials informed the “general public” to socially distance, while at the same time pushing unhoused people to live in crowded shelters and shelter hotels where the virus was spreading and killing. There are a number of obscene contradictions like this that reveal how people in power intentionally make others live in deplorable conditions to die.

The lives of unhoused people do not matter to Mayor John Tory and downtown City Councillor Joe Cressy. Although many have known this for far too long, it has again become blatantly obvious this week. Who we let live and who we let die speaks volumes about our society and cities. Depredation and violence by capitalists and the governments that back them were fully demonstrated viscerally throughout the pandemic and should not be surprising. The pandemic again brought this out revealing sores in the underbelly of Toronto brought about by austerity measures. Entire populations are subjected to death and disease by choice. 

Laid bare by the pandemic are the conditions which have always existed for those marginalized by the state. Capitalism is functioning as it should be, and the pandemic has only accelerated its efficiency. The proliferation of narratives by people like high-ranking public servant Brad Ross claiming the park was “dirty” continues to push the selective disposal of human beings. They want you to imagine that people who live in encampments are unclean but also disposable; not worthy of public space or full lives.  As Zoë Dodd posted, “people are not garbage.”

As Dodd and many others have pointed out these were people’s homes. 

Dodd also reminds us how violence is a spectacle and more specifically how words like “safety” are weaponized against those who are cash poor. Parks are public spaces and necessary. Parks are a space of life, however, the City appears to only want some to enjoy parks while others must be dispossessed of public space. 

As Alex V. Green reminds us, parks are a site and space for so much life. 

The violent clearing events at Trinity Bellwoods serve as a harbinger. Austerity and privatization are in full effect as the means with exterminism as the goal. It is reasonable to expect that the new austerity and security measures are here to stay “post” pandemic. The city attempted media rehabilitation after images of the full force of their violence turned public opinion against their immorality,  claiming there were public health issues and that people in the encampment were offered housing. This is false: only one individual was offered housing. It is important that we cut to the truth and do not cast doubt on the City of Toronto’s violence and injustice by their spin and narratives. 

This episo

Listen now | In this episode, Nashwa and Ryan sit down with Andrea Horwath, MPP for Hamilton-Centre and the Leader of the Official Opposition New Democrats.  Please note this episode was recorded in mid-March. Nashwa and Ryan contextualize this episode with an extensive pre-show- if you do not want to listen to the pre-show please forward this episode to the interview that begins at around 26 minutes.In this interview Nashwa and Ryan wanted the audience to learn more about Andrea and the Ontario New Democrats. This episode focused on provincial issues such as the vaccine rollout. The rollout continues to be a disservice to Ontarians as many have witnessed egregious lines at pop-ups and people rely on a community-driven twitter feed for information about the vaccines. 

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Listen now | On the inaugural Harbinger Society Presents live recording it's an evening of history and hard questions on Canadian exceptionalism as Nashwa Khan and Shaadie Ali of Habibti Please and Deathnography's Henry Lee join host Andre Goulet for a conversation on Vincent Bevins' excellent 2020 book 'The Jakarta Method', Ottawa's Victims of Communism Memorial, how to fight for justice for Palestine and more.

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Listen now (24 min) | This week’s episode features a conversation Nashwa and Ryan had a few months ago with Member of Provincial Parliament Jessica Bell. This episode covers provincial politics. An arena where anti-Muslim sentiments have been stoked with Ford’s Conservatives in power. Although this episode does not address Islamophobia we do believe that we need to vote out the Ford government to fight back around rising white supremacy and fascism in this province.

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Listen now | The austerity measures that were first implemented during the pandemic will not ease post-pandemic. Global vaccine apartheid continues to exist and it seems that only those in North America with relations outside of North America or to communities. It feels eerily familiar for people who straddle worlds to be aware that “back to normal” means back to normal for people completely detached from the global reality of how COVID continues to ravage people outside of the imperial core.

This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at habibtiplease.substack.com/subscribe