One of your hosts, Adam S——, is an American, New York based music critic who has no connection to London or the UK, and no expertise in the MENA region, but for some reason moonlights for LRB as a “sophisticated” orientalist pundit in the vein of Bernard Lewis, decoding what he sees as the barbaric Arabs and Iranians for the white western warmonger class of which he is a part. S—— has spent his entire recent career trying to twist the anticolonial writings of Fanon and demonizing resistance struggles in the global south, all the while purporting to be politically neutral. Following 2023, S—— has commandeered most of this podcast’s discussions of international politics, using them as an opportunity to softly spread Israeli and US regime propaganda.
If LRB is truly afraid of angering Netanyahu or Trump and speaking truth to power, there is a simple option: stop dedicating extended discussions to the geopolitics and wars in SWANA/MENA (“the Middle East”) altogether. If, however, you want to uphold the proud legacy of the publication, the LRB that once platformed Edward Said’s brave and prescient analysis of the Oslo Accords (at a time when anything and everything written by Said— recognized as the leading US intellectual of that time— was openly banned by the New York Review of Books due to its editor’s self-admitted bias in favor of Israel) then you need to think, very fast, about the long term damage the wishy washy imperialist apologist S—— has been doing to your credibility, certainly for anyone in the global majority, but even among readers in the imperial core who can now see beyond the hasbara we were raised on.
Not all of the guest contributors to the S—— hosted episodes are worthless. It’s good to hear from a range of voices with personal experiences, including those like Robert Malley, who may have been in the employ of the US state department, but was directly involved in negotiating the JCPOA. The problem is, rather, the distinct bias that S—— himself brings as a host to how these discussions are framed, always in line with Israeli and US government narratives, and also featuring a remarkable intellectual dullness and lack of charisma by S—— himself, which makes it even more of a mystery why he is podcasting in the first place. Many thoughtless podcasters at least have a knack for sounding engaged and excited with the guests and topics. S——‘s voice has always been the sonic equivalent of a deer in the headlights.
