Since the turn of the 21st century, the world has become deeply familiar with the global “war on terror.” Framed by the West’s ostensibly patriotic and “civilized” political narrative that conveniently expands their national security power and geopolitical interests, it also pins Muslims as savage, and Islam as a barbaric religion of people that want nothing but the destruction of the West.

This perception of Islam—and its followers—as wicked and violent, spread wide and far, especially in the United States, Great Britain and other allied countries. This doesn’t happen without the help of the media and influential public figures, who shape public opinion and reinforce stereotypes.

Peter Oborne, a renowned British journalist and author, has done much work throughout his career to challenge these myths that marginalize an already historically repressed group. He joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his latest book, “The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong About Islam.”

“It's perfectly okay to smear Muslims in Britain,” Oborne tells Hedges. “Because that press arena is captured by people who regard Muslims as second class, third class… citizens, if not barbarians, there's no mainstream corrective to a very dangerous narrative, and it's getting more and more frightening.”

Oborne, for the work he has done on this issue, has himself experienced the consequences of Islamophobia. While working at The Daily Telegraph, Oborne’s editors refused to publish a lengthy investigation he conducted that exposed how “senior Muslim figures in [Britain] were having their bank accounts just taken away from them without any reason given.”

When he found out that “one of the [paper’s] advertiser [was] the HSBC bank” and that they were one of the banks closing the accounts, he left his post. Soon after, when he wrote a book about Boris Johnson’s “lies and the collaboration, the complicity, [and] the client journalism,” it marked the end of Oborne’s career in mainstream journalism.

Yet the Islamophobia that accelerated after 9/11 has deep roots in Western thought. To truly understand its prevalence in Western society, “you have to go back to the Pilgrim fathers.” Fanatic religionism led the pilgrims to believe they were God’s chosen people, and enabled them to slaughter the Natives much like Israel is doing to the Palestinians today. Even the modern families who have furthered the goals of the Israeli state, such as the Bush dynasty, have distant relatives such as a pastor named George Bush from the 1840s that advocated for Christian Zionism and using the Jewish people as sacrificial lamb for a larger prophetic envisionment of Christianity.

Oborne takes Hedges on a deep historical journey, explaining that Islamophobia and the persecution of Muslims is far from a new phenomenon. By understanding their origins, Oborne helps put today’s tragedies, such as the genocide in Gaza and the riots in the UK, in crucial and critical perspective.

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In his 2010 book, Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges wrote “The fate of the liberal class is tragic. It has been annihilated by the corporate state it supported, while it willingly silenced radical thinkers and iconoclasts who could have rescued it.”

There has been no time in American politics where this phenomenon has been more clear than today. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, host Chris Hedges talks to comedian Jimmy Dore about his reporting at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. The pair find the event illustrative of the past few decades of liberalism in American society, namely that its entire concept is not “reality based.”

The values the liberal class arguably once cherished have been completely abandoned by today’s neoliberal Democratic Party, and its contradictions ring loud and clear in everything involving Kamala Harris’s campaign to the media’s coverage of it. While on the one hand, the Democratic Party rhetorically clings to its past as the party of progressivism and inclusion, Kamala Harris boasted at the DNC about wanting to make the US military the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Not many people capture the hypocrisy and demise of the liberal class as well as comedian and host of The Jimmy Dore Show, Jimmy Dore. While Dore felt the 2016 DNC was an event filled with hope and revolutionary energy after the emergence of Bernie Sanders, he described this year in more unfortunate terms: “I was just surrounded by zombie, brain-dead, brainwashed delegates who didn't care. They treated going to the convention like they were going to.

And it was, honestly, it was downright depressing.” Once a believer in the “Bernie or Bust” movement, Dore has become more radicalized since the fall of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party. While he’s not sure any solution is possible, he believes revolution is the only answer:

“And so it's going to take a real revolution and it's going to have to look something like what happened up in Canada during COVID with the truckers and something that Christian Smalls did on Staten Island. [He] was a black guy who organized a bunch of Trump voters against the establishment [and] Amazon. And so it's going to have to come from the ground up like that. We're going to have to shut down capitalism to…have even a chance to take over our government and bring it back to the people.”

“Genocide is the moral imperative of our era,” declares Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in this episode of The Chris Hedges Reports as she continues her campaign for the U.S. presidency. Joined by running mate, Professor Butch Ware, the two make their case as to why they should earn the vote of every disenfranchised American, stuck in the woes of personal domestic struggles and the atrocities committed abroad on their behalf by a self-serving empire.

Stein’s view is clear when looking at how the election is shaping up: “Forget the lesser evil, there is no lesser evil. You have two genocidal candidates, one conducting genocide right now and the other promising to finish the job.”

Stein and Ware hammer down that while the military-industrial complex may seem like a foreign policy issue, tackling it is key to unlocking solutions at the domestic level. Stein says the bloated defense budget, which reaches into the trillions of dollars when all expenditures are accounted for, is one of the primary obstacles she aims to take down. “This is why we are not providing for the health care, the housing, the education, getting people out of debt, dealing with the climate emergency, ending the carceral state and having a restorative system of justice and addressing the issues of poverty and hopelessness, which drive crime in the first place,” she explains.

Ware remarks that the dynamic between Americans who feel trapped into voting for Democrats out of fear of Trump is deeply toxic, fueled by the narcissism of the candidates themselves. “As soon as you sign on the dotted line, they get right back to business, murdering people with your tax dollars, putting it in their pocket, letting your neighborhoods dissolve and break down,” Ware tells Hedges.

Ware makes clear that there is a choice for resistance and dissent on the ballot in November: “We have to end this toxic cycle of abuse, because they have people spellbound into thinking that there is no way to resist, but you absolutely can resist right now by voting Green.”