The So, So we have a very special guest today. We have Adnan Hussein.

Adnan, welcome to the podcast. We're both big fans of guerrilla history.

Well, thanks so much.

It's a real pleasure to be on and I'm a big fan of Red Nation

podcast as well.

My name's Adnan Hussein and I am a professor of medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world history at Queens University, currently director of the School of Religion there and I'm active in a number of community and

university campus-based social justice struggles, anti-war work and anti-islamophobia work.

Excellent and Jen and I have a lot of questions for you.

But before we get into kind of the meat and potatoes

of this conversation, we'd like to maybe establish

a definition of

the war on terror. I know that's a tall order,

but then also reflect on, you know,

the sort of recent history of the so-called end of the Forever Wars

as Biden has withdrawn U.S. troops from Afghanistan and really like what that means for you know the end of the so-called

era. Well I mean I think you're right that it is a, it's worth defining what was the war on terror.

I'm actually sponsoring a talk by Arun Kunani next month in January with the title what was the war on terror so I'm actually

hoping to learn more about it but provisionally I guess I would say that it is the era of US Empire and domestic oppression,

suppression and surveillance of political dissent that was organized through a kind of Islamophobic

discourse as a way of authorizing and justifying U.S. Imperial

intervention in the Middle East and globally since it wasn't only in the Middle

East as a post-Cold War rationale for that U.S. Empire and it, you know, accompanying

...