MEDIA WARS
The War on Iran, A Limited Podcast Series
Pilot Episode
Featuring: Noura Erakat, Ryan Grim, Ziad Abu-Rish, Naveed Mansoori, Adel Iskandar, Bassam Haddad, and Mouin Rabbani
Saturday, 28 March 2026
2 pm EST | 10 pm Tehran
Join us live for the Pilot episode of MEDIA WARS: The War on Iran, featuring Noura Erakat, Ryan Grim, Adel Iskandar, Naveed Mansoori, Mouin Rabbani, and Bassam Haddad. Media Wars examines the truths and absurdities of our era, centering on the US–Israel war on Iran. Fast-paced and eclectic, it blends media roundups with commentary and analysis to expose the folly and brutality of empire and imperial media. The program moves between granular detail and broad historical and geopolitical context, treating weighty, world-altering subjects in a casual, sometimes irreverent voice. Not suitable for children.
In this Pilot, our speakers and hosts and hosts will address the reality and portrayal of the war on Iran and Lebanon, the Cuba Delegation, as well as various media manipulation methods, laced with a lite media roundup.
Featuring
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is a Co-Founding Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and an Editorial Committee member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura is the coeditor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures, an anthology related to the 2011 and 2012 Palestine bids for statehood at the UN. More recently, Noura released a pedagogical project on the Gaza Strip and Palestine, which includes a short multimedia documentary, "Gaza In Context," that rehabilitates Israel’s wars on Gaza within a settler-colonial framework. She is also the producer of the short video, "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She is a frequent commentator, with recent appearances on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others, and her writings have been widely published in the national media and academic journals.
Ryan Grim is a longtime D.C. reporter, breaking news from the halls of Congress and leading the Washington bureaus for The Intercept and HuffPost. At HuffPost, he led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once. Grim has spent years chronicling the rise of progressives in Congress, and his most recent book is The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, which followed his best-selling We’ve Got People. He’s also the author of the 2009 book This Is Your Country On Drugs.
Ziad Abu-Rish is a fellow at the Beirut-based The Policy Initiative, an associate professor of human rights at Bard College, and the author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (Stanford University Press, 2026). He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Naveed Mansoori is a political theorist and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. His areas of research include histories and theories of media and mediation, anti- and de-colonial history and theory, critical theory, Iranian Studies, and Middle East Studies. He is a political theorist interested in histories and theories of media and mediation, anti- and de-colonial history and theory, and critical theory. He received his PhD in political science from the University of California-Los Angeles. His current book project, The End of Prophecy: Mediations of Political Myth in Contemporary Iran, offers a rethinking of the public sphere with focus on the role media has played in social movements before and after the 1979 Revolution in Iran
Adel Iskandar is an Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University, where he is the Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and the Chair of Graduate Studies in the School of Communication. He is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous works including Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation(University of California Press, 2010). Iskandar is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya.
Bassam Haddad is Founding Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
Mouin Rabbani is a researcher, analyst, and commentator specialising in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He has among other positions previously served as Principal Political Affairs Officer with the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Head of Middle East with the Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation, and Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, where he also hosts the Connections podcast and edits its Quick Thoughts feature, Managing Editor and Associate Editor of the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and a Contributing Editor of Middle East Report.