A new grim milestone on friday it was at the United States had crossed 500000 recorded cases of the coronavirus on saturday is that the u. S. Is now registered 20000 deaths more than any other country including italy and as you point out one 3rd of those cases was from new york state alone new York New Jersey and michigan being the hardest hit of all states so far and u. S. Health Officials Say they believe the infection are going to peak on Easter Sunday this coming sunday that was originally a date when President Trump is 81 of the u. S. To come out of this shelter in place orders and want to business to be back and moving again that is no longer happening that date seems to moved to may 1st and there are a lot of Public Health officials who are skeptical even about that date but there are places here in the United States where pastors are keeping churches open most states 43 states have locked down orders 7 of them do not but of the states that have lockdown orders Something Like 515 of them allow an exemption for Church Services so there is some fear that here on Easter Sunday there will be places where massive amounts of people will be gathering but and then he found the head of the National Institutes of health here in the United States says that there wont be a sense of normalcy here in the u. S. Rob until Something Like november and that of course is when President Trump is up for reelection Health Officials in the u. K. Survey outbreak vera is yet to reach its peak because the death toll creeps closer to 10000 but almost at expected to keep rising but as money and no muslim reports from london there seems to be some hope. The numbers are still very high and theyre expected to increase further in the coming days and weeks actually this is in line with expectations as the emergency starts to reach its peak you can see the daily death toll reaching the 1000 level just there abouts here in the u. K. And in fact the last few days the u. K. Already surpassed italy and spain recording the highest number of daily deaths now interestingly you also hearing from the director of and it checks england Steven Powell and he was saying that there has also been a flattening in the number of confirmed cases and also in the number of hospitalizations and that is really important so and thats not just in london but also in other parts of the country but he did say that it will take some time for us to see the effect of that in the death toll think those because of this time lag with the virus it takes time for an infected person to start to show symptoms and then those again time before they deteriorate to the point of needing to go to hospital and sadly they might die and so because of that time live you are likely to see a continued increase in the death toll in the coming days and probably this week more than 30000000 people in brazil have signed up for emergency Financial Relief is locked on and on restrictions affect the economy the governments trying to streamline the payment process after thousands lined up attacks offices this week because of bureaucratic hold ups informal workers are entitled to claim 118. 00 a month now in other world news at least 2 people have been killed and 4 others are missing after a dam collapsed in northern india it released a wave of toxic sludge several homes were engulfed and farmland has been swamped the dam contained ash from a coal fired power station in my job pradesh those the headlines the news continues here at an all does it after studio b. Unscripted. Theres no punchline to state violence sometimes stuff is just bad pop culture is not innocent its coated with all kinds of politics the white mainstream feels that the shift is happening then nervous didnt nervous i like my feminist sort of murder free. Market money i can help contribute to a conversation that will lead to an outcome that is freedom justice equality and selfdetermination for everyone with an academic a writer journalist. My name is father and im from pakistan i think some ideas are too dangerous to do except in novel form and the author of 6 books of fiction and nonfiction and i always knew i wanted to be right. When. We have an opportunity i remember seeing marks speech at the un in defense of the Palestinian People which got him fired from c. N. N. And shortly after a free palestine. I asked myself look at i have in common with a member of the bhutto family a political dynasty in pakistan. From book one always is about pakistan but its about much more than that its about the universal psychology of oppression i read marks book nobody about the injustices faced by africanamericans and i was struck by how much it risen because it spoke to me about my. So there was a lot of talk. I think you can do that a lot of things while i was writing the way writing always felt like the clearest way to to talk about issues that i cared about and to explore things that the served me i think fiction is even more liberating in that sense because if you were to tell people ive written a book about radicalism they may not really want to read it or talk about it but when you put it in fiction. You can bring all kinds of dangerous ideas to people without them really knowing that youve done that why did you write the same thing i like dangerous ideas that free dangerous ideas because there were people who see a brown body in a black body here danger and think that were writing about how to destroy stuff and in some ways we are but were trying to destroy oppressive systems that people yeah and so for me i thought as a writer i had an opportunity to use my mind in my spirit and marshal a whole tradition in the service of justice but i find that when you come from the places we come from when youre talking about the things that we talk about and theres a discomfort with dangerous ideas do you get told a lot of the times to be positive oh yes yes im like its incredibly frustrating yeah not because im without hope or optimism but sometimes you just got to bring bad news you know im telling a story the beginning of nobody but a boy mike brown who was left on the ground for a half hours after being killed by a Police Officer after being stopped for jaywalking yeah for crossing in the wrong car the street. His schooling was was poor 80 percent of the people in the town have warrants against them for murder with that usually feel like jaywalking or parking tickets when i look at the story what it means to be young and vulnerable in america and black or brown muslim trans queer immigrant what have you. Its sad its depressing yeah and editors say you know this is great stuff its powerful its informative but i want people to laugh at the end i need a punch line and theres no punch line to stay violence sometimes stuff is just bad you know and we have to wrestle with and with the sit with it instead of being titillated unstimulated and excited by it or made to believe that the world is going to just be ok so just let people sit with this misery some would say though you are a fiction writer yeah in any way you want thats true it ends badly. Average other work and it often is not all of it is very the book is great but the story. Yeah i mean you leave us in this place yeah but thats life do you think mike that life doesnt end in this tidy way where everything is sorted and theres conclusions and people have closure and so i think when youre writing fiction at least you you have plenty of moments that are joy and of beauty and of love but sometimes the endings are as they are in life painful yes i love though that while the ending is painful the journey there is not entirely so i want to travel around the world i see that as the resistance and i see joy in the midst of pain your books do that your books do that one of the things i loved about your book and your writing is reading about you in ferguson. Protesting mike browns death and having palestinians tweet you how to do it tear gas yeah yeah you tell us about that we were there at midnight when i in ferguson a few days after the killing of my broom and the next night tear gas tear in before the curfew tear gas tear gas. And we started getting tweets because the world was watching this yeah and were getting tweets from ramallah and they were like run toward the wind. You know stand closer to the soldiers because if you stand close to the soldiers they want to or guess you can and they get tear gas you know right this shirt or on your eyes the kind of makeshift gas masks and they have been protesting in the west bank against what was happening in gaza because in the same moment that we were protesting in ferguson august 24th teen there was theres been a 51 day war in gaza for july and august of that same year 2014 now were not just crying for the tear gas were also crying because were like oh my god palestinians who are catching hell in the west bank and in gaza watching in the taking the time of all the things they could be doing theyre taking the time to tell us how to be safer and were building those bonds of solidarity so theres joy in there theres joy in the midst of that pain in the backdrop of that and i guess. That connects another piece of this for me which is the question of activism yet because youre not just writing now im not just writing were also on the ground in a certain way do you identify as an activist some people dont like that term i dont know i dont really know what its supposed to mean i can only write about the things i really care about i can only put my voice and my time to something that means something to me and i think those are uncomfortable issues those are issues of powerlessness of injustice but i dont know i think writing when done well is activism i do think theres a difference between writing in the house writing in the ivory tower in yeah you know and being with being there you know i mean people who are literally killed for writing and for drawing yeah thats a whole different world so i dont i dont take writing off the table as a form of resistance i think activism is its own thing and its all kind of freedom fight. I guess what i wonder though is. With respect to values of each and my concern is that sometimes as academics we kind of pooh pooh what happens on the ground sometimes people on the ground and i go oh youre just in your tower right what good is there were good is it to write the runaways when there are real people you know feeling well from american imperialism or make you feel guilty for writing sure all the time. I get asked all the time why are you writing when you could be doing and i think writing for me is a form of doing i think exactly because of imperialism is oppressive thing so many people that is a followed form of fighting back to rights to have different stories and i think it means something for those of us who come from the global south for those of us who are asian or muslim to see our stories were flecked to in fiction in film. And not only in the news right you know where in that also from an oriental is oriental aslans because we can watch home when we shouldnt. Care boy we shouldnt but we can and its there but i dont want to watch that anymore im tired of that for me pop culture is not innocence and its not entertaining its coated with all kinds of politics and and we go to it innocently you know but of course the people who are making and producing pop culture are not innocent exactly and then when you watch that from a 1000000 miles away that becomes your norm for who and what black people are who are what must i mean or how the lives of asians and such are i was born in 78 and i was growing up in the eightys and ninetys i was a complete professional wrestling nerd i mean the grand moment of wrestling the kind of turret modernized moment of wrestling with hogan becomes the champ yeah by being the iron sheik you come down the hours from tehran iran and and he got his title by stealing it yeah right and he allied with with the russians wrestlers and becomes them sergeant slaughter is as old boy you know so fitting in so hes a super jingoistic imperialist sort of figure whos defeating russians and iranians and so were justifying Foreign Policy by framing these people in a certain way and im looking at all these africans and arabs and iranians who are barbaric and look at these White American superheroes yeah so by the time i find out that were going to go into the persian gulf were going to youre prepare prepare for it make sense because it just like those guys i watch every saturday and i and i cant imagine how you feel watching that stuff im here is all the time actually at the scene that always. Really really upsets me is 0 dark 30 years where the cia officer i mean knows how theyre always really concerned careful thoughtful individuals in film so whenever someone in torture theres always the cia officer to be like is he going to be ok. So and so theres a moment 0 dark 30 and this is like history according to hollywood where theres a man being water boarded and we know right that actually torture didnt yield any actionable intelligence right but this is man being tortured to within an inch of his life and the camera is not really looking at him its looking at jessica chasin the cia officer and shes like this. Whole the whole time you know youre going to kill him and shes like i think were sick and she walks to a corner for her poor her and i think thats the gays and thats the gays of power and so pop culture identifies our solidarity with the powerful and never the powerless and i think most people watch that and think its a great action film or theres drama and suspense but thats intense cruelty and theres intense dehumanization playing and its everywhere i mean its in the shows its in the t. V. Its in sports as you said and i think thats why people like. Muhammad are the. A so moving and powerful because they fought against that they brought some new form of politics and resistance and questioning in the sent to the field of entertainment pop culture you know and were coming kaepernick in in the in the states you know who took that knee and is essentially lost his career because hes willing to stand up and fight state violence against black berrys and there are more figures like that im sure you know i just in theres never been an overabundance of them there always been a few so you do people who over time we begin to love and romance but in the moment we hate them you know they suffer they suffer they suffer extraordinary cost and i think that we can never forget the costs but you know mark we i mean in south asia where cricket playing countries indian bison we had in february of 2019 tensions between these 2 countries in their Nuclear Armed nations so when you have tensions between 2 Nuclear Nations thats i mean possible annihilation and one of the things that was really disturbing to see is how entertainment figures and sports figures rallied for war we have athletes who are wearing military camouflage hats to play a game a lot of Bollywood Actors tweeting for war pretty horrific stuff like cheerleading attacks jingoistic statements in the states thats the norm right yeah carol exist kneeling against the backdrop of air force and army commercials the entire sport which is all about war i mean the trenches and blitzing and doyle along bombs hes the outlier are there any outliers where you are no no its all pretty its pretty depressing because weve had a lot of ultra hyper nationalism and i think im not sure its ever been that bad i guess thats why again your book for me is so. Necessary because when i hear the story of state repression when i see american imperialism when i see economic deprivation and i see how one could become desperate and one could become radicalized by this was the argument against american imperialism from some of us here was youre creating the very thing that youre afraid of. How do you get to that place of thinking about radicalization why think that if were looking at the 20 years of the war on terror almost its been such a shallow narrative and that narrative has been presented to us by by the west essentially and what theyve said is theyre these people theyre muslims theyre vulnerable to radicalism theyre dangerous they come from these places and thats it and they left themselves out of the frames there is no conversation about americas forever wars or about the thousands of of civilians killed in these secret drone campaigns. There is no conversation about inequality and poverty and i think for a lot of us living outside the west that was always false was always paid in the film you know and to me the question of radicalism doesnt come from religion at all but its a question of anger of powerlessness a fear of isolation. And if you have young people in societies where they have no the vision for their future they have a vision for a dignified life noble work safety then theyre going to be vulnerable to any vision that is offered to them and theyll take it and so on that level i think the world is is not helping and radicalism is only furthering its by cutting out space to me i would argue that many of those in the United States have a radical vision yeah but i would use the language of radicalization because of what it connotes sure and it seems that when people in the global south want to have a radical imagination and a radical reimagining of the world we think of violence with the destruction as you say we dont think about the forces they get them there is any way to have maybe throw it open a little bit to question you know i dont want to jump in at this moment how are we to get to sites that are unwilling to cooperate with one another such as opposing states or even sectarian actors in the middle east to come together and begin focusing on their similarities and contribute to cooperation and more constructive dialogue. Who its a good question you the 1st. I think it varies from context to context. And also i have to push a little bit ask who the we is in terms of whos the we thats doing the work restriction here so in the case of israel palestine we can pretend that theres been an enduring war thats going on since the beginning of time which is the kind of dishonest narrative or we could say this is a very material struggle over over land and resources that could in tomorrow if the United States took a different position thats the kind of thing and so