August 13 - From the Arab Awakening to a Terrorist Army and the Movement for Death; The Shake-Up of Brazil's Electoral Landscape; Calls for Justice Following the Shooting of an Unarmed Black Teenager by a White Policeman

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the new phenomenon of a terrorist army and an even more extreme version of terrorism than Al Qaeda’s brand in the form of the Islamic State that has planted its black flag in the heart of the Middle East. One of the world’s leading experts on terrorism, Richard Barrett, a director of the Soufan Group who sits on the board of the International Center for Counter Terrorism in The Hague and the Center on Global Terrorism Cooperation in Washington, joins us. We discuss the growing appeal of the I.S. movement whose vision of a future for the Middle East is the antithesis of the Arab spring or the Arab Awakening, and try to determine what could be done to encourage a movement for life and counter this movement for death.

Part 2

Then with the plane crash that killed the leader of Brazil’s Socialist Party and six other people, we look into the shaken political landscape ahead of Brazil’s October elections with Paulo Sotero, the director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former Washington Correspondent for Estado de Sao Paulo, a leading daily Brazilian newspaper. We discuss the likelihood that the front-runner President Dilma Rousseff will have to face a run-off, possibly against another woman Marina Silva, the late Eduardo Campos’s vice-presidential candidate, who is of African descent and grew up poor and uneducated to become a prominent environmentalist and a charismatic evangelist who came in second in the last election.

Part 3

Then finally we speak with Brian Levin, a criminologist, civil rights attorney, professor of criminal justice and a former New York City Police Officer, about the killing of an unarmed African-American teenager by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, that sparked riots and looting and continuing protests against police brutality by a predominately white police force that serves a predominately black neighborhood. We discuss the eyewitness reports that suggest the teenager had his hands up and was not resisting arrest when he was shot several times and President Obama’s call for calm as well as the Attorney General’s statement that the shooting “deserves a fulsome review”.