February 11 - The Shooting of Three Muslim Students in North Carolina; A Case against the U.S. Arming Ukraine; The Powerful Memoir of a War Photographer's Life and Love

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the shooting of three Muslim university students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that appears to be a hate crime although the shooter posted on Facebook that he hated “radical Christians and “radical Muslims” alike. Jonathan Weiler, the Director of Global Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics” joins us to discuss the local reaction to this atrocity and the growing outrage trending on Twitter at the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter, as well as assessing its global impact since anger at U.S. media coverage is spreading in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries at a perceived double standard that a white American killer is likely to be considered mentally ill while a Muslim shooter is automatically labeled a terrorist.  

Part 2

Then we assess the slim chance of a lasting peace agreement coming out of Wednesday’s summit meeting in Minsk between the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine with John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. We discuss his article at The New York Times “Don’t Arm Ukraine” and the last-ditch efforts of European leaders to get a ceasefire and make a deal with Putin before the U.S. is likely to start arming Ukraine to counter the superior Russian military equipment with which the Russians are arming their separatist proxies.

Part 3

Then finally, with the six months suspension of NBC’s news anchor Brian Williams for exaggerating his wartime experience in Iraq, we speak with a veteran Pulitzer Prize-winning American photojournalist Lynsey Addario, about her very real experiences on the battlefronts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur and the Congo which she documents in her new book, just out, “It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War”.