The January 6 Storming of the White House – “A Singular Event” With Ibrahim Kazerooni and Rob Prince. The Beginning of a new Venture

_______________________________________________________

Clowns, Police and Military Veterans: The Storming of the White House

_______________________________________________________

This is the version on YouTube.

Some of you have seen it on Facebook – It’s the same interview now shown live on the two “platforms” – Facebook and YouTube.

This is the first in a series of talks that Ibrahim Kazerooni and I will be doing. We have been engaged in political commentary – both interviews and in writing for 11 years now. In a program hosted by Jim Nelson – KGNU – Hemispheres – Middle East Dialogues – we have done – rather faithfully – programs once a month, sometimes more now for all this time. As the title of the program suggests, our program is about Middle East developments and U.S. policy (or lack thereof) in the Middle East.  I do believe that listeners to that program get a analysis of the current situation in the region – if not unique – certainly far different than what appears in the mainstream media.

Now we venture out to cover other subjects.

Who are we?

Ibrahim Kazerooni

Close friends and collaborators for going on 20 years, we are quite different in our philosophical make up. Ibrahim Kazerooni is, among other things, an Islamic (Shia) scholar and theologan.

He comes from a long line of imams in his family, a family that with roots both in Iraq – the holy of city of Najab – and Iran. Indeed “Kazeroon” from where the family name comes is a town in southwestern Iran. He has lived in Iraq, Iran, Great Britain, Denver Colorado and now in Detroit Michigan. He is an imam at the Islamic Center of North America in Dearborn Michigan, the largest mosque in North America. Needless to say with such a background he is a deeply, no, profoundly religious person. Ibrahim has a PhD from the Joint Iliff School of Theology – University of Denver Korbel School of International Studies doctoral program. He also has a Masters’ Degree in Mining Technology from Great Britain. He is married and has two children.

He is also an excellent cook, a fact verified by anyone who has had the pleasure of eating one of his meals.

Rob Prince

Rob Prince. Brooklyn, New York City born, he grew up from the age of 5 in Jamaica Queens. He grew up in a Jewish family whose roots are in Bialystok Poland, Grodno Belarus and Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a secular Marxist.

Prince attended New York City public schools in the 1950s and early 1960s, when they were by far among the best sources of public education in the country, if not beyond. Prince graduated with a degree in French Literature in the Spring of 1966 from St. Lawrence University in Canton New York. On his graduation, he found two fully paid invitations for foreign travel waiting for him at home: his draft notice to help blow up bridges in Vietnam and an invitation to join the Peace Corps in Tunisia to help build them. Preferring then and now to build (cultural) bridges rather than blow them up, he went on to spend approximately 2 1/2 years in the Peace Corps in Tunisia where he served his country honorably as a volunteer in Tunis and Sousse and a member of the staff for 5 months after his assignment left.

Prince has been involved in the country’s peace movement since his Tunisia days in Colorado and elsewhere. For the past 11 years, along with colleague Ibrahim Kazerooni, he has been a commentator on KGNU – Boulder’s Hemisphere’s Middle East Dialogues program hosted by Jim Nelson. In Colorado he taught at what was then called Community College of Denver – Red Rocks, Metro State College of Denver and since 1993 at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies from where he retired in 2015. He is married to Nancy Ellen Fey whom he met when she was sitting on a rock on the northern side of Grand Mesa 52 years ago in a place called Rulison, Colorado.

Fey and Prince have two grown daughters, Molly Fey Prince and Abigail Stella Prince, both of Denver and, most recently, a grandson,Theodore “Teddy” Prince Pile