Podcasting war: Zeteo, Gaza, and ethical media practice in the western-Islamic public sphere

This article examines how Zeteo’s We’re Not Kidding narrates, contests, and ethically frames war through long-form conversation. Drawing on close analysis of 17 purposively selected episodes, it asks how the podcast’s form, humour, guest heterogeneity, and evidentiary debate shape media practice during the Gaza war that began in October 2023, which participants describe as genocidal. Four practices organize the analysis: meta-journalistic critique, debunking as evidentiary care, positional witnessing, and humour as ethical attunement. The Western-Islamic public sphere provides the overarching framework, understood as a historically contingent space of encounter and transformation in which Muslim public interventions put established terms of authority and belonging into question. Sherman Jackson’s concept of the Islamic secular helps interpret Mehdi Hasan’s ethical orientation within this space without attributing the same orientation to every guest. Differently situated Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Jewish American, Jewish-Israeli, Black American, and South Asian/British speakers converge on Palestinian personhood and freedom. The article argues that these conversations connect scrutiny of evidence to an anti-colonial commitment to Palestinian personhood, historical agency, and self-determination, while recognizing that podcast intimacy and humour can also normalize exclusion.