University of Tehran professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi discusses Western propaganda, the Middle East, Israel, Syria, and more. ----- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow Glenn: Twitter Instagram Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Thank you. | |
| Good evening. | |
| It's Tuesday, January 8th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| Tonight, Israel's main enemy for many years now, and therefore a main enemy of the United States, has been Iran. | |
| Americans, really Westerners generally, are subjected to a never-ending stream of propaganda about what Iran is, what it does, what its government is like. | |
| What the people of Iran think and want. | |
| Just this week, Canada's opposition leader and almost certainly its next prime minister, Pierre Polivar, was asked about possible Israeli bombing of Iran. | |
| And in response, he said they'd be doing the world a favor because he said Iran is a, quote, theocratic, unstable, genocidal dictatorship. | |
| But as is often true of most of America's official enemies, we hear so much about Iran and virtually nothing from them. | |
| Put more accurately, we hear a lot from Iranian exiles who have attached themselves to or are paid by the West. | |
| Just as we were told before the invasion of Iraq that the neocons Iraqi mascot, Ahmed Shalabi, who hadn't even lived in Iraq for decades, would make the perfect president of Iraq once Saddam Hussein was removed and that he would be beloved by Iraqis. | |
| In other words, when we do hear from Iranians and those rare cases, it's from those who are highly unrepresentative of the country and people who no longer live there and people who actually want a return of the Shah of Iran and his dynasty as brutal and savage as the dictatorship was when installed by the United States. | |
| We wanted to change all of that Syed Mohammed Marandi is our guest tonight. | |
| He's the professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran. | |
| He has become one of the leading voices inside Iran, who is generally regarded as a supporter of the country's general foreign policy orientation and geopolitical interest. | |
| We talked to him about a wide range of issues, including Iranian internal politics, the stability of the Iranian government, its view of the U.S.-funded Israeli war in Gaza, Iran's view of the new Syrian government, whether it has become more militarily vulnerable over the last year or so, whether it seems as though there are major differences from the Iranian perspective between Biden and Trump. | |
| Now, some people become very upset when you even talk to someone who has radically different views than the United States and the West, especially if they're deemed a supporter of one of the bad countries. | |
| Now, for obvious reasons, the bad countries never include... | |
| Governments like Saudi Arabia and Egypt because they're close American allies, but most definitely does include Iran. | |
| Apparently, you're only allowed to put people on who are Westerners or who are doing the bidding of the West to say the same things over and over about Iran. | |
| But you can't put anyone inside of Iran who has a radically different perspective than the West does. | |
| But there's no denying, whatever your views on that, that Professor Mirandi is a scholarly and highly informed analyst, both in general and especially of that region. | |
| I found our discussion with him enlightening and provocative, and I believe he will, too. | |
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| Professor Merondy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. | |
| We're thrilled to have you. | |
| Thank you very much for having me. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| So let me begin by asking you about internal Iran politics. | |
| I just want to spend a lot of time on external affairs, including in the region, but there's this growing discourse now about the possibility that the United States would work with Israel to try and engineer some sort of regime change in Iran. | |
| This has obviously been something that has been discussed for quite some time, but it seems to be picking up a little bit more steam with the incoming President Trump and his administration. | |
| Whenever people in the West imagine regime change in Iran, They're not talking about instituting elections like Iran already has to allow Iranians to choose their leader. | |
| They already know what leader you should have, and that is the offspring of the Shah of Iran to reinstate the dynasty of the Shah. | |
| What can you tell us about how the Shah is remembered, how he's perceived the level of support that he has inside of Iran? | |
| No one in Iran takes this seriously. | |
| The Shah was known to be brutal. | |
| The United States brought him to power through a coup d'etat in Iran, overthrowing the elected government and prime minister, along with the British. | |
| Fundamentally, the Americans created the secret police, the Sabak, that the Shah used to torture and kill people. | |
| During the revolution, many thousands of people were killed in the demonstrations. | |
| And the Shah was subordinate to the United States. | |
| The Shah even sent his jets that were purchased from the United States to Vietnam to bomb the Vietnamese. | |
| Our policies in the region were basically the policies of the United States. | |
| So decisions were not made in Tehran. | |
| They were made in Washington and London, of course, increasingly Washington, as the fortunes of the UK declined and the fortunes of the United States grew. | |
| And of course, after the revolution, decisions were made in Tehran. | |
| And I think that is basically something that the Americans The son of the Shah is not a very intelligent person. | |
| He's been foolish enough to travel to Israel, and Israel, the Israeli regime, is universally despised, regardless of what people in Iran think about the government or the political establishment or the Islamic Republic of Iran. | |
| And therefore, I think that this is just fantasy that is being played out in think tanks in the United States, well-funded think tanks, and they will continue to fantasize in the future. | |
| And what it does, alongside other U.S. policies, is it contributes to the miscalculation with regards to Iran, and that is why for over four decades the United States has always I've heard there are roughly 300 media outlets that are anti-Iranian in Persian in the West. | |
| So imagine how many people are hired for that sort of thing. | |
| There are thousands of terrorists in the MEK terror organization. | |
| Their main base is in Albania. | |
| Bases across Europe and North America, you have these so-called Iranians and think tanks and elsewhere. | |
| So they are a very costly group of people, but they also contribute to this warped understanding of Iran. | |
| So the Americans promote certain people to spread anti-Iranian propaganda, and then the Americans believe that No, it's fine. | |
| He's welcome. | |
| Yeah, you know, it reminds me a lot. | |
| Of course, a lot of the same people who are doing this were the ones who were dreaming about imposing Ahmed Shalabi on the Iraqis after Saddam Hussein was removed and thought he was going to be welcomed with open arms. | |
| It seems like only in the West can people be persuaded to believe that somebody like the Shah's son, who's going to Israel, heaping praise on the Israeli government, is the person whom Iranians are craving to be led by again. | |
| But amazingly, that is what people think. | |
| But let me ask you a little bit more about internal politics in Iran, because I think there is this sense, and this is, I think, why there's a lot more talk now about regime change, is the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran have been pretty severe. | |
| They have definitely had an impact inside Iran, and as usual with sanctions, it's the civilian population that's suffering, but that suffering does often lead to dissatisfaction with people's own leaders, because that's just a natural thing to do if your life isn't what you think it ought to be. | |
| You start getting angry at your own leaders for not making it better. | |
| And then combined with that, the kind of perceived losses that have been inflicted on Iran over the last year, which I want to talk about in a little bit. | |
| Has created this perception in the West, I think more so than ever, that the support for the government is softer than ever, that it has become more vulnerable than ever before, principally because of this economic deprivation combined with some of the geopolitical losses over the last year. | |
| There's no doubt that there is dissatisfaction in Iran with regards to economic issues. | |
| If you look at any poll that is carried out in Iran, not today, over the last 15 years, the number one issue has always been the economies. | |
| The number two issue has always been the economy. | |
| The number three issue has always been the economy. | |
| And contrary to what they say in the West, the issues that are important for the West are not anywhere near the top for The Iranian voters. | |
| So that is a fact. | |
| But that does not mean that the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the current constitution and the current structure, is not legitimate in the eyes of Iranians. | |
| It has a high degree of legitimacy. | |
| And I think that in the past, the Americans have been saying this also. | |
| They've been saying how the regime is imploding. | |
| Of course, they always use the term regime. | |
| To make it sound as if it's something unstable and illegitimate. | |
| Not for the Saudis, not for the Egyptians. | |
| There's no regimes there. | |
| There are governments there and presidents. | |
| In Iran, though, there's a regime. | |
| That's right. | |
| So you have this sort of paradox. | |
| On the one hand, they say Iran is a corrupt regime. | |
| It's falling apart. | |
| The people hate it. | |
| It is imploding. | |
| They are unable to govern themselves. | |
| And then on the other hand, simultaneously, you have this parallel narrative, which says it's a rising threat, it's a growing threat to the region, it's a growing threat to the world, and you wonder how can it be both things at the same time, if it's falling apart, part if it's so disgusting in the eyes of ordinary Iranians, then how in the world can it become a rising power? | |
| So I think, you know, if we go back and look at what Western media and Western think tanks have been saying ever since I remember about Iran, it's been the same sort of language. | |
| And in fact, you can see this. | |
| But every time they have policy failures, since there's no accountability in the United States... | |
| Since no one is punished, you know, no one goes back and read what people wrote five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago in American media and think tanks to see who got it right and who got it wrong, the same people who've been saying this sort of nonsense about Iran, they will continue to be writing for think tanks, getting good salaries, and pushing the Americans to further miscalculation in the future as well. | |
| I think the way that Western discourse sometimes tries to reconcile these two opposing views, that on the one hand Iran is weak, it's collapsing, it's eroding, it's a regime destined for failure, and on the other hand Iran is this existential threat to all things decent, is and on the other hand Iran is this existential threat to all things decent, is this idea that Iranian leaders are basically indifferent including their own. | |
| Pierre Polivar, who's the opposition leader in Canada this week, Likely to be the next Prime Minister of Canada, was asked about the possibility of bombing, having Israel bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, and he called Iran in response, quote, a theocratic, unstable, genocidal dictatorship. | |
| When I heard that, I was kind of wondering, like, what evidence is there that Iran is unstable or genocidal? | |
| How do you see that Western view that's, I think, widely shared of the Iranian government? | |
| Well, the praise that he's given to the Israeli regime, I think, makes him genocidal and someone who shows no value for human life, just like Justin Trudeau. | |
| I don't think there's any real difference between the two. | |
| And I think over the past 15 months, the world has seen the reality of the Western political establishment and their think tanks and their media and the NGOs and the human rights organizations. | |
| And I think everyone now knows that this has all been a facade. | |
| Even those people in Iran who dislike the Islamic Republic of Iran, they do recognize today what the United States is all about, what Canada is all about, what the EU is all about. | |
| They are the people who are enabling The current Holocaust in Gaza. | |
| And it is interesting that they don't only say that about Iranians, they say that about people in this region as well. | |
| But it's ironic because as they're saying that these people, they don't really love their children like we do in the West. | |
| It's extraordinary that every day we're seeing images of women weeping over the bodies of their lifeless children in Gaza. | |
| We see women in Lebanon weeping over. | |
| The bodies of their lifeless husbands. | |
| Apparently, on the one hand, they don't care about the sanctity of human life in our region, but we're constantly seeing images of their misery. | |
| But on the other hand, Western leaders and Western political figures and Western journalists. | |
| They justify or they're apologists for the genocide in Gaza, and they continue to be very worried about human values and human life and human rights. | |
| It's amazing. | |
| There's a notorious quote from William Westmoreland, the senior general, the military commander for the United States and Vietnam. | |
| When asked about all the killing of civilians the United States military was doing in Vietnam, he said, well, you can look at it as kind of unfortunate on the one hand, but you don't need to worry that much because Asian women, Vietnamese women don't mourn for their loved ones the same way we in the last mourn for ours. Vietnamese women don't mourn for their loved ones the same It's obviously almost a necessary type of war propaganda to get people comfortable with mass slaughter of the kind we're seeing in Gaza. | |
| Let me ask you about Iran vis-a-vis the region. | |
| I think a lot of people, including people who are not bought into this caricature of Iran, this cartoon version of Iran about being this apocalyptic cult or whatever, a lot of people have come to believe, and it might even be one of them, that the events of the last, say, six months to a year has actually weakened Iran in terms of its ability to oppose both the United States and Israel and Western powers in general. | |
| Through the Israeli attack, the bombing attack on Iran and retaliation for the missile strikes, which were in retaliation for the bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, that that weakened or destroyed Iranian air defenses, including around its nuclear facilities. | |
| Forced removal of Bashar al-Assad, who had been an ally of Iran in Syria and has put in power people who are far more sympathetic to the United States and Israel, at least willing to do business with them, and much less so with Iran, as well as the weakening of Hezbollah, the killing of its very charismatic and shrewd leader, has, in a lot of ways, made Iran a less formidable figure in terms of leading this so-called axis of resistance. | |
| Do you think there's validity to that view? | |
| I would disagree, and for a number of reasons. | |
| One is that, without a doubt, in war, all sides are weakened. | |
| In Ukraine, without a doubt, even though the Russians are winning the war, but the Russians are weakened. | |
| They have to spend money. | |
| They lose men. | |
| They lose equipment. | |
| And the Ukrainians, of course, are severely weakened, but so is Europe, so is the United States. | |
| The war in Iraq and Afghanistan was like... | |
| Six, seven, eight, nine trillion dollars. | |
| That's how much money was spent directly or indirectly. | |
| And I would assume that in Ukraine, indirectly, forget the direct support, that's just one part of it. | |
| The indirect cost of the war in Ukraine will be in many trillions of dollars, the sanctions and so on. | |
| But that doesn't mean the weakness comes from one side. | |
| I personally think that the biggest loser in this war by far Is the Israeli regime. | |
| Because for many decades, the Israeli regime has promoted itself as a democracy, as representative of the West. | |
| And of course, the West, as we were discussing earlier, presents itself as supporters of human rights and human values and all that is good in this world. | |
| But now the regime has destroyed itself. | |
| Its image across the world is It's in the mud. | |
| No one sees it as legitimate outside the West or maybe in some parts of India, but across the global majority or the global South, and even in much of the West, people view it completely. | |
| In a completely different light than before, they can no longer hide behind the Holocaust in Europe. | |
| They can no longer hide behind the word anti-Semitism, regardless of what that exactly means and the fact that Palestinians are Semites themselves and more Semites probably than the bulk of the immigrant population that came from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine. | |
| So, in my opinion, regardless of the economic I think this was the most important outcome of the war so far. | |
| This Holocaust, this genocide is something that the world will not forgive, and this will have a very, very important influence on the way politics play out. | |
| With regards to Syria, because I think that the Israelis failed in Lebanon. | |
| The fact that they could not take southern Lebanon, regardless of The fact that they martyred Sayyid Hassan Nasrullah and others. | |
| The fact that they could not take Gaza either means that they failed. | |
| Just today, I think they lost three of their soldiers in Gaza. | |
| So in the past, when the Israelis would attack Egypt, they'd go all the way to the Suez Canal. | |
| But now, after 15 months, they're still stuck in Gaza. | |
| In 1982, when they invaded Lebanon, they went all the way to Beirut within days. | |
| And now we see that they were unable to make any significant inroads. | |
| The only place where one could argue that the Israeli regime achieved a success is in Syria. | |
| But there I would also disagree. | |
| We consider this a victory for this coalition between Erdogan, Netanyahu, and Biden. | |
| But I personally think that the winner in all this, and again, putting aside the misery that's being imposed upon ordinary Syrians, the fact that the U.S. and Erdogan and Netanyahu imposed Al-Qaeda and its affiliates on the Syrian people, | |
| that aside, I think that this worked to Iran's advantage because the Iranians entered Syria in 2013 after tens of thousands of foreign fighters were brought into the country to bring down the... | |
| The Syrian government. | |
| And the only reason why the Iranians entered was because they did not want the black flags of ISIS and Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda over Damascus or Baghdad. | |
| And remember Baghdad was also about to fall and Lebanon was also in serious trouble. | |
| So the Iranians entered in 2013 and so did Hezbollah to push them back. | |
| The NATO was behind it, of course, Erdogan was behind ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and so were the countries in the Persian Gulf region. | |
| And I think many of them weren't even thinking about the consequences of ISIS in their obsession to defeat Syria because of its relationship with Hezbollah and Iran, that they weren't even thinking about the consequences that it had for themselves. | |
| But over the last three, four years, Syria has become a burden for Iran. | |
| Every year Iran has been giving them huge amounts of free oil. | |
| They've also been funding them. | |
| I don't know the real number, but a huge amount of money. | |
| Now the Iranians don't have to do that anymore. | |
| And this quagmire is going to be something that Mr. Erdogan and Qatar and others are going to have to deal with. | |
| The economy in Syria, thanks to this dirty war on the country by NATO and its allies, has reduced the country to 15% of the economy that it had in 2010. And the country is in ruins. | |
| The United States is occupying one part of the country. | |
| The Israeli regime is moving forward. | |
| Even today, they've made further advances in the South. | |
| And right now, there's a shortage of fuel. | |
| There's a shortage of bread. | |
| And the country is in big trouble. | |
| And this extremist organization, which is being backed, and right now we see the Western media Describing Jolani and his people sort of like the Pahlavis, like the good guys. | |
| You know, this guy was a deputy of ISIS. He was the head of Al-Qaeda in Syria a decade after 9-11, less than a decade after the 7-7 bombings in London, less than a decade, I think, after the Manchester bombing. | |
| So you see this person in power, you see him and the groups allied to him, hostile towards all the minorities, the Kurds, and the bulk of the Sunni population as well. | |
| It's not as if they support him and his allies themselves. | |
| Some of them are far more extreme than he is. | |
| So how exactly is Mr. Erdogan going to be able to manage these terror organizations remains to be seen. | |
| But I think the problems that Syria is going to cause for Egypt, for Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia has distanced itself from this Wahhabi extremism over the past few years. | |
| Mohammed bin Salman is moving in a different direction. | |
| We can discuss that at another time, but now Erdogan has taken I'm not quite sure | |
| that these people have weakened Iran. | |
| I think in the long run, they're going to be the losers. | |
| And I don't think Jolani is going to last all that long. | |
| So I definitely get all of that. | |
| And I think the United States learned the lesson, although these lessons get learned and then unlearned very quickly when it's time for a new war, that if you go and create instability somewhere or a vacuum of power, very unpredictable results can happen. | |
| It was the invasion of Iraq, even according to Tony Blair, the removal of Saddam Hussein that created the conditions in which ISIS emerged in the Middle East. | |
| At least that's what a lot of Westerners, including those who supported the invasion of Iraq, now believe. | |
| And so who knows what will emerge out of the mess in Syria. | |
| And I absolutely understand the reasons why this has become a huge problem for a lot of actors, including those who promoted it, including Turkey and arguably Israel. | |
| But there was Netanyahu, not just celebrating the removal of Assad, but essentially taking credit for it, talking about the role that the Israelis played in liberating the Syrian people and all that. | |
| So they have clearly made the calculation that this is in their interest, despite the risks and dangers that you're identifying. | |
| And I think one of the reasons why it seems almost valid for the Israelis to see it that way is because Syria had been crucial to the Iranians' ability to work with and arm Hezbollah, even to some extent the Palestinians. | |
| And with Syria now no longer being a country that's allied with Iran and that Iran can use for that refueling of Hezbollah, the idea, at least from the Israeli perspective and therefore the American perspective, is that one of the losers in all of this is Iran. | |
| Why isn't that part true? | |
| Well, there are two parts here that I should point out, two issues. | |
| One is that the... | |
| In my opinion, Netanyahu is working in the interest of Netanyahu and not the Israeli regime. | |
| And just like I believe that Erdogan is working in the interest of Erdogan and not in the interest of the people of Turkey or Turkey. | |
| Because I believe that this adventure in Syria is not going to... | |
| Do good for the people of Turkey. | |
| And I think that the policies over the past 15 months that the Israeli regime has carried out is not going to end well for the regime. | |
| If the regime was smart, and again, I apologize for this sort of language, they would have carried out the genocide from October the 8th for a month or two and lied about the beheadings and lied about the rapes. | |
| A lot of global or public opinion would have been with them because Western media has been so powerful. | |
| But he went on, and then he should have declared a ceasefire and said, I defeated Hamas, I punished them, and Islamic Jihad, and I won. | |
| And he would have had everyone on his side, or a lot of people. | |
| But the longer the genocide continued, the more people began to explore. | |
| The history of Palestine and they learned about the Nikbah and they learned about what happened to the Palestinian people. | |
| They went forward. | |
| The more scenes of misery and death and destruction and genocide was being viewed by people across the world. | |
| And the Israeli regime became despised across the world. | |
| And Netanyahu, he stayed in power. | |
| And I think that's what his objective was and continues to be. | |
| But Israel has been destroyed. | |
| So if Netanyahu celebrates and many Israeli... | |
| Israelis would celebrate with him. | |
| That doesn't necessarily mean it's good policy for the regime. | |
| But what I would say about Syria is that Syria distanced itself from Iran a few years ago. | |
| And President Assad, or former President Assad, he began to approach Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. | |
| He expelled. | |
| The bulk of the Iranians who were there to fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda about three or four years ago, and he tilted away. | |
| And Hezbollah and Iran had great difficulty in really using We saw that Hezbollah was unable to use the assets that existed in Syria, and that the Syrian government had tilted away. | |
| I'm not saying that they sided with the But there is evidence that elements within Syrian intelligence, and I don't know how far it goes up, that they were giving information to the Israeli regime about Iranian or Hezbollah-related assets, | |
| and the Israelis were bombing them over the past few years. | |
| While Syria obviously did not have the negative role that Turkey had, I mean, Mr. Erdogan has been selling oil, transporting oil from Baku for the last 15 months, helping to fuel the war machine in Israel to carry out the genocide. | |
| Sisi has been doing business as usual. | |
| He's also been helping the Israelis use their ports because the Red Sea was close to the Israeli regime. | |
| And Jordan and the Emirates, they've all been helping the regime. | |
| He wasn't doing that, but he was definitely not—Siri under Assad did not have the sort of relationship with Iran over the past four years than they did in the past. | |
| I think that increasingly, especially over the last three years, the Syrian government has been a burden to Iran. | |
| And we have to always remember, it's not that Iran was ever a fan of the Syrian government. | |
| It's a Ba'athist regime. | |
| And remember, Iran fought against Saddam Hussein, who led another faction of the Ba'athist party. | |
| But for Iran, Syria under President Assad, or former President Assad, was infinitely better than ISIS and Al-Qaeda. | |
| And that continues to be the belief today that ISIS and Al-Qaeda are not good for Syria, they're not good for the region, and they're not good for the war. | |
| And what has happened in Syria is going to have consequences. | |
| And I think even Mr. Erdogan is underestimating the anger that exists in China and Russia and Central Asia when they see these many thousands of extremists armed and trained by Turkish intelligence, fighting in Syria, and also some of them calling for jihad, as they call it, in their own countries. | |
| And by the way, just one thing that I would like to add. | |
| These extremist groups. | |
| As you know, and I'm sure many in your audience know, they were created by the West. | |
| It began in Afghanistan. | |
| I don't want to go into history. | |
| Their first textbooks that were printed for children to use in Afghanistan were published with USAID money and at the University of Nebraska. | |
| So this is American Islam. | |
| This was Saudi Islam. | |
| Again, Saudi Arabia has distanced itself from these people. | |
| But this is not an indigenous Islam to this region. | |
| These are groups that the United States and its allies created, and they've destroyed so much of our region. | |
| And another thing is that it's these groups that the West created. | |
| And that the Israelis have also been supporting that together have destroyed so much of our region and led to millions of people. | |
| To flee to Europe. | |
| So those people in Europe who are so angry about immigration, they should look to people like Netanyahu, and they should look to people in Washington and European capitals that have been funding these extremists that have ultimately together led to so many people leaving the region. | |
| Otherwise, I think many of the people who are living in Europe would have preferred to stay at home, but when your homes are destroyed, you have to go somewhere safe. | |
| Yeah, it's amazing always when I see Americans seeing for the first time American media accounts from the 1980s talking about Osama bin Laden with headlines like anti-communist warrior or anti-Soviet fighter is heralded as the future of Afghanistan. | |
| And people become very confused at how this satanic figure was once celebrated in Washington, similar to the way that Jelani was once talked about the way Osama bin Laden now is and has had a kind of reverse conversion. | |
| Let me ask you about the role of the United States and the war in Gaza. | |
| You had mentioned earlier that Israel has suffered easily its biggest hit reputationally all throughout the world. | |
| Ireland just joined the genocide case at the ICC of South Africa. | |
| A Brazilian judge had just ordered a IDF soldier who was vacationing in Brazil to be detained because of suspicions for war crimes. | |
| The young generation in the United States, the student movement, has made Palestine their principal cause much the way they had done with anti-apartheid activism in the prior generation. | |
| You see all these changes in the way that Israel was perceived, even in Europe, where I think there's a lot more animosity towards them than there had been before. | |
| Is that true for the United States as well? | |
| Is there a widespread recognition in Iran in the region that the only reason why Israel can do what they are doing is because the United States under both parties so vehemently supports them? | |
| And if that is the case, as I imagine it is, what do you think is the reason why the United States is willing to sacrifice so much of its own interest in order to stand behind Israel? | |
| Without a doubt, that's the case. | |
| And again, that shows how selfish the Israeli regime is. | |
| In that it is willing to sacrifice the United States, it's willing to sacrifice the collective West for its own interests. | |
| The United States and the Europeans have suffered huge damage as a result of what's going on in Gaza, because they're seen as a part of this genocide. | |
| Without the United States government, without Biden, this Holocaust could not have continued. | |
| It could not have begun in the first place. | |
| And the same is true with... | |
| Germany, the same is true with the British, the Canadians. | |
| Of course, this is not their first genocide. | |
| Just over the last decade, these countries were supporting the genocide in Yemen. | |
| But in any case, this is the first genocide that we're seeing live, literally online. | |
| We're watching it happen in front of our eyes, and the world sees the West being behind us. | |
| So the West is suffering enormously economically and militarily. | |
| And otherwise in Ukraine. | |
| But in the case of Palestine, the image of the West has been totally destroyed. | |
| How can the West in the future ever talk about human rights anywhere, in North Korea or anywhere, when we are all just watching day and night this catastrophe unfold, not just in Gaza, but we should remember what they've done to the West Bank, or bringing to power al-Qaeda, people outside of the West. | |
| See Al-Qaeda for what it is, because they're not watching mainstream Western media. | |
| The world has changed. | |
| So across the Global South, the view of what's going on in our region is very different from what some people in the West believe because they live in their own bubble. | |
| And also, what we saw just yesterday, where Trump I reposted a clip where Professor Sachs was talking about Israel and Netanyahu. | |
| And this is something that, of course, I'm sure you and your audience, which is, I'm sure, very politically aware, know already that the Israeli regime pushed the United States towards the war in Iraq. | |
| They pushed the United States towards the dirty war in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. | |
| Trillions of dollars that have been wasted and that have helped bring about so much difficulty for ordinary Americans and the hardship that it has created in Europe and the refugee crisis that has changed the political landscape of Europe. | |
| I personally believe that if we didn't have the dirty war in Syria, Brexit, for good or for ill, would have never been approved by the British public. | |
| That, I think, tilted the balance of power in British politics. | |
| The scenes of all these Syrians moving towards Europe, I think that changed the mood, and it continues to change the mood. | |
| So, the Israeli regime does not care about the interests of the United States. | |
| It does not care about the interests of Europeans. | |
| Of course, then there's this argument that some make, and I'm not The best experts, to give my opinion. | |
| But you do see some people say that it's Israel that dictates terms to the United States. | |
| Some say it's the United States. | |
| But I think it's Zionism, whether it's in the United States or in Palestine. | |
| And it's not necessarily Jewish Zionism. | |
| It's Christian Zionism. | |
| It's secular Zionism. | |
| Remember, the Americans... | |
| The American political establishment, most of them are not Jews, but they support this. | |
| And of course, Christian Zionists have a very different worldview from Jewish Zionists. | |
| And if you look at how they perceive the future of the world, they apparently want the Jews, the bulk of Jews in Palestine to be wiped out at the end of time. | |
| So it's not exactly a very... | |
| The underlying relationship I don't think is all that friendly. | |
| I don't think someone who wants me to die in some sort of end-of-times holocaust is really a true friend of mine. | |
| Yeah, but I guess since the Israelis don't believe that that is the outcome, they're more than willing to take the support, notwithstanding how misguided they think the motives are. | |
| And of course, in a lot of ways, Christian Zionists in the United States have become more fanatical and even more dogmatic than most Jewish Zionists when it comes to supporting Israel and everything that it does. | |
| Let me ask you about Trump. | |
| You mentioned that post that he posted. | |
| We've had Professor Sachs on our show many times, and I really question whether Trump knew what he was posting. | |
| posting, the first part of that explanation from Professor Sachs is about how it was President Obama who unleashed the regime change operation in Syria and gave rise to all this carnage and instability. | |
| And I don't know if that was the only part Trump had listened to and posted it for that reason or if he knew that the whole rest of it was about the evils of Netanyahu and how he led the way in tricking the United States into the war in Iraq. | |
| But nonetheless, I remember during the Trump presidency, I interviewed President E. Morales, the left-wing president of Bolivia. | |
| And it was at a time when American liberals, Western liberals had talked themselves into this lather that Donald Trump was the worst threat and the greatest evil to ever descend upon the United States and Hillary Clinton who lost to him and whoever, whatever Democrat might win would be the savior. | |
| And I went to Mexico. | |
| where President Morales was in exile, and I asked him about that, and he said, look, for us... | |
| It makes no difference. | |
| Bush, Obama, Clinton, Trump, the United States ends up having exactly the same policy in our region and others. | |
| What is the Iranian view? | |
| And I realize you don't speak for all Iranians, but from your perspective and as a professor in Iran, in terms of the comparisons between, say, the incoming President Trump and the outgoing President Biden when it comes to the issues in your region? | |
| Again, I agree. | |
| I think that there's really no difference. | |
| Biden said he's a Zionist. | |
| His national security advisor, the same person who put out the email to Hillary Clinton, sent the email to Hillary Clinton in early 2012, that in Syria, al-Qaeda is on our side. | |
| Jake Sullivan, he is a Zionist. | |
| He's a supremacist himself. | |
| His priority, obviously, based on his ideology, would be the Israeli regime rather than the United States. | |
| And the same is true with the Secretary of State. | |
| So I don't see much of a difference, if anything, between the current What I would say, though, is that I find it quite plausible that Trump did listen until the end, but it really doesn't make much of a difference. | |
| If you recall, seven years ago, I think it was like between the first and second half of the Super Bowl, Trump had an interview with O'Reilly. | |
| And I think O'Reilly said, like, Putin was a murderer or something like that. | |
| And he said, well, you know, we have murderers here, too. | |
| I don't remember exactly what he said. | |
| But he was saying, you know, we do. | |
| You don't think we think we're innocent? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But that didn't mean that Trump was going to change policy and be humanitarian. | |
| And when, you know, as soon as Trump used missiles on Syria. | |
| And I think your audience, I'm sure many of them know about Aran Matei and his work on the false flag operations on chemical weapons in Syria, something which I also have experience of because I've been to Syria many times, and I've been to Qutai and Douma and other places. | |
| But when he fired those missiles, his own opponents in the United States went on mainstream television channels in the United States and said that he's finally become the president. | |
| Someone said, we're guided by the beauty of our weapons or something like that. | |
| But the war machine in the United States and the Zionist lobby, secular, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, whoever, their interests are very similar to one another. | |
| I believe that many in the United States are... | |
| We're seeing the world very differently now from before, and there is a significant change taking place, and that's why TikTok is being banned and why the algorithms are being played with, and we're now seeing X moving back towards censorship for obvious reasons. | |
| But in any case, I don't think there is any substantial difference between Trump and Biden. | |
| And I don't think Trump has any secret weapon up his sleeves that Biden didn't have. | |
| So I don't think the United States is going to be more powerful or more effective at imposing itself on the rest of the world under Trump than under Biden. | |
| If Biden could have hurt Iran further, if it could have hurt Russia further or China or Greenland or Panama or whoever, he would have done it. | |
| The United States is not a country that has shown, you know, the Monroe Doctrine is something that Democrats and Republicans both pursued in that part of the world which I assume you live in. | |
| That's the American backyard. | |
| It doesn't matter if it's a Democrat or a Republican. | |
| It's the backyard. | |
| Yeah, and I mean, there's even explicit embrace still of the Monroe Doctrine, not just through actions. | |
| I just have a couple more questions for you. | |
| And I'd love to have you back on because I actually have a lot more, but just out of respect for your time, I'm going to ask a couple more. | |
| One of the big foreign policy legacies that Trump and his supporters love to tout are the so-called Abraham Accords. | |
| If October 7th hadn't happened, there clearly was an attempt that very well may have succeeded under President Biden to continue with those and to forge a deal where the Saudis and the Israelis would have fully normalized relations. | |
| And then October 7th happened. | |
| It became difficult for the Saudis to do that. | |
| But that clearly is a major goal of the incoming Trump administration. | |
| Trump and his family love the Saudis. | |
| They love the Emiratis. | |
| And they clearly want to unite them with the Israelis and have this kind of pan-American alliance that they think will dominate the region. | |
| What is your view of the... | |
| The possibility, the likelihood that they will be able to forge that kind of an alliance? | |
| Well, the Israeli regime is very radioactive now, and people hate it much more than ever before. | |
| Anyone or any regime or any government that moves towards Israel is going to put itself at great risk. | |
| Even before October the 7th, people across the region disliked the regime. | |
| They did not see it as legitimate. | |
| But today, it's a completely different thing altogether. | |
| They're carrying out this Holocaust. | |
| We don't even know how many people have died. | |
| The real number is how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people have died because of illness, because of lack of clean water, because of a lack of medicine, because of cancer. | |
| Or how many thousands or tens of thousands of people are under the rubble? | |
| We don't know. | |
| We may never know. | |
| But people across the region see this as the great evil of our time. | |
| In a sense, the most evil thing that we've ever seen in human history is simply because we're watching it happen and no one stops it. | |
| And the West enables it. | |
| So the outrage and the anger across the region and beyond is very different from before. | |
| So it's going to be... | |
| Very difficult. | |
| And I should also add one thing, and that is that Iran is sanctioned. | |
| It's completely sanctioned. | |
| Iran's media is sanctioned. | |
| Even people like myself have been removed from Facebook, Instagram. | |
| Iran has very little voice. | |
| They constantly attack Iran. | |
| They constantly spread misinformation and disinformation about Iran, and Iran really can't respond. | |
| Across the global majority, we see how over the past 15 months, Iran's popularity has increased among people from all walks of life. | |
| And this is something that I've experienced. | |
| Iran is the bad guy. | |
| It is evil. | |
| But it is Iran that is opposing apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing. | |
| The Americans and the Europeans are the good guys. | |
| But they're the ones supporting apartheid, genocide, this Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing. | |
| People across the world are looking at what's happening, and they're reevaluating everything that they believed beforehand. | |
| And I would imagine that this is true about, in different ways and to different degrees, other countries that the United States Is hostile towards what they're doing in Gaza, because this is an American-led Holocaust. | |
| This is not Netanyahu's Holocaust. | |
| This is Biden's Holocaust more than anything else. | |
| Without him, it would not have happened. | |
| Then the Germans and others. | |
| But how in the future will anyone side with Americans over human rights in China or Russia or North Korea or anywhere else or Iran? | |
| How is anyone going to side with the United States when they see that the United States and the West have been behind this greatest crime, at least of the 21st century, simply because, as I said, it's being carried out in front of our eyes? | |
| I think this is something that, despite the fact that the West controls the bulk of the media and the social media especially, that they do not quite understand. | |
| Yeah, some of the smarter people in Washington who want to maintain American empire or American hegemony have been warning that things like America's support for Ukraine and then especially America's support for what the Israelis are doing in Gaza has fueled the perception that a world under American control is a world that nobody wants and that, more than anything, is driving a lot of countries previously. | |
| Unwittingly but aligned with the United States into the arms of China because now they have an alternative. | |
| Let me just end by asking you this about Saudi-Iranian relations because for a long time in the region I think there was a perception that those two regional powers and the animosity and conflict between them is what had been driving a lot of the region-wide conflicts. | |
| And that was both something that could be exploited by outside powers who were aligned with the Saudis, but also was something that was creating the potential for a regional war with various proxies or even with the two countries. | |
| It seems as though there's been, I don't want to call it a reproach month because maybe that's too much, but at least an attempt by both countries to tamp down the tensions that are very overt, that are very kind of bellicose. | |
| China has played a role in trying to mediate those as well. | |
| What can you tell us about the direction in which Saudi-Iranian relations have been going? | |
| That's a good question. | |
| We have to remember that Saudi Arabia, at the behest of the United States, began spreading this extremist ideology. | |
| And they began in Afghanistan. | |
| We know that Brzezinski, before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he asked Carter to fund these so-called Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to encourage the same Jimmy Carter, who is the human rights advocate and all that, to encourage the Soviet Union to enter Afghanistan to create a Vietnam. | |
| What many people think, this did not begin with the Soviet Union entering Afghanistan. | |
| It began with the United States under Carter and Brzezinski pushing or encouraging the Soviet Union to enter the country. | |
| Then the Americans and the Saudis and others began to fund these extremist groups in Pakistan. | |
| And this culture of extremism grew from there. | |
| And that's why Pakistan today has so many problems, even though it was directed towards Afghanistan, but it spread in Pakistan. | |
| And the Saudis, in order to counter Iran, and for other reasons, they began spreading this. | |
| Today, Saudi Arabia has moved away from this. | |
| And ironically, Erdogan and Qatar have been supporting these groups more than anyone else. | |
| 12 and 13, I was invited to the Istanbul Forum. | |
| It doesn't exist anymore. | |
| But I said in both lectures or in both talks or during my speech or discussion in a panel, on both occasions, I compared Turkey to Pakistan. | |
| I said Pakistan before the dirty war in Afghanistan. | |
| It was a conservative society, but they didn't have this sort of extremism that we have today. | |
| And my concern is that we're going to see changes take place in Turkey because of its support for ISIS or Erdogan's support for ISIS and al-Qaeda. | |
| I say Erdogan because I don't believe, I think, many Turks are very much opposed to these policies. | |
| But in any case, Saudi Arabia, in recent years under Mohammed bin Salman, whatever you think about him, he has distanced himself from these policies of supporting these groups. | |
| And that has been a plus in the relationship. | |
| But also a very interesting historical footnote. | |
| The rapprochement began when General Soleimani went to Baghdad. | |
| He went to Baghdad in order to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister. | |
| And he was supposed to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister at 8 in the morning. | |
| And they were going to discuss a letter from Saudi Arabia about potential rapprochement. | |
| They wanted to find a solution to decrease tensions. | |
| And then Trump murdered General Soleimani. | |
| And again, here Netanyahu, going back to that clip, Netanyahu was supposed to be a part of this attack. | |
| To murder General Soleimani and the leader of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces who was also fighting against ISIS because Iran was leading the war against ISIS and Iraq was very central to that war. | |
| General Soleimani was leading the fight against ISIS and he was winning the war. | |
| And so when he went to Baghdad, Netanyahu was supposed to be a part of this attack, the Israeli regime, and then Netanyahu backed out at the last moment and Trump did it himself. | |
| So it shows that Netanyahu, he helped push Trump towards confrontation with Iran even there. | |
| But the point that I wanted to make was that the attempt for rapprochement existed then and the Israeli regime and the Americans murdered General Soleimani. | |
| Because they didn't want that rapprochement. | |
| But gradually the two sides began to negotiate, to talk in Baghdad and Oman and elsewhere, and finally in China, in Beijing, and they reached an agreement. | |
| And I think now the relationship is much better than it was before. | |
| And I think actually what's happening in Syria is a great concern. | |
| To Saudi Arabia. | |
| And so it's not as if this is not 2012 and 13 and 14. The mood has changed. | |
| Many are concerned by how the Americans and how Erdogan and how the Israeli regime, they brought Al-Qaeda and its allies, some of them are much more extreme than Jolani himself, how they've come to power and how this is a threat to them. | |
| So there is, you know, there is There is an opportunity for the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf region to improve even further. | |
| And I think those countries that are supporting the Al-Qaeda, whether it's Qatar or Mr. Erdogan, they should be concerned about how many countries, whether in Central Asia, the Russians, the Chinese, in the Persian Gulf region and elsewhere, How many different countries are deeply concerned, if not angered, by what they've done in Syria? | |
| So the potential for better relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, I think, are there. | |
| I can't predict the future, but as things stand, I think the chances for them to improve at the moment are significant. | |
| Well, as you alluded to earlier, people in the West, unless they really make a concerted effort, hear a lot about Iran, but very rarely hear from people inside of it, which obviously brings a new perspective. | |
| I've been following your work for some time. | |
| I hope other people will do so as well. | |
| We'll provide the links where people can do that. | |
| I really appreciate you taking the time to come on. | |
| We'd love to have you on again. | |
| I hope you have a great evening. | |
| You too, and I hope your audience, everyone has a... | |
| Very good new year ahead of them. | |
| And I think 2025 is going to be a very, very dangerous and tough year for people in many parts of the world. | |
| But I believe that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. | |
| All right. | |
| It's good to end on an optimistic note. | |
| Really appreciate it. | |
| Thanks so much. | |
| Thank you. |