During a recent interview host Tucker Carlson questioned Ted Cruz about U.S. policy toward Iran, pressing him on his lack of basic knowledge about the country while accusing him of advocating reckless military intervention. Cruz awkwardly admits he doesn’t know Iran’s population, despite calling for regime change, and the exchange becomes increasingly combative as Carlson challenged the Texas senator’s credibility. Guest hosts Russell Dobular and Keaton Weiss of the Due Dissidence show note that Carlson gets Cruz to reveal that the U.S. is already backing Israeli strikes against Iran—contradicting official government statements. The hosts argue the push for war is being driven by pro-Israel influence and propaganda, echoing the prelude to the Iraq War. They also urge viewers, especially Trump supporters, to withhold all political support if Trump endorses military action, emphasizing the catastrophic consequences of war with Iran. Plus segments on the likely consequences of war between the United States and Iran with Iranian professor Mohammad Marandi and the most common responses trauma surgeon Dr. Feroze Sidhwa receives when he tells people about working in a Gaza hospital.
If they really believed Iran tried to assassinate the president, then we, of course, as a country, would take it upon ourselves to attack Iran.
We can just say that and then just let that hang in the air for months on end, which, you know, there was talk about that, speculation about that, whatever you want to call it.
Before November of last year, people were blaming that on Iran.
So why'd you wait almost a year to do anything about it?
It's just amazing how, as when Israel strikes, all of a sudden, the panic meter gets turned up to 10, and all of a sudden, this is an existential problem.
Establishment media sucks, all gaslighting, so good luck, bullshit we can't afford, fomenting this world.
Watch and see as there's Jack Goff, the median speeds and jumps the medium and hits them head on.
It's the Chimitor Show.
Chimitor Show.
Welcome to the Jimmy Door show, everybody.
Keaton Weiss and Russell Dobular in for Jimmy while he is touring Europe.
Well, this was a special treat that came online yesterday.
Ted Cruz on Iran, full interview tomorrow.
So this was the teaser clip.
We have a few clips that we're going to play because, of course, Tucker Carlson in Washington now interviewed Ted Cruz and did not really hold back.
So here he is quizzing Ted Cruz on the population of Iran, the country that Ted Cruz would like to overthrow.
By the way, how many people live in Iran, by the way?
I don't know the population at all.
No, I don't know the population.
You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?
How many people live in Iran?
92 million.
Okay.
Yeah.
How could you not know that?
I don't sit around memorizing population tables.
Well, it's kind of relevant because you're calling for the overthrow of the government.
Why is it relevant whether it's 90 million or 80 million or 100 million?
Why is this?
That's a lawyer trick that Ted Cruz just did, and Tucker kind of let him do it.
Tucker should have said, well, take a guess how many people live there.
Because what Cruz just says there, he says, okay, well, I mean, I don't know.
I don't look at population tables.
What's the difference if it's 80 million, 90 million, or 100?
He's acting as if he knew it was somewhere in that range, right?
He's acting now as if he knew it was about 90.
Ah, maybe 80, maybe 100.
What Tucker should have said was, take a guess how many they are so you get them on the record because I have a feeling he didn't know that it was in that ballpark.
I had a feeling he had no idea whatsoever, as was evidenced by his initial response.
So now he tries to lawyer it like the scumbag he is.
And I thought, wow, you know, what's the difference?
80, 90, 100.
I knew it was somewhere in that range.
I wasn't that far off.
I'm not totally ignorant about the country that I wanted to overthrow.
By the way, the population of Iraq in 2002, right before we invaded, was a little over 20 million.
So when people talk about why this is going to be so much worse than Iraq, that's a big part of it.
Is that you're just talking about a much bigger country with much more people in it, almost four times the population of Iraq when we went to war there over 20 years ago.
Yeah.
And that went well.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
So it'll only be four times worse than that.
Yes.
Yeah.
If you don't know anything about the country, I didn't say I don't know anything about it.
Okay, what's the ethnic mix of Iran?
They are Persians and predominantly Shia.
Okay, this is no, it's not even you don't know anything about Iran.
So I am not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran.
You're a senator who's calling for the country.
You're the one that owns the government.
You're the one who knows anything about the country.
No, you don't know anything about the country.
You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
I'm not saying that.
Who can't figure out a saying you don't need to kill General Suleimani?
And you said it was bad.
They're trying to murder Trump.
Yes, I did because you're not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
If they really believe they're carrying out military strikes today, you said Israel was.
Right.
What?
So, first of all, yes, what Tucker says there is definitely true.
If they really believed Iran tried to assassinate the president, then we, of course, as a country, would take it upon ourselves to attack Iran.
Wouldn't just say that and then just let that hang in the air for months on end, which, you know, there was talk about that, speculation about that, whatever you want to call it.
Before November of last year, people were blaming that on Iran.
So why'd you wait almost a year to do anything about it?
It's just amazing how, as when Israel strikes, all of a sudden, the panic meter gets turned up to 10.
And all of a sudden, this is an existential problem that requires immediate urgent action, like potentially World War III.
Yeah.
And once again, I will draw people's attention to the fact that they did not at all cover these assassins.
Didn't cover them at all, right?
And I'm not saying don't go Google it and find a name and then tell me no, you can David Henkel.
We know we still know that name, right?
Mark David Chapman.
These assassins, the media loves those stories, right?
That's very clickbaity for them.
That sells a lot of magazines.
Have you ever seen them so silent about who the people who tried to kill the president are?
Especially Butler?
You heard like a couple things about this person and then silence.
If that does not tell you these were ops partly deployed for this purpose, so that now they could claim whatever because they really did not put in front of the public who these people were.
They gave them no explanation for it, really.
That makes it much easier to just fill in the blank and claim whatever you want to claim about it.
Yeah, now you can just say whatever you want.
All right, we'll back it up a little bit.
That's right.
No, you don't know anything about the country.
You're the one who claims they're not trying to murder Donald Trump.
I'm not saying that.
Who can't figure out a saying you don't need to kill General Suleimani?
And you said it was bad.
They're trying to murder Trump.
Yes, I did because you're not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.
And if they really believe carrying out military strikes today, you said Israel was.
Right.
With our help.
I said we.
Israel is leading them, but we're supporting them.
Well, this, you're breaking news here because the U.S. government last night denied the National Security Council spokesman Alex Pfeiffer denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on Israel's behalf in any offensive capacity.
We're not bombing them.
Israel's bombing them.
You just said we were.
You just said we were.
We are supporting Israel.
you're a senator.
If you're saying the United States government is at war with Iran right now, people are listening.
Wow.
Oh, my God.
And that was just a small sample of things.
I mean, that was just a tiny sample.
We will get to more in just a moment.
But no, once again, he's absolutely, Tucker is, he is absolutely right.
That, of course, if they really thought that Iran was behind the assassination attempt, they'd have not waited until Israel acted first.
What, 10 months later?
That was in July of last year.
It was almost almost a year ago.
It's almost an entire year.
Well, we would have just let that go for a year, not really said much about it, not really done much about it.
I mean, it's just so absurd.
So absurd.
Glenn Greenwald says it's such uniquely Washington ethos for a senator to run around demanding the U.S. destroy and overthrow the government of a country without knowing even the most basic facts about it.
Ted Cruz learns where a country is on the map when he calls for war against it, but no sooner.
Exactly.
Ted Cruz just said the quiet part out loud, says Brian Allen on Tucker Carlson show.
Cruz casually dropped that we're already at war with Iran alongside Israel.
Tucker, visibly stunned, reminded him that the White House denied U.S. involvement just last night.
And then, yes, right on queue, Cruz panicked, stuttered, and began walking it all back.
But of course, when it's difficult to know where Israel ends and the United States begins, what difference does it make whether you walk it back or not?
The cat was out of the bag once he said that.
All right.
So this goes on a bit further here.
This is when it gets even more confrontational.
And so let's play some more of this.
Powerful country in the world.
If you're calling for toppling in government, it's incumbent on you to know something about the country and to think through the consequences of that.
And you haven't and you don't.
And I'm saying that.
Okay.
You are you engage in reckless rhetoric with no facts.
And to be clear, you engage in reckless rhetoric.
You're the one saying we need to overcome.
You're out of bounds.
I'm about to rule your perfectly reasonable statements out of bounds.
He's the one engaging in reckless rhetoric.
Is he the one advocating for war?
No, you're the one who's reckless rhetoric with no facts to back it up.
That describes exactly what you just said, which is, yeah, we need to topple Iran.
I don't know how many people live there.
Yeah, no.
No, that is exactly what we talk about.
Projection.
Yeah, he's the one demanding that you demonstrate the most basic knowledge of the country that you want to.
It's not just about bombing it.
Clearly, their objective is to overthrow the government.
Right.
So, so you really, it is really incumbent on you to know something about how that would play out.
To know how that would play out, you need to know something about the country.
Yes, absolutely.
You engage in reckless rhetoric with no facts.
And to be clear, I'm not calling you the overall government.
You put out a newsletter attacking Donald Trump and calling him complicit.
Am I going to read Donald Trump?
Yes, you have.
And by the way, pain for Donald Trump.
This is like after anti-Semitism, this is the last refuge.
You're an anti-Semitic and you hate Trump.
Okay, I love Trump.
I will read.
You put out a whole newsletter saying Trump is abandoned America first.
And here's what Trump said in.
How pathetic is this?
Like, this is why Ted Cruz is such a hated man.
He's widely hated in Washington by both parties, not just the Democrats who hate him.
If you remember John Boehner, when he left the speakership, he said Ted Cruz is the most miserable son of a bitch he ever met in his life.
You had that guy, Peter King, the congressman from Long Island, who during the primaries in 2016, he backed Trump.
And he would have been a never Cruz had Cruz won the nomination.
They said, if Cruz wins a nomination, will you vote for him?
He says, I'd rather drink cyanide.
Yeah, this guy is just like a very, very reviled.
It's very colleagues.
And it shows you here.
I mean, he just is a miserable bastard in ways that like transcend whatever your politics are.
Remember, Al Franken, I tweeted this out today.
Al Franken gave a really great quote.
I mean, he's a scumbag himself, but he is funny.
He tells the interviewers on the view, he says, you know, I actually like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz.
And I hate Ted Cruz.
So, yeah, no, everybody hates this guy, which explains why he sat down with Tucker Carlson.
He's the one who's arrogant enough and enough of an asshole to think that, yeah, I can go toe-to-toe with Tucker Carlson for two hours on this war of aggression that nobody in America wants.
He's a guy who's used to being absolutely despised.
And this is a perfect example of why no one can stand to be around him, even people on his political side.
Yeah, it's very weird when people like this, who clearly are repulsive and cringe and off-putting, get this far in politics.
Yeah, exactly.
It's very weird, like DeSantis.
Like, supposedly, that was not just, you know, smearing from the Trump people.
Supposedly, he is a weird, unsociable, off-putting guy.
How do you become governor?
How do you do that?
Because you got to get people to give you money.
You got to do a lot of gladhanding the way our system works.
Texas is more than any other on earth.
You have to be able to really get people to want to write you checks.
How do you do that with that kind of personality?
Yeah, no, especially like Texas is a huge state, second most populous state in the union.
You need a lot of votes to get elected in Texas.
Who could walk into a voting booth and vote for this man?
Who?
It's very strange.
It is bizarre.
Response.
Well, considering that I'm the one that developed America first and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one who decides that.
For those people who say they want peace, you can't have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.
So for all of those wonderful people who don't want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon, that's not peace.
That was directed at you.
Man, this is, you got me.
You got me.
Trusted.
No.
Yeah, no, exactly.
Like, it is so unbelievably juvenile To, in response to what Tucker just said, read a newsletter where he very meekly, by the way, criticized Donald Trump as some sort of gotcha, as if that belongs in the same conversation as agitating for World War III.
It shows you what a cult Ted Cruz thinks MAGA is.
Like, he thinks it's a cult.
Now, I know most of Magazine.
I think the red actually did not play well with them.
Right.
I decide what America first is.
Right, right.
So, what I'm saying is, you know, the polling data suggests most of MAGA doesn't want this war.
Ted Cruz feels like the best play he could make is to appeal to what he views as the cult of MAGA.
Well, you cross the deer leader.
Ha ha.
It's a smoking gun.
And so it's up to you, MAGA, if you're going to stand for that.
I mean, this is really a line in the sand.
This is why we've been covering on our show a lot, how this has really driven a wedge through the MAGA coalition, perhaps irreparably, because if you have principles, you have to take a side, and there's just no question which side to land on here.
But Ted Cruz thinks that that's a major own, and Tucker kind of mocks him a little bit for it.
All right, we'll let this go a little more.
Just saying, my views, look, I like Trump.
I campaigned for Trump.
I know Trump.
I talked to him last night.
You talked to him last night?
What did you say?
Did you say don't do this?
Because that would have been a good thing to get in.
Yeah.
I mean, I would imagine he did.
All right.
Well, hopefully, fingers crossed, knock on wood.
Trump, and you know that.
But you're against this foreign policy.
I think that we should be very careful about entering into more foreign wars that don't help us when our country is dying.
When you say Donald Trump is dying, look, yes, focus on our country.
I'm all for it.
But the naive can't have a nuclear weapon.
It went from make America great again to Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
That's the Donald Trump mantra now.
Is talking about Iran all of a sudden, because Israel started bombing them.
They can't have a nuclear weapon.
That's the line.
They're amidst negotiations.
Tucker, you know as well as I do, Donald can get Miriam with the six-inch strap on or the 15 inches.
Do you want him to get the 15 inches, Tucker?
Is that what you want?
That would make you a traitor.
You don't even know how much money this costs.
You don't know anything about the country whose government you want to throw, overthrow, and you're calling me reckless.
I want to stop a lunatic who wants to murder us from getting nuclear weapons and kill millions of Americans.
Oh, my God.
You say I can't see how that benefits America in any way.
That is bizarre.
And by the way, isolationism.
You're for what's bizarre is that all of the sudden, a year after they supposedly were behind the assassination attempt, this is an immediate life or death emergency.
Like that should be the tell, folks.
Don't you understand?
Like, where was this urgency until Israel bombed?
Israel was the one who, amidst negotiations and talks, decided, you know what?
We're going in.
We're bombing.
That wasn't a decision the United States came to officially, right?
That was what Israel did.
So according to what Ted Cruz would have you think, Israel jumped the gun, they bombed, and all of a sudden, now we have to be so afraid that Iran is going to try and kill us all.
All of a sudden, all of a sudden, what about the last year?
Because of assassins that have been uniquely invisibilized.
Yeah, for a year.
Singularly, singularly, I challenge you to find one other case in history where people attempted assassinations of the president where they were that invisible from news coverage.
Yep.
Policy is the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Oh, absolutely.
And it doesn't work.
Yeah, I'm a big leftist.
This is so silly.
Now I'm Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.
Okay.
Let me just say one last thing.
So how is your foreign policy different from Jimmy Carter's?
Seriously, please.
May I ask that question seriously?
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Jimmy Carter?
So what century is this?
I am the product of the last 25 years watching carefully, being involved in the periphery, and I see an unending string of foreign policy disasters that have impoverished and hurt.
Unending string.
So unending string.
They would include Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and our inability to stop the Houthis, by the way, in Yemen, which exposes us as weak.
And I grieve over that.
So these are failures.
You helped preside over some of them as a member of the Senate.
What failures, foreign policy failures have I presided over?
Well, we were unable to beat Russia in the war that you supported against Russia.
That's the thing.
You didn't mention Ukraine in that list, but you talk about continuity.
I mean, Ukraine was February of 2022.
The Afghanistan pullout was August 2021.
So you're talking about literally a continuous string.
You've been spending the last three years telling us that Vladimir Putin is evil and we're going to beat him with other people's children.
And a million of those kids are now dead.
You've never apologized for that.
That was a fucking idea.
By the way, look, the level of number of falsehoods you lay out just in one statement are rather.
You haven't supported the war against Russia?
Are rather stunning.
So the war against Russia was caused, which I have explained in great detail by Joe Biden's weakness.
But you supported the war.
If you want to talk, talk Russian Ukraine.
I'm happy to talk about it.
Oh, God.
Do you think that's been a success?
No, it's been an absolute disaster.
Okay, but you supported it.
Shouldn't you apologize?
No, you should apologize for not going to engage in the demanding of apologizing.
I should apologize.
You should apologize.
Wow.
I mean, what a miserable bastard.
I have got him.
We've been very busy because we're doing one show after another.
I've got to watch the whole interview.
It's two hours.
I don't know.
I don't want to jump on your segment.
Do you have like, because Ted Cruz tweeted out something about how out of context?
And you, it was before the whole thing dropped.
And you said a clip has been seen out of context.
Well, no, that clip that's out of context.
Think that he was going to be vindicated by the whole interview.
Yeah, the clip that was supposedly taken out of context was when Ted Cruz talks about the Bible, which is not my area of expertise.
Obviously, you guys will have to go to Candace Owens' channel to get the truth on that.
That's outside my purview.
But this is.
I heard about it, though.
Yeah, I've heard of it.
Yeah.
Sounds good.
A lot of people seem to like it.
Ted Cruz, recipient of $1.9 million APAC dollars.
That is a whole lot of explanation.
Yes.
Craig.
Mochabir says the U.S. provided the Israeli regime with the green light for its surprise attack on Iran, the distraction of feigned peace talks to facilitate the attack, U.S. tax dollars to finance the operation, the intelligence for targeting, the weapons and ammunition for killing, the diplomatic cover to protect it from Security Council action, U.S. forces to intercept the Iranian response, the promise of direct U.S. military backing if Israel requires it, and now appears poised to join the Israeli regime in offensive operations.
Once again, the U.S. is a co-perpetrator in Israel's crimes, and corrupt U.S. politicians and media corporations have dusted off the old WMD's ruse to push the U.S. into war for the Israeli regime.
After Israeli impunity, the biggest threat to international peace and security is American ignorance.
Amen.
Amen.
And Ted Cruz fed all of that right there.
He gave you the, they want to kill us all.
So what are you crazy for defying Donald Trump's what, oddly enough, neocon foreign policy strategy at this moment?
And not only that, but as Craig says earlier in this tweet, as he references, he spilled the beans that, yeah, we're involved.
Well, we.
Well, what do you mean we?
Well, I mean, Israel, but I thought Israel and the United States are different entities.
Yeah, well, I mean, we're backing Israel.
So it's just so obvious who instigated this.
And, you know, as much as knock on wood, polling seems to indicate at this moment that the overwhelming majority of Americans are against this or unsure.
So the latest polling shows 60% of Americans oppose U.S. intervention in Iran.
16% favor it.
And the rest are unsure.
And what we need to do right now is we need to make sure that all of the rest of those people who are unsure get their mind right and say no because the propaganda blitz in these coming days and weeks is going to be just absolutely relentless.
For anyone who lived through the post-9-11 Iraq march to war, you know what I'm talking about.
For those who are too young or too unengaged to know what I'm talking about, go learn what I'm talking about.
You know, go on YouTube, search for, you know, whatever, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, whoever the CNN guys were back then.
I don't even know because that's what kind of impression CNN makes on people.
Go back and look at some of that media coverage just to educate yourself as to like the lengths that these people will go to just convince the public that, yeah, ignorance is bliss.
Freedom is slavery.
War is peace.
Up is down.
Left is right.
It's pretty extraordinary what they will do.
And crazy as it may sound to some of you, it does work on people.
It does work on people, which is why the task is so urgent that we A, remind people of what a mistake that was, what the disastrous consequences of that were, and warn people that, yes, because Iran, you know, whether Ted Cruz knows it or not, is a country with almost four times the population of pre-war Iraq in 2002.
So the consequences of this will be much, much worse.
And it's imperative that we stop this from happening.
We just have to stop this from happening.
Some Democrats, as well as Thomas Massey in the House, have created a war powers bill that would require a congressional vote.
You need to call your senator and your congressperson and urge them to vote yes on that.
It's all hands on deck because if you've been politically awake for the last 20 years, this right now is what you've been fearing.
This was the big disaster event that we just couldn't have happen.
And now it's looking pretty likely it's going to happen in pretty short time.
And so it's all hands on deck to try and stop this.
Yeah.
The real difference right now is it's a different country.
This propaganda does work on some people.
It always will.
It's not going to work on most people, not this time.
There's been a lot of water under the bridge since 9-11.
You have a president who is uniquely despised by the Democrats and people on the left, like much more so than George Bush.
They hated George Bush, but this is a completely different order of magnitude of hate.
It's a different country.
Like you just didn't even have within the bounds of normal politics the concept of hatred for a president at that time that you have for Donald Trump.
And MAGA is the anti-war faction of the United States political spectrum.
They're probably the most anti-war collectively, the most anti-war portion of the voting public, of the regularly voting public of the people who really go into a voting booth and vote.
There's nobody really to propagandize with this stuff other than people in nursing homes watching CNN.
Like it's not going to work on most people.
So I think it's less a question of seeing the war fever that they were able to whip up about going into Iraq than it's a question of do they care that they're not going to be able to move the needle much above the 16% support that they have now.
Do they care?
Because I don't think you get that above 22.
I don't care what kind of propaganda you do.
So, do they go ahead anyway?
Especially when the people who are going to be most against it are Trump's base.
Does he go ahead and do this?
Does he completely just light all of his political capital on fire that way at once?
And the bigger question is: does he even have a choice?
Because it's pretty obvious.
He's a Zionist puppet.
And this isn't a mask off moment.
It was obvious before he came into office.
It was obvious through what he said.
We kept showing that clip.
It was obvious in his first term.
Sure.
It was obvious his first term was obvious.
We kept showing that clip of him dancing around in front of the Israeli flags, bragging about how Sheldon Adelson would crack the whip.
And he bragged about how fast he got things done for Sheldon Adelson.
And then look at who he appointed.
So anyone who's like, I didn't realize he was like this.
Come on, man.
Come on.
It was very obvious he was going to be like this.
Now that we're here, he does care about being adored.
And that's probably why he looks so tired and beaten when you see him now in front of the cameras because he knows that the forces that really control him are about to destroy his bond to his base.
Yeah.
And I think what also should be communicated from that base, and I know that some people are not going to agree with this because there are some people who still want to find the positives in this administration.
But if you really want to maximize leverage against the war with Iran, you got to make clear that if you do this, we're not supporting any of your other program.
None.
Even the immigration, which I know a lot of you guys care a lot about in the MAGA base.
You know, if you know, sometimes you have to raise the stakes, right?
Sometimes you have to call a bet and raise them.
And so you have to say, not only will we not back you on this Iran play, we're also not going to be there for you when it comes to the deportations, when it comes to the ICE raids and all the other parts of the MAGA agenda, the tariffs.
I mean, I'm not really sure why anybody would be in support of these tariffs at this point in the game, but whatever.
People can see things differently, I suppose.
But you have to use maximum leverage here and just say, look, if you do this, we are out.
We are not going to support any other effort of this administration.
And, you know, that can lead to a pretty hopeless place if you lose.
But I don't know how else to describe this as just a very existential moment.
The stakes are really and truly that high.
That high.
Look, these mass deportations are not going to put more money in American workers' pockets anyway.
That's why Donald Trump was talking about, oh, the hotel businesses are upset about this and the farmers.
And then he walked it back because the base is pissed about the Iran thing.
So he had to throw them some red meat and say, all right, we'll do the deportations again.
Lutnick is talking about using AI to replace a lot of the jobs.
So there's not going to be an economic payoff to these deportations under any circumstance.
A war with Iran?
Do you know what that's going to do to this economy here if there is a war with Iran?
Oil, man.
Yeah.
I mean, come on.
So what are you talking about?
How are you going to hit your house?
How are you going to drive your car?
Right.
At that point, a Haitian migrant taking your job at the denim factory and eating your cat's tail, it's going to be neither here nor there.
It's not going to matter.
It's not going to matter either way.
This is what I mean.
Like, you just got to go all in to stop this war because by the time this is over, nothing else matters.
If this happens, nothing else is going to really matter.
I mean, this is just going to dominate your life in just about every way it possibly can.
So you just have to make it clear to Trump, hey, we're not.
If you do this, whoever calls us and asks, do you support Donald Trump?
Yes or no?
We're saying no.
Do you support deportations?
No.
Do you support anything else on the agenda?
No.
You have to make it clear.
If you do this, we're abandoning you.
We are abandoning you wholesale.
And that's really the only way to handle it.
If you are a member of his base whose opinion of him he values, that's got to be the message.
You got to go all in to try and stop this because I'm telling you right now, this is going to be very, very, very bad if it goes the wrong way.
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The war of words between Supreme Leader Khomeini and Trump has been heating up quite a lot.
So let's just take a look at some of the back and forth between them and we'll get your comments.
The Iranian nation was firmly imposed war.
Just as it has done thus far, we also stand firmly against an imposed Iranian nation surrender imposing anyone.
Surrender is not a reasonable culture.
I guess you would never such words.
Surrender the one that made him surrender.
Should the United States intervene in this arena, especially for military involvement, the damage it would sustain would undoubtedly be a revenue.
Say good luck.
When is the end out?
Say it?
It's already right now.
That's why we're doing what we're doing.
They had 60 days and a big, you know, 60 days, plenty of time.
And they made a mistake.
Honestly, they made a mistake.
Their country's in ruins.
So many people are dead.
They shouldn't be dead.
It's a Very sad thing.
Okay, now we've seen this movie before here in America, where they tell us that whoever we happen to have appointed the villain of the week are on their last legs and they just can't stand against us.
And yet the Iranian leader is saying you're going to regret it if you get involved in this.
What's the truth?
The way that it's being presented in the United States is we can very easily overwhelm Iran.
They told us that about Iraq.
They told us that about Afghanistan.
And do you think that China or Russia would come in on the Iranian side if the U.S. does, in fact, strike Iran?
Well, there are two things here.
One is, let's just compare these two people.
Just, you know, you don't speak Persian.
Ayatollah Khamin is a very eloquent Persian speaker.
And he knows four languages.
He speaks Azadi, he speaks Persian and Arabic.
And he is literate in English.
He has been reading Time Magazine and Newsweek back then when they were journals and a bit more worth reading, even though they were that.
But he would follow up on Western politics.
And he would read these.
He also reads novels in English.
And so he's a highly educated person.
He's read philosophy.
And of course, he's a theologian.
He's a scholar in Islamic law.
Trump, on the other hand, I mean, I wish he could at least speak like the godfather.
At least it was worth watching.
You know, an offer he can't refuse.
60 days.
I mean, who are you to, you know, give other countries 60 days to do what you want them to do?
That's the language of a thug.
And the way he talks, I mean, you know, the Godfather is much more eloquent.
But Trump, the comparison is clear.
I mean, if someone wants to be fair, look how politely he speaks and how he's threatened to kill the leader.
And the leader, look how he responds.
He says this is irrational or illogical and so on.
This is the difference.
And then, of course, there's the, you know, okay, so he's got a thug, he violates international law, he terrorizes, but can he do it?
We'll see.
But Iran has been preparing itself for an American, an American U.S. invasion for a long time.
But I could say since the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, that's been the plan to prepare.
So they've been building, they've been developing missiles and drones and underground bases and taking the nuclear program underground and anything that's threatened by the Americans and infrastructure, you know, it's all they've taken it underground.
So for example, they bombed Iranian radio and television, so they've moved it underground.
They've already prepared this because they said that such a day will be inevitable.
It's inevitable.
Ultimately, one day the United States is going to attack us.
So, you know, for Israel, we see that the Iranians are very capable of striking Israel.
They're striking them every day and night.
And the Israelis, they can't stop them.
And the Israelis are not even doing it.
It's the Americans who are doing the heavy lifting.
And the Americans are using all their bases in the region in Turkey and Qatar and in the Emirates, in Kuwait, in Bahrain, all of them to help the Israeli regime offensively and defensively.
And then the airspace of Jordan and Iraq is open to the Israelis and the Americans and the British.
So everyone's gathered to help the Israelis, but still the missiles are going through.
And remember, the Israelis started this, not the Iranians.
It was an unprovoked attack.
But in that unprovoked attack, it wasn't sophisticated.
Like, you know, Western media was saying, oh, look how the Mussad and the Israeli intelligence and the military carried out these precision attacks and killed these commanders.
They were at home.
Some of them were at home in bed with their families.
They knocked down an apartment, killing everyone inside, 65 people to kill one or two people.
Over 20 kids were slaughtered.
And the Western media was saying how sophisticated this was.
Well, everyone in the neighborhood knows who these people are.
They're on TV.
I mean, I'm sometimes, I'm not, I'm not a, I don't, I try not to be on Persian television, but I've been on a few times.
But because I have more than enough to do at university and then, you know, online for an English audience or audiences.
But people in our neighborhood, they know where I live.
It's no, you know, it's no discovery by Mussad or Israeli intelligence.
So if they bomb the apartment building that I live in, kill everyone inside, is that some master stroke?
So, you know, Western media, they are a part of this.
They are a part of genocide.
They have been helping the genocide in Lebanon, the genocidal attacks.
They've been helping with the genocide in Gaza and they justify this illegal onslaught against Iran.
But the point is that fighting Israel is more difficult than fighting in the Persian Gulf because you have to have long-range missiles, you have to have long-range drones.
But here, all you have to do is fire short-range missiles and short-range drones, and they get there far quicker.
So the other side of the Persian Gulf or Iran is easily accessible.
They can destroy everything.
If they can fire 100 missiles, let's say tonight, or 200 missiles tonight, or 300 Missiles tonight at Israel, at the Israeli regime, they can fire 3,000 across the Persian Gulf.
But what's the difference?
All those oil and gas installations and tankers are there.
They don't need to shut the Strait of Hormos.
There won't be any oil to get out of the Strait of Hormos.
There won't be any ships or what do you call them?
Tankers to take the oil.
Yeah.
So if the Americans get into a fight with Iran, yes, they can do damage, but they will be devastated.
And the Americans can't invade Iran because this is not 1990 or 2003.
The United States is not the United States back then.
It's been doing forever wars.
It's worn down.
It's declining fast.
Its people don't want war.
And powers have risen.
Iran, Russia, China, BRICS, and so on.
So Iran today is much more powerful than it was before.
It doesn't want war.
This was unprovoked by the Americans and Israelis.
But Iran is stronger today.
Russia is stronger today.
And the Americans are overstretched.
Not only does the United States have huge problems at home, a divided nation, most are opposed to the war.
And you see on the right, people like Tucker Carlson and others.
What's her name?
Marjorie Teller Greene.
Yes, but no, I meant her own show.
She has her own show.
Candace Allen.
Candace Owens.
Yeah, it's sorry.
Steve Bannon.
Yeah.
Yeah, even people who consider themselves nominally pro-Israel.
I mean, Candace Owens doesn't, but Tucker and Bannon certainly do.
And yeah, they are against this for reasons that I think many in MAGA are.
And yeah, no, I mean, it's certainly true that by the numbers, yeah, no, our country does not want this.
Yeah.
What was it?
Like 16% are in favor of it?
16%, according to the latest.
Yeah, absolutely.
So if he attacks and Iran hits back hard, how is he going to continue with 16% behind him?
It's going to tear the country apart.
It's going to tear people.
We're already kind of torn apart as it is.
Yeah.
But it could happen anytime now.
I mean, I'm expecting it.
Some say, you know, this is bluster, and some, but I personally think that it's, it's, it's, Iran is assuming that it will happen.
That doesn't mean it will 100% happen, but the assumption is the safe, the safe way to deal with it is to assume that it's going to happen.
And since they've removed their planes from Qatar air base and their ships from Bahrain, I guess to protect them, then that is a sign that an assault of sorts is quite possibly very soon.
Okay, well, Miranda, thank you very, very much for joining us.
We know it's the middle of the night.
Please stay safe.
I know there's some speculation that you're being personally targeted, given that there seem to be attacks in the different stations you go to.
Please take care of that.
Just one thing to clarify.
I've been asked, as I said, to give up my cell phone by security agents who approached me.
And I said I can't because of what I do.
And they, you know, they just said, okay, but, you know, so I've separated myself from my family.
I'm alone.
And when I go to press TV, the building's empty.
So I don't want to get anyone into trouble.
However, the press TV building is not in the same comp, it's not far away from, but it's not in the same complex that the IRB building, the number one building was when it was bombed.
But there was the belief that it may be bombed too.
So I wasn't targeted when they hit that other building.
And B, I have no idea if I'm a target or not.
People are telling me to delete WhatsApp.
I don't have Instagram because they removed me from Instagram and Facebook years ago.
So I just quit.
I don't have those apps, but they say, but WhatsApp is being used and Instagram is being used to help the Israelis target people.
And so, but I can't remove my WhatsApp for now.
And also some of these VPNs that are Israeli controlled, they say they're very dangerous.
But I think people should delete them.
And I think people should just remove Instagram everywhere and WhatsApp in particular.
But personally, for me, deleting WhatsApp now is difficult because that's how you communicate.
I think that's how you communicated with me.
I'm not sure.
But other people, journalists, friendly people, journalists who are fair-minded, not, you know, well, actually, not peers.
Yeah, well, actually, they also contacted me, contacted me through WhatsApp.
But in any case, if I delete my WhatsApp now, then a lot of people won't be able to communicate with me, but I'm going to do it.
And I'll probably use Telegram.
I don't know how safe it is, but, you know, I mean, I'll have, I use WeChat and I have Telegram.
There are a couple of Iranian apps that I use.
But for now on, I'll keep it, even though it may be a risk.
But I really think that it's my responsibility to at least give Iran a voice during these days.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time.
I know it's really late and under obviously extraordinary circumstances.
So thank you so much for making time for us.
And yes, be safe.
It was a great pleasure, Keaton.
And you say safe too.
And thank you for all the great work that the two of you and everyone else is doing these days.
And let's hope and pray for better days.
I just had to ask this Because, you know, as we've been talking about this, the last poll I saw showed about 45% of Americans have a favorable view of Israel, which is lower than it was, you know, pre-October 7th, but still shockingly high in my view.
When people find out, I mean, you're fairly high profile, and when people find out that you volunteered in Gaza.
If you don't mind answering, how is that received just among the community, both on the doctor side, on the patient side, just as a community member?
Because surely there are some people who, when they hear that, think you're going over there to aid the terrorists.
I mean, there's got to be some people who feel that way.
So what kind of reception do you get just out in the world?
No, actually entirely positive.
I'll give you a few examples.
When I flew, this is before I even stepped foot in Gaza, actually, but I flew on British Airways to Cairo.
But I flew through London, obviously.
And I got on the airport.
I was on call at my trauma hospital, and then I got on the airplane the next morning.
So I was just dead tired.
So I just fell asleep.
And I woke up in London.
And the stewardess is like, are you okay?
You just slept for like nine, 12 hours straight because I was flying from San Francisco.
And the, so I said, no, sorry, I'm a doctor.
I was just on call last night.
I was really tired, but thanks for waking me up.
And she said, oh, no, no problem.
And then she said, she was Irish, but just judging by her accent, but she said, you know, at least you can enjoy a vacation in London now.
And I kind of thought to myself, oh, should I tell her?
Should I not tell her?
So I just, I chuckled and I said, oh, actually, I'm a doctor.
I'm going to the Gaza Strip.
And she literally immediately broke down crying.
She hugged me.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek and she said, please, please help those children.
Please help those children.
It's, and I was surprised.
That's not, you know, you don't, and she was like a 65-year-old lady.
She wasn't, you know, but the, um, but it was just, I was, I was surprised by that because it's not, um, you don't get that from watching the BBC.
You know, you're not getting that from watching the BBC.
The BBC is better than most American media, but it's still pretty awful.
But the another thing I'll tell you is that when I went to, so I was at the DNC for about three hours and they shunted.
There was a thing called the uncommitted movement.
Do you remember?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Yeah, total disaster.
But the but they asked some doctors to come out and speak because they had actually gotten a lot of delegates from uncommitted, like people writing it uncommitted.
So they gotten some delegates.
So they actually had some, I guess, sway or something.
And so they held a little press conference.
And Tanahisi Coates and Alex Coburn, or not Alex Coburn died, Patrick Coburn, and Democracy Now covered it.
It was like literally as far away from the main stage as you could possibly get, but it was there.
And people showed up.
And afterwards, and I think it was broadcast by, I think Forbes put it on their YouTube channel or something.
Afterwards, I was walking around Chicago interviewing with some guy from some channel and people, random people were like, are you one of the doctors that was just, because I was literally wearing these scrubs because they asked us to come and scrubs.
So there was like, are you the doctor that went to Gaza?
I was like, yeah.
And they were like, oh my God, God bless you.
Thank you so much for what you're doing.
It's just so awful.
We got to stop this, you know, and yeah.
So no, that's it.
The only negative, I mean, like you get Twitter nasty grams.
Well, yeah, I'm not even talking about that yet.
Yeah, but the only, it's very interesting because the only negative pushback that I've gotten in the medical community has been from two people.
One is a trauma surgeon at Tufts and the other is an anesthesiologist somewhere, I forget, maybe Dartmouth or something like that.
I don't remember, maybe Vanderbilt, somewhere.
It doesn't matter.
Interestingly enough, the anesthesiologist is a lawyer as well.
He must have gone to med school and then or gone to law school and then went to med school.
That's the least surprising thing you've said in this past hour.
So these two people wrote an article on some website called thejurist.org or something, which obviously nobody reads, but it's a website for lost students, apparently.
So it's not even refereed.
It's not even peer-reviewed.
And they wrote, I was pretty shocked.
This is about the New York Times article.
I was pretty shocked by this.
They wrote that it's perfectly obvious that we're lying about everything based on pure medical nonsense.
Like they literally just invented absolute medical nonsense that anybody who's gone through their third year of med school could tell you was bullshit.
So that alone should have raised red flags for like any administrator, right?
Being like, wait, what did you just say?
Like, just just, so they said that brain injuries are visible on x-rays, which is ludicrous.
Like that is such a, I know you guys, you're like, why aren't they?
They're just not.
But that is just such an unbelievably stupid thing for a trauma surgeon, especially to write.
That's shocking.
Like that, that means that guy is an idiot.
Like should not be allowed more patients to have his license taken away.
That's crazed.
You know, no, no, of course he's just lying.
He obviously knows that that's not true.
But the point is, you have to presume he does believe it because he wrote it.
That means he shouldn't have a job.
And he's the chair of the trauma.
He's the head of the, he's the section chief at Tufts.
So that's pretty shocking.
But that's number one.
But number two, they went on to say, and again, remember, the anesthesiologist is a lawyer.
They went on to say that because they didn't specifically say me, they said basically everybody who participated in this article, because I polled 65 people, they basically said that since we're obviously just all Hamas propagandists, we shouldn't even be considered humanitarian workers when we go back to Gaza.
That's just, that's inviting the Israelis to kill us.
And he knows that full well.
There's no way he doesn't know that.
That's outrageous.
That's absolutely ridiculous behavior, you know?
But aside from those two, and again, that is something that I was pretty surprised.
That I found shocking.
That was interesting.
I was not expecting that.
I expected the Twitter mucky mucks and the, you know, some guy from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies or something just to write stupid stuff.
But the, but the, but for other, for, first physicians to do that, I was pretty sure, I was pretty shocked by that.
But, but other than that, the response is entirely positive.
The administration of my hospital is actually entirely positive about it.
Now, that's that, there's a reason for that.
It's because I'm quite far from any ideological center.
Like, Stanford is 100 miles west of me.
David, UC Davis is 100 miles north of me.
I work at a small county hospital with 168 beds in one of the poorest counties in California.
Nobody cares what happens here.
So I'm quite lucky in that way.
But yeah, no, overall, the popular response and the response within medicine has generally been positive with some important exceptions.
That's great to hear.
All right.
Just to just to close out, when I hear you and others talk about the conditions there, it's hard to imagine this population even being able to recover from this.
Even if the bombing stopped tomorrow, the level of physical deprivation, you're talking about a generation of children that at best is starving during formative years.
I mean, it's very clearly a campaign of extermination, really, of this culture, of this people.
If all of the bombings stopped tomorrow, would the Palestinian people be able to recover from this?
And what would they face in their recovery?
And also, I know you work with a lot of organizations.
I think a lot of people feel very helpless.
Are there any organizations in particular that you would urge people to support so that people like you can go over there and do the work you do?
Yeah, so I went with Med Global the second time and the first time I went with the Palestinian American Medical Association.
They're both doing good work in the West Bank right now.
Right now, as far as I can tell, Gaza is completely closed.
I don't believe anybody is being allowed in and out.
I know Med Global has stopped even trying to send teams because of what I mentioned before.
Half of them people are denied.
And that could change at any given moment.
But honestly, right now, what I would recommend that people do is if you're going to use money for something, use it to try and change the political situation of the United States.
Because literally nothing, just remember, nothing of any significance is going in or out of Gaza.
Nothing.
So if you do manage to send money to somebody in Gaza, all that means is you privilege them over their neighbor because they can pay for the stuff that these gangs that the Israelis are supporting have stolen.
But that's it.
Because again, nothing is coming in.
Nothing can meet the scale of the need that's there.
So honestly, I just, and I know it's frustrating because it feels like, you know, gosh, if I write my senator, what the, you know, does that do anything?
No, by itself, probably not.
But getting together with your neighbors, like, I mean this seriously, I don't mean this to be flippant at all.
I think spending money on a potluck to attract your neighbors to your house to discuss these things is better spent money than trying to send money to an NGO to work in Gaza because the problem is here.
Once we stop committing the problem, once we stop being part of the problem, the problem will go away instantly because we're the only ones that have the capability to impose the problem in the first place.
So as soon as we stop doing that, then yeah, then we should all donate money to Gaza because we owe them incredible reparations.
And that includes me.
I don't exempt myself from this at all.
And the U.S. government obviously is never going to pay reparations, but we can.
But yeah, so put your energy into political change here.
We have the ability to influence our government.
Not much, to be perfectly fair, but it is there.
And it's not only calling and emailing and texting and posting on social media.
You can get out in the street.
You can make decisions at your workplace.
You can make decisions in your community spaces at your church, at your synagogue, at your mosque.
There's a lot of things that people can do if they actually put their mind to it.
The U.S. government is not some alien entity that we have no control over.
We do.
We just don't.
They want us to think we don't, but we do.
And getting together with people and seeing what people are able to do.
And just remember, there's a Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in like every town in the United States.
They're everywhere somehow.
There are plenty of people who are already working on these things.
Just go get involved.
Go get involved.
But then before that, you asked.
If the population, the culture of people are recoverable.
Yeah, I mean, are they recoverable?
The only way to know is to try.
But, you know, this kind of thing has never been done before.
Like, if you think about it, what has been done to Gaza is kind of like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If they were carried out continuously and repeatedly, and then the population was put into one of the most dense concentration camps that has ever existed.
Because now I'm not even talking about the entire length of Gaza.
I'm just talking about the narrow strip of the Moasie that was on that map that you just showed where that isn't red, which is something like 15% of Gaza's landmass now.
And Gaza was already one of the most crowded places in the world before this started.
So the so yeah, exactly, which actually everything underneath that box outlined in red is also red.
So it's just, it's crazed.
Like it's completely and totally crazed.
And just to be clear, everything in the red zone has been demolished.
Everything, every building, with a few exceptions, you know, the actually one of the major exceptions is the compound of the gangs that the Israelis are supporting who can steal aid and then sell it back to people for 100 times its cost, which they can't afford, obviously.
But is Gaza recoverable?
I want to say so.
The Palestinians have a remarkable capacity for resilience, but obviously everything has a limit.
Can these children go back to having a somewhat normal life?
I don't know.
I do know there are millions and millions of people across the world that are willing to try and help them do that, but not under bombardment.
And certainly, and this is a really important thing, not under bombardment and not, and this is why Hamas is refusing to surrender.
Not if we just go back to the closure of Gaza that existed on October 6th of 2023.
People have to remember Gaza has been a closed military zone since about 2007.
That's insanity.
There's a whole society there.
That's not, nobody would accept that.
If that was done to any American neighborhood, there would be people, people would be slinging their rifles over their shoulders and marching out to kill whoever it is that happens to be on the other side of that fence.
That's completely understandable.
The Jews did it when they were in the Warsaw Ghetto.
They used the most pitiful armaments that they could find.
They dug trenches.
They dug bunkers.
They did anything they could to resist the slow, methodical starving and destruction of their society.
And that's exactly what the Palestinians have done here.
And it's not pretty.
War is not pretty.
Violence is not pretty at all.
October 7th was a shocking atrocity, but that doesn't change the facts of the matter.
So, yeah, is the society recoverable?
I hope so.
And I would like to find out, I guess is the way to put it.
All right.
Well, Dr. Fero Sidwa, such a pleasure and an honor to meet you.
God bless you, man.
Really?
Thank you, Doctor.
Thank you for the work you're doing.
No, thank you both.
I could rant in my basement, but if nobody's there to hear it, it doesn't do any good.
So I appreciate you guys doing the work you do.
All right.
Well, thank you very much.
Great to see you.
Everybody follow Dr. Fero Sidwa.
And yes, be safe out there.
And we will keep in touch.
Let's talk to you again sometime.
Absolutely.
Thanks, guys.
All right.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
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