What is it like to be a Jewish citizen of Iran? Today's Liberty Report speaks with an Iranian-American of Jewish background who just spent three months in Iran. His take on Iran is far different from what the neocons want us to believe. His experiences might surprise you.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
What is it like to be a Jewish citizen of Iran? Today's Liberty Report speaks with an Iranian-American of Jewish background who just spent three months in Iran. His take on Iran is far different from what the neocons want us to believe. His experiences might surprise you.
Be sure to visit http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com for more libertarian commentary.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, the co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you.
Well, very good.
We have a special guest we'll be visiting with today, and I'm sort of very interested in this.
He has a fascinating personal history, but he's very interested in the liberty movement.
He knows something about foreign policy from a personal viewpoint.
His name is Benjamin Adut.
And Benjamin, I want to welcome you to the program today.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
It's a real honor.
Well, very good.
We're going to let you tell a lot of the story, but it is fascinating.
Actually, Daniel brought to mind some of your history, but I understand that you even came to Lake Jackson once, and we had a picture in Lake Jackson.
So I didn't, I think that's wonderful.
Thank you for making that trip.
We're not having a party this year, so we're just going to have you on our program today.
Yeah, it was your birthday in Lake Jackson, and it was a great trip.
I came down there with a couple of friends, and we made a road trip out of it, and it was great to be there.
Yes, and we didn't get into the conversation at that time that we want to talk about today, because it is my understanding that you were born in Iran, and you got to the United States when you were seven years old.
Your parents were both Jewish, are both Jewish, and it's interesting because there's a lot of misconceptions at times and misinformation about our relationship with Iran.
And you have been living in this country a long time, but I understand you've gone back there a couple times.
So just fill us in a little bit there.
Give us a brief history of how you ended up living in California.
Yeah, I was born in Iran.
I was born, I think, pretty much on the eve of the revolution in 1978.
And when I was about almost five years old, we left the country.
The revolutionary government would not issue a passport to my father because it was a case of mistaken identity.
They thought that he was someone else with the same name and same last name, and that person was involved with basically selling arms to the Shah's government.
And so when the new revolutionary government came into power, they were going after anyone who was involved and had relations with the Shah.
And so they would not issue a passport to my father.
And my father, he basically had us smuggled out of the country through the Turkish border.
I was about, like I said, I was five years old.
We moved to Turkey for a couple of months and then we went horseback across the Turkish border through Kurdistan, lived there for a couple of months.
Then from Turkey, we went to Switzerland, lived in Switzerland with an Orthodox Jewish family through the Hayas organization, which is kind of a Zionist organization that helps Transfer political refugees out of the country.
From there, we went to Vienna, Austria, lived there for seven months.
And then from there, we got our asylum and we moved to California.
We had some family living here, a couple of uncles that had already moved here prior to the revolution.
So we moved to LA and I've been living in LA since 1985.
Well, great.
So when did you start?
I mean, did you sort of grow up in the, I know there's a big Persian community in LA.
I have some friends that are part of it.
Tell us a little bit about how you grew up as a sort of a newly arrived person in Los Angeles.
And what was your sense of the country you left behind?
And that didn't come up a lot in your house and that sort of thing.
Yeah, there is a large Iranian Jewish community in the Southern California area, especially Los Angeles.
We moved here.
It was a big change.
I was five years old.
I didn't speak any English.
And so it was a big change for me.
When we came here, at first it was very difficult to get adjusted, but after a while, I had to learn the language and all of that.
But I grew up in a Jewish household.
I was went to Hebrew school and then went to public school here.
And after a while, I felt like I was an American.
Growing Up American00:04:30
I identified myself as an American and learned the history through public school.
So later on, you started getting involved and interested in politics in the mid-2000s.
You mentioned that you'd gotten interested in Dr. Paul's campaign and some of the things that he was talking about.
And that kind of led you, I suspect, to a renewed interest in Iran.
And I think you said you went back there about three years ago.
Was that your first visit since you left?
That's right.
Well, for me, the political journey started when I started to notice inconsistencies in the narrative about the Middle East.
And because I was from there, I started to notice, I started to detect propaganda.
And, you know, I went online, I was reading a lot of information, especially in regards to the Israel-Palestine issue.
I could say that I was very much indoctrinated about the mainstream narrative of that conflict.
And then 9-11 happened and the Iraq war started.
And I knew that something was not right.
I knew that the country of Iraq that they were talking, demonizing and trying to basically rally people against was not this threat that they were making them out to be.
So I started to really notice the propaganda back in 2002, 2003.
And then in 2006, so I was very anti-war.
I started off, you could say, as kind of an anti-war leftist without any real understanding of economics or libertarian philosophy.
And then in 2006, a friend of mine who was also an anti-war leftist, a Jewish anti-war leftist, he took me to see a documentary called America Freedom to Fascism.
That was the opening night.
It was the premiere showing of that documentary by Aaron Russo in Beverly Hills.
And Aaron Russo was actually there that night.
I met him.
And I saw that documentary and it blew my mind because it talked about the Federal Reserve and how it creates money and how it finances basically the government's operations.
So I was introduced to Dr. Paul through that documentary and to the ideas of fiat money.
And so that kind of led me down the path of looking into the economic side of it.
And then in 2007, Dr. Paul, I'm sorry, 2008 when Dr. Paul was running for president, I was driving down the street.
I saw someone on Santa Monica Boulevard, and you never see this in Los Angeles.
Someone was holding a sign that said, Google Ron Paul.
So I did that on my way home from work, and it was Dr. Paul, the person I had seen in the documentary, and I said, oh my God, this is amazing.
So, yeah, I was very involved with the grassroots in 2008.
I converted my real estate business into a volunteer center for Dr. Paul in Los Angeles.
And so I'm going on a tangent here, but basically I was introduced to Dr. Paul in 2008.
Jewish Member's Message00:12:49
And I did go back to Iran three years ago.
It was only two weeks that I was there.
I recently went back three and a half months ago, and I was there for about three and a half months, three months.
And so yeah.
You know, Benjamin, I'm interested in the misconceptions by the American people and maybe misconceptions that we may know about, we may not, of the Iranian people.
But your parents decided they had to get out or wanted to leave in 1984.
And that was in the midst of a war.
And our hands are obviously not clearing in that war.
And I'm just wondering, did your parents know?
Did the Iranian people know?
Do they know that we were involved with Iraq?
Do they know that we were actually even playing games with the Iranian government at the same time?
What were the perceptions there?
What would your parents tell you went through their minds during that period of time?
I think that most Iranians know that the US government was involved in the, well definitely the overthrow of Mossadegh with Operation Ajax.
And they also know that the Shah was backed by the US government.
And so and they all suspect that the US government has also something to do with the bringing in of Khomeini into the country.
So there's no way to prove that, but they also suspect that there was some involvement there.
Wow.
So my parents, even though they're not very political, yes, they follow that line of thinking.
I think it's really interesting.
You say you spent three and a half months there recently.
You had already kind of made a political and philosophical journey to enlightenment, I guess we would call it.
But there are, and we talked about this before we started, there are such inconsistency, there's so much of a lack of information on the part of Americans about what it's really like in Iran.
What Iranians, what Persians are really like, how things really are there.
We get it filtered through the propaganda of the mainstream media.
It's a horrible, dangerous place.
That Jews are persecuted.
It's a terrorist sponsor.
It's the worst place on earth.
But I think your experiences were very different there.
Maybe you can walk us through just a few of your perceptions while you were there.
Maybe if you just bust a few of the myths that I think most Americans have about Iran, I think it would be very interesting.
Yeah, I mean, as far as the Jewish community goes, they live in peace.
They live just fine.
They are living their daily lives.
They go to work.
They make money.
They spend time with their families.
The culture there is very family-centered.
And so, yeah, it really is a lot of propaganda.
The people are living there.
The worst thing that's happening to them is the sanctions and embargoes, you know.
But it's amazing, it really shows the resilience of the market there because they have such little government intervention into their market, there's so much.
One thing I was really surprised by was all the commerce and activity.
It's very active.
People are buying and selling despite the sanctions, despite the embargo.
So, you know, people just live their lives and it's not, yeah, I mean, there's just so there's so many myths to dispel.
I'm a little overwhelmed that they even kind of know where to begin.
But, no, people are just living their lives and the Jews are living their lives and they're fine.
You know, I spent, like I said, I spent three and a half months there.
I went to their synagogues.
I spent time in their homes.
No one complained of persecution in private conversations.
You know, yeah.
You know, we've been involved over there.
And you mentioned Mossadegh.
That was back in 1953.
So we've been involved a whole lot.
And of course, that's what our policies are that we talk about is trying to get us less involved over there.
So there's a lot of reasons for a lot of people to resent our involvement when they know about it.
And obviously many Iranians know about us involvement and messing things up so often.
But if you look at both the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community and just looked at all of Iran, what percentage hold great hostility, you know, the evil empire and Americans are evil.
And what percentage say, you know, there's some bad governments on each side?
You know, we sort of like the American people.
What is the status?
And what did you get from your trips over there recently on how they look at us?
I think one of the major differences between your average Iranian and your average American is that your average Iranian is able to distinguish between the government and the people.
And so they understand that it is the U.S. government that is doing these things and not the American people.
I'd like to read a quote from Moray Sadek, which was the Jewish member of parliament.
They have a member of parliament in the Iranian parliament, even though they make up, you know, it's a country of 70 million people.
There's 10,000 Jews.
And so they actually have a representative in their parliament.
Mr. Sadek was interviewed by the Al Monitor news site in regards to the letter sent by the U.S. Senate and Netanyahu when Obama was trying to make this kind of nuclear deal.
And the U.S. Senate sent the Iranian government a letter saying that we don't accept this.
And basically Obama's deal is not valid.
So he gave this interview and he said, you know, he said their letter is not worthy of a response for the Iranian members of parliament.
This was more of a joke than anything else.
These senators are not the representatives of the American people.
Now, keep in mind, this is the Jewish member of parliament in Iran.
He said, these senators are not the representatives of the American people.
They are the representatives of the warmongers who become anxious whenever they think of peace and stability in the world.
Like demons, they constantly encourage war and violence.
Mr. Obama needs to make it clear to these people that they are out of line.
And he wrote inside, he said, inside Iran, we shouldn't really pay attention to this letter.
We have always had a stable foreign policy and never sacrificed our national interests because of partisan politics.
Unfortunately, some of these American neocons are so interested in warmongering and defending gun factory owners that they sacrificed their own national interests for the sake of the Zionists.
Now, this is a Jewish member of the Iranian parliament basically calling out the neocons and making that distinction between the American government and the people.
So to answer your question, and that was a really long answer, but basically the Iranian people, they don't make that distinction.
In a way, they know that the American people are a victim of the American government.
Yeah, well, let's hope that trade prevails.
You know, we're starting to see some trade.
It's still very difficult.
I'm sure, unfortunately, both main candidates don't want to see the path smooth, but hopefully we're seeing the beginning of something that may continue.
We will have to finish up, but I'm going to get a brief comment from you.
I think your trips there are just fascinating and very helpful and giving us a lot of information.
Hopefully, more Americans will have an open mind, but I think your point about the people and the government being two different elements.
I think the one question I want to ask, I think we might know what the answer will be, is do you think that you would be well received in Saudi Arabia if you decide to do the same fact-finding trip?
No, definitely not.
No, definitely not.
It was surprisingly a very open society.
And, you know, I never felt like I was persecuted or questioned for my religious background.
I don't even have an Iranian name.
My name is Benjamin, and my last name is Edut.
So neither, you know, my last name is Hebrew.
I have a Hebrew first name and a Hebrew last name.
And I'm not Muslim.
And so I never got any problems.
It's not even an issue there.
It's really, it's unfortunate because the war propaganda here is so strong.
It is so powerful that it paints a completely different picture of what Iran is actually like.
So, yeah.
I was going to say our main goal with the show is to try to fight the propaganda.
Benjamin, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.
You're very welcome, Dr. Paul.
Thank you.
Well, good.
I think this has been a fascinating program.
I hope all our viewers will share this program to a lot of different people and spread this message because it's so vital as far as I'm concerned.
I think it's the misconceptions that really lead to the problem.
So if the American people got their message about what Iran is like from Benjamin, they'd have a completely different attitude about all the hostilities.
And just think of our major candidates today are belligerent and they want to undo just this slight crack in the door back to a normal relationship with Iran.
So it's, yeah.
Another quote from this member of parliament, he wrote, he said, as a Jew, I proudly say that today the safest synagogues in the world are in Iran.
There is no synagogue in Europe that does not require special security.
This is not the case in Iran.
And historically, it has never been the case either.
So, you know, that's the thing.
He says, look, in all these synagogues, even here in Los Angeles, they have special security to make sure that they are safe and they're always worried.
But in Iran, and I went to these synagogues, there is no security.
People just, you know, go and come and there's no security guarding anyone from entering the synagogue.
So, you know, I think that really makes it clear what's going on there.
People feel very safe.
Right, Benjamin.
You just feel very safe.
Benjamin, that's a powerful message.
I think the whole program has a powerful message.
And once again, I want to urge all our viewers to share that message with as many people as I can.