April 22, 2024 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
17:08
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| He did worse than nothing. | ||
| I wish he did nothing. | ||
| If he did nothing, we might be in the clear right now. | ||
| What he actually did was enter the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, with the regime and unfroze $150 billion. | ||
| And I think it's really important to put that obscene amount of money into perspective. | ||
| $150 billion. | ||
| You could build a country with that money. | ||
| And that was During the time of the Green Revolution in Iran, which was a revolution that looked much like the Women, Life, Freedom revolution, and the regime was on its knees. | ||
| The regime was on its knees, and this is so frustrating when you get these, you know, tankies, for lack of a better word, that say, you know, the Iranian people can free themselves, sure, Sure, they can and they've tried. | ||
| and they might have been able to if you would stop making deals with the Mullers, | ||
| stop giving billions to the Mullers. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is an Iranian attorney, activist and artist, Elika | ||
| Elika, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Well, I'm glad to have you because we played a couple clips of you in the last week or so, as obviously some of the situation involving Iran has escalated. | ||
| One was from your TikTok and then one was an appearance that you made on Piers Morgan's show where you were kind of going at it with an American activist, let's say, and a Palestinian activist who seemed a little confused about some of the issues. | ||
| So before we get into that, though, could you just give a one or two minute explanation of who you are? | ||
| How'd you end up? | ||
| Doing this kind of thing for a living, and then we'll go from there. | ||
| Well, I'm an attorney, as you know. | ||
| I moved to the States to do that. | ||
| I think when the revolution kicked off in Iran two years ago in 2020, after the death of Massashina Amini, I became heavily involved in the kind of like Iran activism world, working alongside academics, intellects, and just activists online. | ||
| And that kind of, you know, Increased to the general region, especially following October 7th. | ||
| And then that just basically brought me to where, where we are today. | ||
| So can you explain the accent then? | ||
| Because from Iran, living in LA. | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm, I was raised in London. | ||
| And raised in London. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And can you maybe, before we get into the specifics of the politics of what's going on now, talk a little bit about the Iranian people and sort of the disconnect between the Iranian people and the regime? | ||
| Because you got into that a bit on one of the clips I saw, and I think people are very confused about that. | ||
| So, I mean, it depends which clip you're talking about because I feel like I haven't stopped speaking for the past week. | ||
| I don't remember when I slept. | ||
| I've said many, many things. | ||
| Are you talking about how we don't want to be referred to as when they refer to... Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because people think that the people of Iran are reflective of the regime and you're really describing the disconnect there. | ||
| Yeah, and you know, it really is shocking that at this point we even really have to explain this, and this is kind of what my original video that went viral was, the whole point of it was. | ||
| Like, where were you? | ||
| Why haven't you been paying attention? | ||
| Because this is exactly what we've been explaining for the past two years, which is that the regime doesn't represent the people of Iran. | ||
| The people of Iran have come out and said that They've risked their lives to tell you that. | ||
| They've sacrificed their lives to tell you that. | ||
| They've been lynched to tell you that. | ||
| They've been lynched, blinded, tortured, raped. | ||
| All of those things to free themselves from this government that doesn't represent us. | ||
| And, you know, you get to this stage where people are now celebrating the Islamic Republic and it becomes very clear that you haven't been paying attention to this Huge chasm, huge chasm that exists between the Iranian people and what we call an occupying force in the country. | ||
| Are you surprised that so many Americans seem to be confused? | ||
| I guess the answer to that is yes, that you do seem to be surprised by how many Americans are confused, but how sort of exacerbated that has gotten since October 7th? | ||
| Yeah, so October 7th was just a meltdown for me. | ||
| And I think people are really confused about that because they're like, well, you're not Israeli, you're not Palestinian. | ||
| What a lot of people don't understand is that so much of what happened there was a really, it was very sensitive for Iranians who not only have experienced that kind of oppression, slaughter by the Islamic Republic, but we also know all too well that these are the proxies of the regime. | ||
| And even during this period of time, Since 2022, since the protests have kicked off in Iran, you know, there have been many reports that the proxies have actually been in Iran too. | ||
| So the people in Iran will report back, hey, they're not speaking Persian, they're not speaking Farsi here. | ||
| These guys that are dressed in black, they're speaking Arabic. | ||
| So we know, like, okay, that's Hezbollah, that's Hezbollah, that's in Iran. | ||
| So this is a system. | ||
| They all operate together. | ||
| And when we see the proxies carrying out the work of the regime, either in a concerted effort or independently, this is a big trigger for us. | ||
| So, from October 7th, it was just so jarring to come off the heels of trying to get the world to say, women like freedom, and pay attention to the people of Iran, and understand, you know, that this is a terrorist regime, to then turn around from that, and October 7th say, well, these are freedom fighters, How? | ||
| How did you understand that but you don't understand this? | ||
| So, since then, it's just been a really, really exhausting, as you say, exacerbating effort to try and educate the West that these are not the heroes in the story. | ||
| Regardless of which side you're on, whether you're pro-Palestine, whether you're pro-Israel, whatever the hell you are, somewhere in between, these are not, have never been, and will never be the heroes in this story. | ||
| How much of what's going on in Iran now, do you connect back to when Obama was president, and Iran was going through a revolution, and young people were finally stepping up, and women were stepping up, and college students were stepping up, and we did absolutely nothing, which was very different than the way we behaved with other, you know, ground-up revolutions, say what happened in Egypt. | ||
| He did worse than nothing. | ||
| I wish he did nothing. | ||
| If he did nothing, we might be in the clear right now. | ||
| What he actually did was enter the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, with the regime and unfroze $150 billion. | ||
| I think it's really important to put that obscene amount of money into perspective. | ||
| $150 billion. | ||
| You could build a country with that money. | ||
| That was During the time of the Green Revolution in Iran, which was a revolution that looked much like the Women, Life, Freedom revolution, and the regime was on its knees. | ||
| The regime was on its knees, and this is so frustrating when you get these, you know, tankies, for lack of a better word, that say, you know, the Iranian people can free themselves, sure, Sure, they can and they've tried and they might have been able to if you would stop making deals with the Mullahs, stop giving billions to the Mullahs and much more than that. | ||
| There's a book by Jay Solomon called The Iran Wars where he talks about how Obama actually foiled human rights programs that were documenting the violations in Iran. | ||
| All as part of this deal to engage in these diplomatic relations with the regime. | ||
| And then you have to ask, is it really that surprising that we are where we are now? | ||
| What did the West think would happen if you keep empowering these terrorists? | ||
| If you're making deals with ISIS, what do you think the end result of that is? | ||
| Freedom and safety for all? | ||
| How worried are you that the UK, where you used to live, that America, that all of the Western nations, we've imported so many of these people with bad ideas, the wrong ideas. | ||
| We're seeing Hezbollah flags in New York. | ||
| I mean, they've had them in UK for quite some time, and ISIS flags. | ||
| But that is also now a huge problem. | ||
| It's not just what's happening in the Middle East, it's what's happening in our countries. | ||
| You know, I think what we're witnessing is a huge overcorrection in a very dangerous direction. | ||
| There was a period of time where the Western ideologues became aware that the West had caused serious problems in the Middle East and the shift has gone, the pendulum has swung the other direction now, right? | ||
| Before, Everyone was a terrorist. | ||
| I was a terrorist, right? | ||
| If you just had a certain skin color, you were a terrorist. | ||
| Now it's gone the other direction, where I saw something online the other day that said the word terrorist is a slur, a racial slur, and so now no one's allowed to be a terrorist. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're actually terrorists. | ||
| It's just racist now to call them terrorists, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What we're seeing is people scaling back on this vetting of allowing people. | ||
| We, as Iranian dissidents, we're supposed to be safe here. | ||
| We left that. | ||
| To be safe here. | ||
| We're in this country to enjoy the rights and privileges that are afforded to us, which is the First Amendment, which is freedom of speech. | ||
| And now they tell us in the UK, you know, they arrested an Iranian man for holding up a Hamas or terrorists sign. | ||
| Yeah, we played the video. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so they say to him, it's inciting violence because people are going to respond to that with violence. | ||
| That's not how our rights work. | ||
| Our rights work that we have freedom of speech and those who respond with violence, you arrest them. | ||
| During the desegregation period, would you say, let's not do the desegregation because people will respond with violence? | ||
| Of course you don't. | ||
| That's not how our rights work. | ||
| So ultimately what you do is you emulate our lack of freedom there, right? | ||
| Because now we're living in a world where we can't feel safe to speak because you're letting in the people that will harm us if we speak. | ||
| And if we try to speak out in the streets, you arrest us and silence us anyway. | ||
| What do you make of how little, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but from where I sit, how little so many of the pundits know about some of this now that you're kind of entering the pundit world after having been on here is it's one thing to do videos, to tick talk to your phone or computer, but you know, having to, uh, push back on people, that sort of thing that, that so many of these people on TV, they, they simply have no idea of the geography or the history or, or any of the things that you've mentioned here. | ||
| I can't say that it's entirely surprising. | ||
| I think the problem is that we are living in an age of social media and what I fear is that people are not understanding the catastrophic downstream effects of what's happening here. | ||
| You're talking about these accounts that have millions and millions and millions of followers and millions of views and they literally just say anything. | ||
| Like, completely unsupported, completely inaccurate, extremely dangerous, no regulation, no oversight. | ||
| You know, when you think about the things that we grew up on, right? | ||
| And you think about the time that it takes for us to unlearn some of the things that we were raised on, right? | ||
| Even all of those things that we were raised on and we were taught, that was still in such a controlled manner. | ||
| It was such a controlled setting. | ||
| It was still such a controlled schooling. | ||
| And then we later learn, okay, well, some of this might have been wrong, unlearn it, whatever. | ||
| I don't know how people are planning to deprogram the generations of people that have been so grossly misinformed and so radicalized from this age of social media when anyone can say anything. | ||
| So in response to your question, am I really surprised that these people have absolutely no clue? | ||
| I'm not really that surprised at all because they're probably watching the same Videos that everyone else is watching. | ||
| So how do you, how do you get traction then in that world? | ||
| Cause you, you know, you got about 400,000 followers on TikTok. | ||
| I mean, people are paying attention, but you're fighting upstream from sort of what the narrative is on a platform like that. | ||
| I don't know that it's possible. | ||
| And that's what, that's what gets me down. | ||
| You know, it's true. | ||
| I had a video that went viral, but let me tell you why. | ||
| Um, In general, I try to make my content very balanced, very educational, and very fair. | ||
| That's not attractive. | ||
| It's not attractive content. | ||
| It is to people who, you know, are operating at kind of more of that highbrow level. | ||
| It's not going to be attractive to the masses. | ||
| That video that I made actually came from... I had a phone call with a friend That day, because I was just like, I quit. | ||
| Like, just forget it. | ||
| Let's just all die. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| We're basically there anyway. | ||
| And I was telling him some of the things that I was thinking. | ||
| And he said, you know, if you say that in a video, I promise you it will go viral. | ||
| So that was just like a last shot for me. | ||
| It was just like, okay, one last try. | ||
| Let's just find out what happens. | ||
| It ended up working. | ||
| But the reality is that the type of education that the masses need to understand this, it's not going to be in two-minute soundbites. | ||
| It's not going to be, you know, packaged in this condensed way that they want to gain something from. | ||
| It is going to take an investment. | ||
| And I think what we're seeing is the results of a very, very lazy, lazy investment in Middle Eastern conflicts. | ||
| What do you think American or Western policy should be if we were to look at the Middle East in five years and things actually were better? | ||
| I mean, what do you think kind of the steps would be to get us to something like that, if you think that's even remotely possible? | ||
| Well, you know, the Iranian people have spent a long time really offering a lot of resolutions in terms of not doing deals with the Munas, you know, and if that had been heeded from the beginning, We wouldn't be in this position. | ||
| I think we've gone from one extreme to the other, one extreme being military interference, to the other which is funding, propping up and empowering this regime. | ||
| I think If we see, I won't say if, we will see a day when Iran is free, at that time when the people of Iran are calling for a secular democracy, if that day comes, when that day comes, that there's a secular democracy or whatever it is that the people of Iran choose for themselves as their government, | ||
| We want to have good relations, and that's basically what I said in the video. | ||
| We want good relations with the West, with the East, with Israel, with all of it. | ||
| So long as we have our future free government, I don't think there's any reason why the West needs to avoid engaging with that government in a positive way. | ||
| Where can the good people find you? | ||
| We're going to put some links down below and hopefully this will just be the first of many conversations. | ||
|
unidentified
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The good people can find me at... The bad people will find you too. | |
| That's kind of how it works. | ||
| The bad people will find me. | ||
| They'll find you either way. | ||
| They'll find me either way. | ||
| The good people can find me at Elika Lebon, which is my name. | ||
| I think that's pretty much my handle everywhere. | ||
| Oh, I think on TikTok I'm Elika in America, because my other one got banned. | ||
| Elika in America. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, I hope to do this in person sometime and keep up the good work. |
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