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Foreign. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a special episode of Ask Habib Anything. It's long, it's deep, it's a little bit complicated. If you stick with me, you're going to see enormous and important things that I think are generally invisible to Western eyes when they look at this region. As we record, a debate is raging in the media, in the west, in the Middle east, over whether President Trump is actually going to order a military strike on Iran and whether it will accomplish its goal, which is to bring them back to the negotiation shading table much more willing to compromise on their nuclear program, on the missile arsenal, on their production capabilities of those missiles, and maybe even if it, if such a strike would have the capacity to topple the Ayatollah's regime. We explored this question in previous episodes, especially episode 79, where we tried to argue that this regime has a unique and extraordinary superpower. And that superpower is an ideological framework called the mukawama. Resistance is the translation, but it's bigger than just the word resistance in English. The Islamic Republic has this vision of holy war, this theory of its own existence and meaning and purpose and how it will accomplish that purpose that calls for a sustained, never ending campaign of violence that is accompanied by a willingness to absorb violence, catastrophic levels of damage. And the more damage you absorb, the more sacred and religiously perfect is the sacrifice. And so you can absorb limitless catastrophic damage while the enemy facing the constant, never ending pressure of the mukawama, of the terroristic violence, of the harm to its capacity to just exist, inevitably will fall. This is an asymmetric form of warfare that learned a great deal from Mao Zedong and Algeria and all these other anti colonial and anti imperial theorists and conflicts in the 20th century. But it's cast in a uniquely Islamic and specifically Shia way. If you understand the Muqawama, you understand the extent to which the Islamic Republic is in this sense, this strategy sense, a kind of larger iteration of Hamas. The devastation to their own polity that a total war would involve, that their willingness to sustain that devastation is to them their great force multiplier. In other words, damage to Iran in war is not to the Iranian regime, a deterrent. It's almost, almost a catalyst, almost a driver. The suffering of their own people is religiously justified and validating, and it is an immense leverage they have in the war itself. We're going to look into what this is, what this muqawama discourse is, where it comes from, how Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, built out these concepts how much they borrow from Sunni conversations and specifically Palestinian discourse from the 60s onward, the example of Izzeddin Al Qassam in the 30s, and what the Iranian regime is, if you understand where it comes from and therefore, by the way, what it will take to actually bring it down. You can't topple the Iranian regime by bombing it. They're not deterrable in the way an ordinary government or state or ideological movement would be. The IRGC itself is going to murder hundreds of thousands of its own people on its way down, if it even begins to fall. And it has basically said that outright to Iranians. Khamenei said in January, hundreds of thousands of martyrs built this revolution. We won't let it be toppled. That was said in Persian to Iran Iranians. That was a threat. It took hundreds of thousands of martyrs to build this. That is what you will need to bring it down. In other words, we will kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians if we have to to prevent the fall of this revolution. That's how Iranians heard that statement. And so this is not a regime that is teetering and falling and collapsing and unwilling to suffer disastrous consequences for Iran and that it shares with Hamas and by the way, with Hezbollah and with every part the Houthis of Yemen, every part of the Mukawama ideological world. A few days ago, Steve Witkoff was interviewed on Fox News and he said explicitly that President Trump was curious about why Iran hadn't capitulated after he moved ships and aircraft carriers and massive amounts of troops and planes into striking distance of Iran. Wouldn't a rational regime just come back to the negotiating table more willing to negotiate? And the answer is no, explicitly and specific, because massive firepower has moved into the region, the regime hunkers down. That's the goal, to understand the most fundamental strength of the Iranian regime, its resilience on its own terms, in its own vocabulary, in its own religious vision, and therefore to see what needs to be part of any strategy for challenging them effectively. The goal, the foundational, fundamental goal, is that three dimensional human beings emerge from our story. We will understand the ayatollahs, we will understand why the ayatollahs believe what they believe, why a rational, normative human being could come to that belief. It's not enough to throw out words, which Western media always does, like extremist or radicalized. I sometimes use those words. It's just shorthand. But it's a judgment. It's not understanding. And today we're going to seek understanding. What is the Mukawama what is the never ending resistance? What are its roots? What does it actually argue? And how do you subvert it? Before we get into it, I just want to say we have a sponsor for this episode and we're very grateful to our sponsors. It's actually a really beautiful dedication. This episode was sponsored by Betsy and Andy Cadell of New York City, who asked to dedicate this episode to our global Jewish family and specifically within that global Jewish family, the Selbst family of Tel Aviv, who made sure that the Kedal's son Simon was safe and protected during the 12 day war with Iran last summer while he interned in Israel. It gave him and his very terrified parents thousands of miles away, immeasurable comfort knowing that he was not alone. And most of all, they want to wish both Guy and Otan's Selbs congratulations on their recent engagements and upcoming weddings. A wonderful reminder of how important it is to celebrate the future. Thank you for that. Thank you for being part of our family. And I also want to invite everyone listening to join our Patreon. It's how we keep the lights on. You join a community of people discussing these issues and talking about them and sharing resources and learning together. Yesterday, as of this recording, we just had the February live stream. Every month you join a live stream where you ask me questions and I try to answer every question asked in those live streams and they are on the Patreon. You can watch the backlog of live streams as well. So join us at patreon.com askhavivanything the link is in the show notes. Let's get into our story. One major strand of the Iranian regime and a strand that's really worth using as the entryway into this story is thinking about what the Iranian regime draws from Palestinian literature of resistance, of what the Palestinians call resistance literature and the ideas that underlie it. And therefore I don't want to begin in Tehran. I want to begin in the hills around the village of Yabad near Jenin in what is today the northern West bank. In November of 1935. A Syrian born preacher imam named Izzeddin Al Qassam is in these hills. He is surrounded by British police who are hunting him for having killed the Jews. He is not a bandit, or at least not a primitive bandit of any kind. He is actually a very sophisticated man, a sophisticated thinker, a product of Cairo's Al Azhar University, the intellectual core of Sunni Arab Islam. He is deeply influenced by the milieu in Cairo of that time, of the very refined Islamic Modernist thinker, modernizing thinker, Muhammad Abduh, who people will have heard on this podcast, as the teacher of Rashid Rida. He is the Grand Mufti of Egypt. He held that role, like Abdukh Al Qassam believed that Islamic societies were weak in the modern age because they had stagnated and because they had grown impious. And a revival of Islamic piety and also revival of Islamic power required a return to a pure version of Islam. And part of that return was a return to Islam's willingness to confront the world, to be engaged in powerful resistance against, for example, the British Mandate, but generally imperial powers everywhere. As the police close in on Izzeddin Al Qassam, he refuses to surrender. He shouts to his men, this is jihad. Victory or martyrdom. This is the myth. His death in that shootout, it wasn't an end, it was the end of him. But it was one of the great catalysts, maybe the primary catalyst for the following year's great Arab revolt that would explode on the British from 1936 to 1939 and just really launch the Palestinian national movement as we know it today. To the modern Islamists, especially to Hamas, which named its battalion its fighting forces for Al Qassam, Al Qassam is the ultimate template. Why is he the template for Hamas? For one thing, he fuses piety and anti colonialist militancy. Before he came to fight in Palestine in 1921, he fled to Haifa and began working with Palestinian Arabs and especially the poor. Before he arrives in Palestine, he tries to fight the Italians in Libya. He led a guerrilla fight against the French in the Syrian mountains. He was a pan Islamic anti colonial fighter, which is how Hamas understands itself. He was also an imam, and that's fundamental. He taught that piety was a prerequisite for victory. A fighter who prayed, a fighter who didn't gamble, was a disciplined fighter, was a better fighter. The being pious was a kind of devotional discipline that allowed you to become the warrior that you needed to be. He was also a class warrior. He led a class rebellion, including within Palestinian society. He shifted resistance to Zionism from the sort of polite elite salons of the urban notables, the Husseinis, the Nashashibis, the great families of the urban centers, the Khalidis. These are people who worked with the British, negotiated with the British, and he shifted the focus of resistance to the mosques and the hovels, the slums of the displaced poor. When he arrives in Haifa in 1921, he finds a city that had been transformed during British rule by Zionist immigration, which would increase massively over those years because the pressure in Europe on the Jews was growing dramatically and the doors were closing to the West. That very year was the beginning of a massive uptick in Jewish immigration. And America's doors were closed by the Emergency quota Act of 1921. And he builds a synthesis of religious piety, anti colonial violence and a relationship with the displaced peasants. He was called the Imam of the oppressed in the Istiklal mosque in Haifa. He didn't just preach to the wealthy who showed up. He preached to the porters of the dock, workers of the port. He preached to the tinsmiths, to Arab farmers who were then living in shanty towns around Haifa. He founded schools for adult literacy. The connection between religion and militancy was deep. He founded schools for adult literacy because when you teach the workers to read the Quran, that's a mechanism for recruiting them into the network. So the mosque became a place of recruitment, a place of ritual and religion, but also of recruitment into the resistance network. He founds a group, the Black Hand, which he establishes around 1930. And the black Hand would be the first to systematically organize religiously framed gorilla cells in opposition to the British, in opposition to Western imperialism, in opposition to Zionism. He organized them into small cells. This was a compartmentalization obsession that Hamas would later adopt. It's one of the great secrets to the actual successful implementation of October 7th. And it ensured that the arrest of one member wouldn't collapse the organization, because any single member doesn't know much about the rest of the organization. And he obtained a fatwa, a religious ruling from the Mufti of Damascus, authorizing armed struggle. You have the tactical focus, you have the religious framing, you have the appeal to the masses and the poor. In 1991, decades and decades later, three generations later, when Hamas named its military wing the Izzedin Al Qassam Brigades, they were claiming that archetype right the social movement, class war, anti Western consciousness mixed with religiously validated martyrdom, all implemented, carried out by the a fighter described as sincere, honest, earnest, authentic right, who was disciplined and austere and willing to die, who rejects diplomatic compromise in favor of the purity of the grave. It's a sacrificial capability that in Izzeddin Al Qassam's example, ignites national revolution in the great Arab revolt that comes out of his death. So yes, the fighter loses in the simple sense, that battle, but his loss ignites a great revolution. The Hamas talks about Qassam's death as a glorious defeat. Yes, a defeat kind of technically, tactically, locally, but glorious because the 1935 death of a single preacher in Yabad creates a vast problem for the British Empire and accelerates its, its flight from Palestine ultimately. And it's the foundation of Hamas's cult of martyrdom. They also named their most popular, best used rocket the Qassam rocket. Death in battle in this vision of martyrdom is a strategic win because it inspires the next generation. So you have an anti elite stance, a pan Islamic idea. The whole thing, everything. The whole thing is how Hamas understands itself. And it's all encapsulated in this gentleman named Izzeddin Al Qassam. It's also part of the vision of Palestine as Islamic waqf, as an Islamic trust that is above compromise or surrender. You can't compromise away any piece of Palestine because it is legally in Islamic religious law according to Hamas. This is in Hamas's 1988 charter, part of the sacred Islamic trust. Lands that are not compromisable. Their ownership by Islam is part of Islamic religious duty of Sharia law. Qassam built that template. And it's worth remembering Qassam as we go through this. But so did Mao Zedong. And that brings us into the 1960s. Over the course of the 1960s, Palestinian National Movement doesn't remember Qassam all that well. The Palestinian national movement after the 48 war is shattered. Palestinians lost the 48 war not just to Israel, but also to Arab domination. The Arab armies that invaded lost the war. The term Nakba today means the experience of the catastrophe of the mass flight, expulsion, displacement of the Palestinian masses who would become generations of Palestinian refugees. As Palestinians see it. That's not what Nakba meant at the time. Nakba in the immediate aftermath of the 48 war was a reference to the catastrophic failure of the Arab armies who invaded the Egyptian army, Kawkji's forces from Lebanon, the Jordanian Arab Legion of the Arab armies to displace the Jews. It was a pan Arab failure, not a specifically Palestinian tragedy, but a pan Arab military failure was what the word meant at the beginning. And Jordan, indeed after the war, claims the west bank as its own place, declares the west bank part of Jordan. That's why it's called the West Bank. Who names it the West Bank? The people living on the east bank from Amman, that over there is the west bank of the river. Egypt claims Gaza. And by the way, Palestinian elites meet in a conference, a famous conference in Jericho in 1951, and accept Jordanian control and accept their Jordanian ness and control and citizenship and belonging to Jordan. The national movement is broken. The national movement doesn't really exist. It's scattered. People are searching for other identities and other ways of belonging to. And that's when Palestinian intellectuals start to take notice of China, of the example of Mao Zedong, and of Algeria, of the Algerian independence war from 1954 to 1962. These are the great secular revolutions then underway in the world. Palestinian commandos form units in the refugee camps in Jordan, in Lebanon, in the West Bank. They weren't just reading the Quran. They. They were reading Mao Zedong. They were reading Frantz Fanon translated for them. They had little books of Mao's writings. They realized that they can't win a conventional war against Israel. Certainly the Arab armies don't appear capable of doing so. Nasser's unifying the arabs in the 50s and up until 1967, but they hadn't been successful yet. And the catastrophic failure of 1967 really kind of drove that point home. And these Palestinian commando forces that would organized into the pflp, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is very Maoist language, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Fatah and its various offshoots and arms, they adopted a strategy that borrowed heavily from Mao's, what Mao would call the protracted people's war model, a model of kind of permanent popular uprising war to transform their movement from a failed, basically diplomatic lobby to into a revolutionary guerrilla force modeled on Mao and modeled on the success of the National Liberation Front of Algeria to kick out 130-year-old French colonial enterprise. Chinese influence was actually immense. The ethos, the mission statement of Mao in 1927, his famous line, a revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and. And gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. This was framed. I mean, this was the core. Right after October 7th, there was the tweet. What did you think we meant by decolonization? Essays, Vibes, Losers. I forget who wrote that tweet. Some young activist person who thought they were, you know, figuring out the world revolution. Well, that's just Maoism. I mean, that's just that Maoist ethos that said, no, this is. This is going to be violent and brutal. That's what it is that we're talking about. There's no other path. China itself was the first non Arab power to recognize the PLO in 1965, communist China, it provided millions in aid. It wasn't the only one. The Soviets also got involved in the plo, but the Chinese provided vast amounts of aid. They trained huge numbers of fighters, they supplied AK47s and mortars that became these iconic symbols. The Fedayeen, the commando era and the protracted People's War model was translated into the Palestinian situation. It emphasized using a dedicated, ideologically mobilized peasantry in China, or in the Palestinian case, basically the refugee camps, the refugee masses, to gradually exhaust an enemy that was technically economically technologically superior. Mao taught that the masses were the sea and the gorillas were the fish. They were embedded and maneuvering in those masses. They represented those masses, they lived off those masses. By the way, these organizations, these groups, they established schools, social programs, health clinics in the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon. And those institutions were all part of turning those camps into revolutionary bases of MA mass mobilization. And they found an inspiration not just in Mao but also in Qassam, who did very similar thing. Another source of inspiration. We're going to get to Iran, I promise. This is all very valuable because the Iranians borrow a great deal from these developments. Another source of inspiration was a psychological layer given by Frantz Fanon. He's this famous writer read in all the anti colonial decolonization discourses on the modern American campus and Western campus generally. He's a psychiatrist from Martinique who joins the Algerian revolution in the 1950s. And he argues that colonialism, French colonialism in Algeria specifically, but colonialism writ large and imperialism writ large, they weren't just military occupations, they were psychological traumas for the, for the local, for the native, from, for the early Palestinian commandos. Right. His writings, the book the Wretched of the Earth, which college students are told to read but rarely do, offered a kind of scientific justification, a psychoanalytic justification for armed struggle. Fanon wrote that at the level of individuals, this is a quote. Violence is a cleansing force. Violence frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and from his inaction. It makes him fearless, it restores his self respect. Violence had this deep effect on the actual native coming to the colonialists and acting as with violence, it was a psychological rebellion as much as it was a political or military one. Colonialism, he writes, is not a thinking machine nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It'll never fall on its own. It is violence in its natural state. And it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. The FLN's eight year terror war against the French collapsed. French, Algeria sent a million people packing back to France people who had lived for generations in Algiers, white French, Europeans. And, writes Fanon, the act of picking up a gun was the moment the native ceased to be an object of history and became the subject of history, the driver of history. And, Fanon writes, the practice of violence also unites them, binds them together as a whole. All the natives turning what is inevitably under colonialist rule, a fragmented and displaced population, into a disciplined national organism that sees itself as one. Algeria's example, Fanon's writings. The success of the FLN terror war against a vast French military power, a NATO member, the willingness of France to be unbelievably murderous in its response to the FLN war. Possibly half a million Algerians died in the French army's operations against the Algerian population and the Algerian resistance. Mao's theory of popular war. All of these strands fuse in the 1960s into a model for Palestinian commandos. The FLN proves that a poorly armed guerrilla force can defeat a major Western power just by making the cost of occupation unbearable. Moral, political, economic. The PLO, when it's founded in 1964 in Cairo, is consciously inspired by that and in some ways modeled on the fln. For example, the FLN founds a state in exile kind of institution the PLO does too. It founds a military wing, social services, a diplomatic apparatus. They want to prove that they're a government in waiting, just like the fln. And the Palestinians learn from the FLN that terrorism works, right? It was a strategy in which terrorism coerces concessions from the colonial power, essentially by provoking disproportionate repression. The FLN wanted to provoke the French into the massacres of the Algerian population. Wanted is a strong word. By forcing the French to defend the injustice of their rule, they forced the French to seriously contend with the ultimate costs of that injustice, and they collapsed the French Republic. De Gaulle comes in and founds a new French constitution. It collapsed over the question of Algeria. The immense influence that forcing disproportionate repression can have on the colonialist power was one of the great lessons that PLO drew from the FLN success. That's how you undo the oppressor. Bombings and assassinations in urban centers force disproportionate repression, radicalize the local population, mobilize and unify them, gain international sympathy, and bring the edifice crashing down. Are you recognizing Palestinian discourse and strategy in some of this? Hamas in the Gaza war, its hopes, its reasoning for bringing that kind of deliberately seeking the kind of devastating war in Gaza that we've just seen building that vast, unprecedented tunnel network, refusing to let civilians into what is the biggest bomb shelter network in history, precisely because the oppressor's destruction would be the oppressor's undoing. And all Hamas has to do is survive. It doesn't have to win, it just has to literally not be gone. When all is said and done, when the dust settles. By the way, the desperately tragic irony of it all is that Hamas won't succeed. The transfer of the FLN model in Algeria to the Israelis won't work because the Israelis are rather dramatically different from European colonialists and imperialist powers in ways that fundamentally change the strategic calculus. You don't have to like the Israelis to understand this. And this is not our topic today, so I'll just connect it with our topic today by saying that the Palestinian Fedayeen commandos and PLO ideologues and his thinkers and planners post Algeria when they're writing about the FLN model and they're not completely oblivious to the difference between Israeli Jews and French Algerians, they talk about the difference in colonization. French settlers in Algeria can return to France. Israeli Jews don't have a metropolis, a metropole to return to. They don't have a powerful state that sent them to exploit and take over that land to go back to. But in the discourse of the Fedayeen, this difference didn't make them question the underlying theory. It didn't make them ask, are Israelis actually susceptible to terrorism in the way French Algerians were? Or are we in fact destroying the Palestinian cause rather than destroying our ability to influence the Israelis, to push the Israelis, let's say, of the west bank rather than actually freeing Palestine? They didn't ask themselves if this means that the Israelis might not be susceptible to the Algeria strategy. Instead they radicalized to basically a strategy of genocide. The struggle, they said, therefore, has to be total. The struggle against the French in Algeria didn't have to be total. There was an outlet the French could leave. The Jews have no home to go back to, so they can't leave. So they have to suffer vastly more before it's no longer worth remaining. They have to be destroyed. There's a total war and it's also a total war on the civilian population because it requires total mass, complete flight. And it is justified and necessary because of this difference between Algeria and the Jews in Palestine, which is that the Jews have nowhere to go and therefore their suffering must be all that much greater. So it's not just anti colonial war, it's Anti colonial war to genocide is the only path forward that would liberate this country. Right? That's how the Fed kind of responded at the time, or some of them kind of respond at the time to this problem. They see the problem. They're not stupid. They don't want to give up the FLN's optimism, the optimism they learned from the FLN, which is that this could be successful. In 1987, Hamas is founded in Gaza as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Students of Abdul and Rida and all of that lineage, which we talked about in this podcast, and they Islamize this discourse. They bring Qassam back into it as an example. They merge MAU and Fanon and the FLN example and the Qassam example. And they begin to talk about Fanon's redemptive power of violence, the ability of this violence to produce what Fanon called the new man, the confident, assertive, dignified man. The subject instead of the object. Well, that becomes a theological category with Hamas. This new man who picks up the gun and finds his voice and his power and becomes, in Hamas's language, modeled on Qassam. It becomes the living martyr, the resistance. Every fighter in the resistance is a martyr. To be the desire is to die in a way that triggers great revolution. It's this cult of martyrdom that is foundational to Hamas. They really are willing to die. And it's important to understand why. And it comes from a religification of this Fanon vision. Fanon argued that the colonized person is dehumanized by the colonizer, and the colonizers gaze in the colonizer's political structure. And to stop being an animal in the eyes of the colonialist master, the colonize has to turn violent, has to strike the master. That's the equalizing act. Hamas adapts this. This is, by the way, why you get so many college students in Western campuses who didn't use October 7th as a trigger to argue for Palestinian independence. They celebrated the massacre itself because that was the equalizing act. In Fanon's explanation, the Hamas adapt this and it's articulated very early in the. Already in like 88, 89, in the charter and communiques, they talk about how the dehumanization isn't just psychological, it's a humiliation of Islam. Right? This speaks to this obsession with Islamic weakness of the lineage, the theological lineage of Egyptian Sunni discourse that produced the Muslim Brothers, which produced Hamas. The violent strike against the colonialists in Hamas's retelling isn't just Restoring self respect to the colonized. It vindicates God because pushing Islam back, as Zionist Jews did, is an attack on God's very vision for history and the meaning of history, which is, of course, Islamic. Violence becomes not a means. Violence becomes an end. It becomes a redemptive cleansing ritual from this betrayal of God represented in the weakness of Islam. The cleansing ritual is the martyrdom. Fanon's new man was a liberated citizen. Hamas new man is the mujahid, the holy warrior who overcame the fear of death and became invulnerable to colonial pressure because they do not fear death. When they talk about how they don't fear death, the Jews fear death. That's why they're going to win. They're extending Fanon's vision of the new man into an Islamic religious frame. Hamas utilizes Fanon's idea. They take this Fanon idea that violence binds the people together, that unites the people, as one of the justifications for suicide bombings beginning in the mid-90s. Violence produces unity, right? Fanon writes. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole. Hamas operationalizes this idea by creating a cult of the martyr, of the actual person who died. So, for example, when a suicide bomber would blow up in the second intifada or in the mid-90s, the funeral became a mass psychological event. They talked about it as the wedding of the martyr. Even though it's a funeral, it's designed as a ceremony, a mass public ceremony to turn grief, to turn despair into a collective sense of shared power, into a sacred identity. Hamas directly applies Fanon's quote that colonialism will only yield when confronted with greater violence. They argue that because they don't have tanks and planes, the only greater violence available to them is, was a willingness to die. And that could produce the kind of sustained, untenable, unabsorbable, intolerable violence for the Israelis that would penetrate the psychological iron dome of Israeli society, the sense of Israeli society that it is safe and powerful. And that brings us to the next actor in this whole development of the psychological and political world, which is Hasan Kanafani, one of the truly important framers who brought together, who built out the intellectual architecture of Palestinian resistance, which again, is a part of one of the threads that builds out Iranian ideas, and then Iranian ideas will deeply influence Palestinians in return. So walk with me for a moment. We dive into the weeds so that we can come out the other side and see things differently. I'm a big believer in diving into the weeds. One of those threads is Hassan Kanafani Kanafani was born in Ako, an English acre north of Haifa on the coast. In 1936, he became a refugee in the 48 War. He eventually settles in Beirut, and he's often called the most influential modern Palestinian novelist. He wrote these important novels that are political allegories to critique Arab leadership and the refugee experience. Men in The sun in 1963. Kanafani is the first, or maybe the most important, not the first, to begin to articulate imperialism, not as a policy, you know, usually and most recently adopted by certain European countries, powerful European countries, but as a kind of unified biological global organism that is all deeply interconnected, even if the imperialist nations themselves are divided and even if they're at war with each other. In a 1970 essay on PFLP strategy, he says, imperialism has laid its body over the world. The head is in Eastern Asia, the heart is in the Middle east, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. And wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the world revolution. This is an explicitly Marxist, universal class war kind of talk, and he was that. But what he actually did with imperialism was transform it into what we would today call intersectionality. America, Israel, every Arab regime that he deems reactionary at the time he was talking about Jordan, were not separate entities. They're different organs of the same what he called beast. The Middle east is the most vital organ, the heart, because of oil, because of the strategic geography. And therefore a strike in Palestine or Israel against the Jews of Israel was not just a local nationalist act. It was a heart attack for the entire global system, which he frames also as the global capitalist system. This is logic that very closely resembles what Western academics today call interconnected systems of oppression or intersectionality. It's not an accident. It borrows heavily from that source. It's this intellectual world that was built by these Third World ideologues. It's why modern scholars argue that policing in the US is deeply intertwined with the war in Gaza. It's why they talk about, I say, scholars, ideologues in positions of scholarly importance, but not producing scholarship so much as advancing this Kanafani vision. Right, because their arteries are the same imperialist superbody. It's why they don't get excited about civilians dying unless the global imperialist architecture, which is coded white and coded Western, is doing the killing. Gaza matters and Sudan doesn't for that reason. And Iranian civilian protesters don't matter because the people killing them are anti the great imperialist Western beast rather than part of the structure. The west is the evil thing, not tyranny or violence or extremism in and of themselves. This is not familiar enough to ordinary people outside of academia in the west, and it should be. These ideas are shaping a new generation of Western elites through that academia. So where are we? Mao's war of the masses? Algeria's successful anti colonial terrorism? Kanafani's grand unified Marxist theory of geopolitics. Qassam's early example that fuses seems early on to fuse these later ideas with a Islamic pietism of Abduh Rida of the Egyptian, what would become the Muslim Brotherhood. Hold on to all of these things because now we get to the Muqawama in the 1950s and especially in the 60s after 67, but beginning, I think from the 48 example, from the 48 loss to the newfound Israel, something deep begins to change in Arab political consciousness and Arab political vocabulary. And you can't really understand the Middle east of today without understanding this shift and the dichotomy between what was before and what comes after. The dominant political term in the Arab world in the 1950s and 60s, whether it's nationalists or third world worldist Maoists or all the different movements that fuse these things, the dominant term was Thawrah revolution. This is the age of Nasser, of the Ba'ath parties. And they're talking about revolution as a sudden radical change. That's the concept, It's a lightning bolt. The goal of Thaura is to capture the state, to take over the palace, to use the machinery of the army and of the state, to modernize society, to close the gap economically and technologically with the west and to win a decisive conventional war against the Israelis. To reclaim Arab pride and to reclaim the rightful Arab place in the world. This is a vision of decolonization essentially born in these decolonization discussions. That's very optimistic. It's modernist. It believes, it has a confidence to it. The Thaura is a great leap forward into the future. And then it all shatters, it all breaks. Already in the 56 war, the Israelis show that even poverty stricken, basically third world economically, Israel can push back the Egyptians. Under Nasser in 1967, the Arab armies are utterly defeated and quickly and easily by an Israel that only got more and more powerful. An Israel, by the way, that isn't yet under an American military alliance or umbrella of any kind. An Israelis shouldn't have defeated new Soviet built Arab armies and out of that ruin of the Thawrah concept, because it could not face even weak little Jews in the desert and defeat Them comes a slow but steady shift to talking about this new idea, this slow idea, steadfastness and many other words coming to being, coming to the discourse. But the big one is mukavama resistance. The great leap forward crashes, the humiliation, the sense of societal failure only grow. Optimism is no longer relevant. And that's how you get a kind of new strategy, also coping mechanism. But it's a deep strategy, and it's rooted in Algeria and Mao and the example of Qassam and its appeal to a new, sanctified kind of endurance war. Thaura is a lightning bolt. Mukawamam is the tide. It's slow moving, it's gradual. It's also inevitable. When they talk about the Mukawamam in the 1960s and 70s, it's no longer a conversation about taking the capital. It's no longer a conversation about explicit, visible, conventional victories. To win in a muqawama, all you have to do is not lose. The muqawama is religiously grounded, right? And borrows this religious fication that Hamas does explicitly in the 80s is already happening in the discourse. It borrows these ideas from Fanon and from Maoism and Third Worldist ideas about how the native is authentic, the imperialist and colonialist is fake in some profound way, came to this land, came to this place. But only through violence and an architecture of sustained power can they maintain their existence. And so if you can begin to systematically and over long periods and steadfastly and with great endurance, torment and exact greater and greater costs from the enemy. One of the costs you're exacting from the enemy is forcing the enemy to do unspeakable atrocities to you. That is a cost you're imposing on the enemy. They talk about this explicitly in the fln. All you have to do in this vision is not lose. You have legitimacy, the enemy doesn't. You therefore have staying power. Well, the enemy is inherently fragile. All naked systems of power are inherently fragile. Fanon taught us as long as you're still fighting tomorrow and not utterly annihilated, you've by definition won today. And victory, because it's a battle between immovable truth and the fragile pretenses of power, between the real and the fake. No matter how powerful the fake looks, victory is inevitable. Time is on your side. If you ever notice how so much of anti Israel discourse is obsessed with Israel being somehow fundamentally and inherently fake, that Jews are fake Jews, that Israeli ness is a fake identity, that Hebrew is a fake language, that none of it is real. It's all this shadow and mirage, it has to be fake. Because if it is not fake, if this is a real people with a real history and a real culture and a real language, if the Israeli Jews are a real society with nowhere else to go and a legitimate presence, then they are not about to collapse inherently, internally, like other colonialist projects like French Algeria. What do we do then? So in this vision, it's wishcasting. We need the Israelis to be a fake nation, whatever the heck that even means. You are eternal. You therefore are patient. Time is on your side. And the colonialist is the one who has to win quickly or risk total collapse. So just don't give the colonialists your own total collapse. It's a doctrine that assumes the enemy is technically superior, militarily superior, and therefore the resistance fighter doesn't win in the Western sense, but just incessantly, endlessly harms, without ever being swatted away, without ever being removable. By the way, the people who talk this way about Israel, they say it about the west as well, that all its wealth and its power, its physical power, worldly power just masks a cultural emptiness and a weakness and a fundamental inauthenticity. It lacks the patience to fight the kind of generational, sustained war that only the, the only the mobilized, the authentic, the spiritually confident native can actually fight. Mukawama doesn't build states, it doesn't build economies. The revolutionaries say it. They retool their societies for steadfastness, for permanent resistance against the whole global system, against the entire architecture of power, which again is one big undifferentiated superstructure of imperialist oppression. So they hit one end and that hurts the other end as well. But they're fighting the whole thing. Welcome to the Muqawama. Which brings us to Iran and how for 47 stagnant, oppressive years, the Iranian regime has unironically called itself a revolution. Exactly. Two leaders of Iran in 47 years, and there's still a revolution. Why? Because the revolution is the Muqavama is permanent and everything, the entire Western state based order, is the enemy. So how do we get from the Algerian, Palestinian, Arab nationalist thinkers reading MAU and Fanon to Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran? Thank you for asking. I'll explain. At this point, in the 70s, among the Sunnis, resistance is still secular, third worldist anti imperialism. It's modeled on Algeria, on MAU. The Islamist example of Qassam and others was there. It was there. Hajameen Sarida, like Qassam, a Student of Abdoukh as a great teacher of his and a man who's deeply involved into the 30s, before his death in the 30s, in Palestinian Salafism and radicalizing Palestinians and the Palestinian national movement. But none of that religious narrative was the core driving idea in this Middle Eastern resistance discourse. It was still basically secular nationalism. The religification, I hope that's a word of the resistance goes into overdrive with the arrival of Khomeini, of the first supreme leader and founder of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Who was Khomeini? Before we talk about Khomeini, we have to talk about the man Khomeini learned from how to do what he did to Shi'. Ism. And that's the Iranian thinker, Ali Shariati. Ali Shariati is a Sorbonne educated sociologist, a brilliant man who basically takes Shia theology and fuses it to the secular Maoist FLN Kanafani kind of discourse about resistance. How does Shariati do that? He, by the way, is sort of labeled in Iranian textbooks the ideologue of the Iranian revolution, the thinker of the Iranian revolution. He's deeply influenced by the Marxist struggles of the global South. I once read that he actually personally corresponded with Franz Fanon during the Algeria war. I can't find that source now in preparing this episode. But there's no question that he read and imbibed Fanon very deeply. He actually translated Fanon's works into Persian. Shariati understands what a great many of the Marxist revolutionaries in the Middle east understood in those days as the Marxist revolutions in the Middle east largely failed and petered out. By the way, it's the same thing that Catholic Marxists in Latin America came to understand when it comes to building out liberation theology. Look it up. What he understood was that secular Marxism won't work. It won't mobilize the Middle east masses because the basic cultural mother tongue, the cultural operating system of the Middle east publics, the populations, was Islam. And so Islam had to be the language with which Marxism is taken up as a mobilizing banner by the masses. In Iran's case, in Shariati's case, the Shia branch of Islam. The problem with making a Shia Marxism a revolutionary Shia Marxism is that Shiism is pretty famously and for many centuries a more inward looking, more passive, more quietist, mystically inclined brand of Islam. It's less bellicose, aggressive, conquering at most points in its history than the Sunni branch of Islam. Shariati had to. What he basically embarked on was this project of stripping Shiism of that passivity, of that quiet and wow, did he ever. He delivers in 1971, a lecture that changed the world, changed the Middle East. The lecture was called Red Shiism versus Black Shiism. And what he does was a kind of. One writer describes it as a sociological surgery on Shiism. Black Shiism. Is this what he calls a stagnant institutionalized religion of Shiism up to that time of contemplation of mourning. It's very important within Shi' ism to mourn the death of Imam Hussein in the great battle of Karbala. And the institution of these morning rituals when Shia in the streets, you know, they whip themselves and they have this public mourning ceremonies. The institutionalized mourning is very introverted and contemplative. And Shariati says the Safavids, this Persian dynasty that rules Iran from 1501 until the middle of the 18th century and establishes what's called 12 ver shi', ism, that version of Shiism as the official state religion was deliberately a religion of passive spirituality and passive mourning for Imam Hussein. Imam Hussein is killed by the forces of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid in the battle of Karbala in 680. And that's this foundational moment in Shia religious consciousness. And this religion of passive mourning, Shariati actually sort of disdainfully calls it the religion of mourning. Teaches the people, he says, to be patient, to be passive, to wait for the coming of the hidden Imam, the Messiah figure in Shia Islam who will come and fix the world. And then Shariati contrasts that black Shi' ism with red Shi'. Ism. And there's a reason for red, obviously. Red Shi', ism, he says, would undo all of that passivity. It's the original religion of Imam Hussein himself, he says, of protest, of revolution, of blood. That's how Shariati talks about Red Shiism. Catholic Marxists in South America recast Jesus as a Marxist social revolutionary. Shariati recasts Imam Hussein as a Marxist social revolutionary. The martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala becomes a metaphor for revolutionary struggle and for martyrdom. He actually likens him to Che Guevara. In the speech, he has this line. Shiites do not accept the path chosen by history. They negate the leadership which ruled over history and deceived the majority of the people. Now, that's a Sunni, Shia thing, but it's very much a Marxist thing as well. He depicts Westernized Iranians as what he calls a hollow man. Westernization, he says, is a toxin. And he says that Western liberalism is evil and must be rejected and just fortifies these power structures. This is a sentiment, this rejection of Western liberalism that the regime would use to justify decades of cultural purges, this kind of soft, permanent war in Iranian society against Western influence. The ideal Shia man in Shariati's vision overlaps almost perfectly with the ideal Marxist revolutionary. Shia mourning is, as he calls, a school of protest. You mourn to learn to protest and overthrow, and therefore martyrdom is no longer a tragedy. You're no longer weeping. It's a tactical act that shames and topples the oppressor. Hussein, Shariati writes, is a teacher of the history of how to die when you cannot be or live when the injustice is no longer livable and sustainable and tolerable. You die in ways that topple the oppressor, that redeem. That's the example of Hussein. That's the Marxist revolutionary applied in Shia terms, as Hamas would do in Sunni terms, after Shariati actually applied, projected onto, layered on top of an Islamic martyrdom vocabulary. And now, finally, we're ready for Khomeini. Rukhollah Khomeini, born 1902, dies 1989, was an Iranian Shia cleric, religious scholar. And in the 1960s, he emerges as this very important critic of the Shah of Shah Pahlavi. He condemns the regime's policies, he condemns the secularization policies. He rages against women wearing immodest clothing because of Western example. He rages against the ties of the Shah to the us. He rages against the existence of Israel and Iranian Israeli ties. He's arrested and exiled in 1964. He spends years in Turkey. He lives in Iraq and then he moves to France. In France, he does his writing, his work, he develops and disseminates his doctrine of the velayat e faqih. My Persian pronunciation is bad. I apologize to all Persian speakers. But the idea is the guardianship of the jurist. It's a vision of an Islamic governance structure that calls for clerical rule. While Khomeini is building out this vision of clerical rule, he engages with Shariati's ideas very deeply and learns from them a great deal. Now, there's some suspicion between Khomeini and Shariati. Shariati, for example, doesn't like the idea of clerical rule. That seems to him the exact opposite of Red Shiism. But nevertheless, Khomeini takes in Shariati's insights and he projects it onto a new vocabulary that he himself develops. That Khomeini develops of this dichotomy between two groups, between the oppressed, the weak, the poor, the mustadafin and the arrogant oppressor, the mustaq birin. These are groups that exist, these words exist, these terms exist in the Quran itself. Before Khomeini, the Mustadafin, which comes from a root meaning to be weak, was generally used to refer to the spiritually humble or those who deserve charity and pity. It had a political connotation as well. But Khomeini radically expanded that political meaning. He turns the mustadafin from the poor, the weak, the humble, and he recasts it as the world revolutionary class. And Shiism he recasts using Shariati's re reading of Shiism as the engine of that revolution. What am I talking about? There's a Quranic verse that says, and we desire to show favor unto those who were oppressed in the earth and to make them examples and to make them the inheritors. This is not dissimilar from the Psalmist who talks about the humble shall inherit the earth or the humble shall inherit the land is, I think, a more accurate translation of the Hebrew. Those are the humble, those are the, the musta dafin, and meanwhile the arrogant oppressor, the mustaq birin, who exhibit Istigbar arrogance. Those he codes onto, he applies to Western superpowers, you know, Western imperial powers, the Western state order, that is the global state order, and all of the regional governments and regimes and states that serve, in his view, those Western powers. He specifically talks about the US and Israel as the arrogant powers that the weak must unite against, that the oppressed must unite against in this great global revolution. What is this word arrogant? You know, we heard it even last week from Khamenei. They always and for decades have used this term, arrogant. What makes the powerful arrogant? A few things. One, the claim to moral superiority of the democratic liberal west that makes them arrogant. The toxicity, as the Shia revolutionaries think of it, as of this sort of all encompassing Westernization of global society. Globalization is a cultural phenomenon of Westernization. And the imposition of this toxic thing, flattening thing on Islamic societies is arrogance. Islamic societies, when they marry, they have white wedding dresses, that's Queen Victoria started that. They surf on the web to impure websites, there's sexy advertising, selling soda cans, right? All of that Westernism, modernism, globalization is experienced as this arrogance, this deep sort of imposition. But it's arrogant for a deeper reason. The Western powers are arrogant because of their secularist vision of the world, because they rely on material wealth and technology because they think that they are superior and justified, Having found economic mechanisms and better political mechanisms that have given them massive wealth and technological superiority. And the favoring of those secular things over spiritual truths is an arrogance not just toward the peoples trampled by Western cultural dominance. It's an arrogance against God. And so these words mean a lot. They have deep connotations, and they're very big and complicated. Khomeini was anti nationalist. He gave a speech early on, after the revolution, I think within the first year of the revolution, to oil industry workers, which had a famous line. They say, first Iran, then Islam. He said of Iranian nationalists, this is a mistake. He said, it is the same mistake that has kept us under the boots of foreigners for centuries. This is about Islamic weakness, if you notice. This is the source of our misfortunes. He says they want to separate the Iranian nation from other Muslim nations. To say Iran first is shirk, which is paganism or idolatry. Nationalism itself, Khomeini argues, is Westernization, is part of that cultural imposition of globalism, of globalization. It's an imperialist Western plot to keep the Muslims divided and prevent them from uniting in this great global global revolution against the West. The revolution for the oppressed of the world, coded in this Khomeinist language, disregards nationality. Iran fundamentally opposes this regime, inherently opposes the global state system as part of what Kanafani would call the great imperialist beast. Yes, it really is communism, okay? But it is imbued through Salafist ideas, through this forefatherism, through this, you know, pietistic nostalgia, with this powerful romanticized religious past and a call to piety. Khomeini synthesizes the Salafism of the Sunnis and the Shariati Red Shiism that is itself a fusion of Marx and Shiist theology and theory of history and all these romantic ideas about native authenticity. It's all in the zeitgeist. It's all in the water that he's drinking. And he fuses it all. The material weakness of Muslim societies, he says, the fact that Muslims are weak, this is kind of an innovation, this terrible weakness of Islam that drove this whole new discourse in Sunni Islam that would produce the Muslim Brotherhood, which to this day is. Shapes a lot of this discourse. Why is Islam poor and backward? That's not how history should have gone for Khomeini. That's exactly how history should have gone. He explains that the material weakness of Muslim societies, the backwardness, the poverty which was imposed on them by the west and architectures of power and all that. He says it could be overcome only through spiritual purity. It is easier for the weak to be spiritually clean. Spiritual purity brings divine protection. Divine protection brings inevitable victory. And the weak have a much easier time being spiritually pure and clean. And only the weak therefore can lead the world revolution. In other words, he reinterprets Islam's weakness as its revolutionary preparation, its revolutionary call to lead the great revolution, to overturn the arrogant powers. Arrogant because they're secular, arrogant because they're powerful, arrogant because they impose their culture on everybody else. Arrogant because their secularism is a rebellion against God. And therefore God would inherently be on their side precisely because of their humility, of their poverty, of the purity with which they engage in this world revolution. And if God is on their side, how can they lose? He literally said in the speech to the oppressed of the World, May 1979. The superpower of the mustadafin of the weak or the humble will triumph over the superpower of the mustaq biri. The superpower we're building, that is the representative of the weak will triumph over the superpower of the arrogant and powerful. This is the promise of God, he says, and God's promise is not broken. Khomeini argued that one pious fighter would be able to defeat 10 decadent Western soldiers. That's the word he used. His example was, his rhetorical example is the Battle of Badr. The Battle of Badr was fought in 624, early on in Muhammad's career, near the wells of Badr in Western Arabia. It's this very decisive early conflict between Muhammad's followers in Medina and the Quraish who rule in Mecca and initially opposed Muhammad. And the Muslim force was very outnumbered, but nevertheless it won this surprising victory and it strengthens Muhammad's political and religious position in Arabia. This idea of asymmetric warfare, Khomeini says, is heart and soul of Islam. And so we're only following in Islam's most fundamental military archetype because that is purity, that weakness. And that purity gives divine protection. And that's how history is supposed to go. And how do you reach this asymmetric strength? Well, you already have the key to achieving that few against the many victory. And that's Shariati's Red Shiist reinterpretation of Imam Hussein. Martyrdom, says Khomeini, the willingness to die, the desire to die in the service and in order to catalyze the world revolution is the force multiplier. The death, the dying, the act of sacrifice is the ultimate existential success, not even what you achieve on the battlefield for your sacrifice, sacrifice. It's an already accessible taste of redemption itself. The dying becomes, in Khomeini's reading of it, the goal, a closeness to God, an unequivocal expression of closeness to God's love of the humble believer and the force multiplier of the mustadafin, the weapon available to the weak and the humble. Fanon argued that violence itself was redemptive to the dehumanized colonized. It was a dignifying act against the power of the colonialist. Khomeini adds a new layer to that. Weakness is recast from a problem to a solution, from a sign of societal failure to a signal of piety and authenticity and inevitable victory. When you are killed and defeated on the battlefield, your death, as Qassam showed us, as Imam Hussein showed us, becomes the inspiration that forges a new generation of martyrs who are themselves hungry for redemption and themselves therefore the engine of the endless mukawama for world revolution. Before the 1979 revolution, Palestinian ideologues, PFLP, for example, were already closely allied and working with and literally training with Shia revolutionaries of Khomeini who had fled Iran and you know, because of the Shah. One bridge, for example, between these two groups was this unit inside of Fatah in Lebanon called the Student Battalion. It's founded in the early 70s. One of the important figures in this is Munir Shafiq. He's this Christian born Maoist intellectual, he was the group's intellectual leader in Lebanon and he, he's one of the people who made this argument that the communist revolution, the Marxist revolution, for it to succeed it has to be authentically reflective of the people's own culture to speak the people's cultural language. And in the Arab world that cultural language is Islam. And so Arab Marxism would have to become Islamic Marxism. When the 1979 revolution begins, these Fatah Maoists in Lebanon see in that revolution over on the Shia side and on the Persian side of the curtain, they nevertheless see the revolutionary engine they were looking for. Khomeini looks like he's finally figured out how to merge Islam revolutionary Marxism, harness the masses to the revolution using that fusion of Islam and Marxism. And so the Iranian revolution becomes a proof of concept that these revolutionaries needed, that a people's war can topple a US backed regime and it can do so through the mosque. That connection is already there in the mid-1970s when Iranian Islamist Khomeinist exiles fleeing the Shah arrive in Lebanon and they connect with Fatah leaders and they join student battalion camps in Lebanon. And so Khomeinist revolutionaries on this deeply religious model are actually living with Palestinian secular Maoist guerrillas. And they're eating with them and they're training with them. And it's why that connection was very easy to make. Those Palestinians would take the Khomeinist example and form new Islamist organizations, first in Lebanon and then in Gaza. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is formally founded in Gaza by Fatih Shikaki. It's the final destination of this synthesis. Right. Shikaki explicitly recruits secular nationalists from Israeli prisons, people who have committed terror attacks already. He wants fighters who already have military experience, they already have Maoist discipline. They were already part of some of these groups, but they didn't have the holy purpose, the mobilizing theology. And the Palestinian Islamic Jihad takes these two threads, this Maoist revolutionary ideas and Khomeinist religious ideas. It's not Shia, it's Sunni, but it has the Qassam model, right? It adds in from the Iranian theological element. It basically takes this idea of martyrdom as the great redemptive act, as the Fanonian redemption. And it founds this organization called Palestinian Islamic Jihad, led by former Fatah members, secular nationalists. And in 1987 they actually attempt the first suicide car bombing in Jerusalem. Palestinians hadn't carried out suicide terrorism until inspired to do so and taught to do so by Khomeinists. To this day, Islamic Jihad in Gaza is the most pro Iranian Palestinian terror group explicitly. So they take their orders directly from the irgc. And that deep relationship. Islamic Jihad is the most obvious and most explicit of the fusion of Khomeinism with Sunni Palestinian terrorism or revolutionary ideas. But it's also deeply true of Hamas itself. The Iranians taught Hamas early on suicide bombing tactics, IED manufacturing. They gave them a budget in the tens of millions of dollars early on when the organization didn't have other sources. They scaled the movement in the early 90s from a rock throwing movement basically in the first intifada, into this regional asymmetric army into this much more significant group. Hamas is founded in 1987 as a social movement, as a religious movement, as a Muslim Brotherhood arm in Gaza. And the military infrastructure is really only developed by Iran to a significant extent after the beginning of the peace process. And this is, I think, what people don't understand, the extent to which Hamas is a war, a regional war, a mukawama war on the peace process. So the PLO moves toward diplomacy, the Oslo Accords, whether they were actually doing it or not doing it is a great obviously debate between Israelis and Palestinians, etc. But the Oslo Accords are signed in 1993 and the Peace process is well underway. And to Hamas that leaves a resistance vacuum because the Fatah is no longer part of a resistance in its view. And Iran moves to fill that vacuum using this vehicle of Hamas. In Gaza, in 1990, there's a conference in Tehran. The peace process had already begun under Shamir with the Madrid talk. So it still works the timeline, I promise. But this was this first formal point of contact. Iran hosts a conference on Palestine to which it invites Hamas. It by the way, excludes secular groups belonging to the PLO and the PLO itself. Tehran is trying to replace the PLO with an Islamist alternative. In 1992, there's a big visit by Musar Bumarzouk, the chief of the Politburo of Hamas, and he meets with Khamenei himself, with the supreme Leader himself. Iran commits to a multi million dollar annual subsidy, opens a Hamas office in Tehran. By 1992, Israeli intelligence, Egyptian intelligence, all are tracking Iran, training Hamas fighters in significant numbers at IRGC bases in Iran and at Hezbollah camps in the Beqa Valley in Lebanon. Before Iran, before Hezbollah, before that connection, Hamas didn't use suicide bombings. It was a Hezbollah thing. It was a Shia red Shia martyrdom idea. Under Iran's basically tutelage, Hamas military planners like Yikya Ayash, nicknamed the Engineer because he built bombs and advanced explosives, they learned to do that. It produced the psychological mobilization, the psychological theory required for what they would come to call martyrdom operations in 1992. Israel deports 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members to Lebanon in late 1992. And these 415 people, the Marj Al Zuhr exile, as it's called, are taken in by Hezbollah and they establish a kind of terror college where IRGC instructors, Hezbollah instructors begin to train them in guerrilla warfare, in IED manufacturing. This continued to October 7th in 2017. Okay, there's this after 2012 when Hezbollah gets deep into defending Assad in the Syrian civil war, carries out massacres in Syria of Muslims. Hamas breaks away from Iran for the first time in a serious way and publicly because Hamas is on the Sunni side and Iran is of course on the Alawayt Shia side of the Syrian Civil War. Five years later, in 2017, after the five year break, Yehis Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, the planner of October 7, the main advocate of the Iranian path for Hamas in 2017, Sinwar becomes the leader of Hamas and he immediately patches things up with Tehran. He says, our relationship with Iran is excellent. Iran is the largest supporter of the Qassam Brigades. The ties are deep, the ties are long standing. Hamas wouldn't be what it is without Iran. It's a long, long, interlocking conversation between Sunni and Shia, between various revolutionary ideas, communist ideas, Western ideological ideas, and Islamic ideas that are ported over into Shiism, ported back into Palestinian Sunnism. We know that Iran provided no small amount of the funding and coordination and help and backup for Hamas to actually plan and implement and fund the October 7th attack. When Israelis said on October 8th that Hamas, that the October 7th attack wasn't just Gaza, that Hamas was a spearhead of this Iranian ring of fire that surrounds us, to kill us, the great Mukawama, right, whose first great focus and target is the destruction of Israel. But then we'll have to take down the entire global Western structure. When people like me were saying on October 8 that the Israeli response wouldn't end in Gaza, that it only made sense as the start of a much larger campaign that would ultimately have to end in Tehran itself, we weren't using weak metaphors. We weren't speaking in diplomatic terms. When you understand these deep ideological and institutional ties, the narrative that drives the Mukavama strategy of Hezbollah and Iran and Hamas, the deep shared sources that they draw from, despite the Sunni, Shia divide, which matters, but doesn't prevent them coordinating deeply and for generations. If you don't see that and you don't understand that, nothing happening in the region right now makes sense. And once you do see it, you understand the scale of the danger. And I think you also understand something about how you win in a war like this. So what is the Mukallma? The Muqawa ma is the inhaling just imbibing into Iranian Persian Shi' ism of Western revolutionary Marxism. It's an adoption of the Algerian social and military models of war, the Maoist social and military models of war. It's an application of Khomeini's special interpretation of the weakness power of the weak and powerful paradigm in Shi' ism in the Quran, and this vision of a kind of cult of redemptive martyrdom that takes Fanon's redemptive violence to a martyring, to a sacrificial logical end, really. And all of it fused into a single coherent concept of permanent, forever asymmetric war. It's an idea that grants its practitioners the power to sustain unlimited destruction, to absorb almost unlimited destruction, and to still Declare victory because you're still here, not because you've won anything, not because the enemy is defeated. This isn't about defeating the enemy in any short term sense, in any Western sense. This is about the permanent, slow moving, grinding, never ending, patient tearing down of a great architecture of power. No practitioner of Mukawama can do anything but tear down. They can't build a state or a nation. Just look at Iran's utterly dilapidated state. Every institution, every economic arena, the only thing that works in that country is the IRGC itself. And Iran sees Israel. The Mukawama as a whole sees Israel as the heart of the beast, as Kanafani taught Israel. Specifically Jews, not just Israel. When Hamas in its charter talks about this problem, it doesn't talk about Israel, it talks about Jews everywhere in the world. And the Iranian regime, not accidentally, has hosted Holocaust denial conferences over the decades. The Jews are the weakest thing that ever pushed Islam back. The Jews are the signal of Islam's great weakness, and therefore the Jews, the overcoming of the Jews of Israel is necessarily the great signal of the new power granted to Islam by this new vision of revolutionary Shiism, its power to uplift Islam from those centuries of weakness and backwardness through piety, through humility, spiritual humility, in opposition to Western materialist arrogance. Muqawa ma is a never ending holy war whose ultimate goal is the redemption of humanity through the redemption of Islam, or at least the redemption of the humble and the weak of humanity against the arrogant and evil and superficially powerful. And mukawama therefore makes this regime unbelievably bad. As a government, Iran can never flourish under tyrants who think in these ways, but also unbelievably resilient to conventional military pressure. So what do we do with it? How do we defeat it? How do we bring down this regime? Step one, we understand that the Mukawama is stumbling. What am I talking about? The most important hit the Mukawama ever took was the Syrian civil war. When Hezbollah entered Syria in 2012 to make sure Bashar Al Assad doesn't fall, it wasn't just Hamas that suddenly broke with its patron, Iran. The whole resistance concept, the whole muqawa concept suddenly appeared to many Arabs. No longer to be about fighting Israel, about fighting the oppressive system, the great beast, it suddenly became about killing fellow Muslims, about killing the mustadafin, the oppressed, the humble, the believers. Hezbollah, the jewel in the crown of the Mukavama architecture. It looks like it's switched sides, right? This whole myth, this whole Red Shiism myth of Protecting the Musta Dafin is shattered in the eyes of much of the Sunni world. We have polls on this. The muqawamah suddenly becomes associated not with any great Muslim liberation movement, but with sectarian death squads in Syria. Hezbollah was the grandeur, the apotheosis, the perfected instrument of the Mukawama. After 2006, the Second Lebanon War, this immense war in which Israel could not bring Hezbollah to heel. Between 2006 and 2011, between the Second Lebanon War and the beginning of the Syrian civil war, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah was the most admired leader in the Sunni Arab world. Never mind the Shia, he was the Robin Hood of the Middle East. He was this pan Arab hero who fought a superior Westernized conventional military to a standstill. He was the proof in the pudding that the Shia had finally cracked the revolutionary code, that they had finally delivered on generations of broken promises, that Salafist piety and revolutionary Maoist Algerian ideas and tactics and the whole edifice of never ending war and purposeful suffering that is encapsulated in the mukawama, that that whole thing could actually push back the great imperial beast of the west incarnated in Israel. Nasrallah literally topped the charts in polls of admired figures throughout the Arab World. A 2008 University of Maryland ZOGHB International poll found Nasrallah to be the most admired leader in the Arab world, ranked number one by 26% of respondents, the top figure. And the admiration was consistent across Sunni majority states, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Sunni majority states that have peace treaties with Israel. Also in 2007, 79% of Palestinians expressed confidence in him. That's a pupil, in the words of the pupil itself. Confidence in Nasrallah's judgments, in foreign affairs, in other words, thought the Muqavama was winning. And then in 2012, Hezbollah enters Syria and it all breaks in poles. Nasrallah collapses. Admiration for Hezbollah collapses. The Sunni Salafist imam, cleric teacher Yusuf Al Qaradawi, who had a popular show on Al Jazeera and had defended Hezbollah even though they were, in his view, heretics. He's Sunni, they're Shia. He doesn't just defend, he celebrated Hezbollah in 2013. He calls them Hezbol Shaitan, the party of Satan. Subi Al Tufeli, Hezbollah's own founder, condemns the group as a foreign legion for Iran because it went to that war in Syria. The brand of Hezbollah became toxic in many places in the Sunni world. And now, after the last year, Hezbollah lies shattered, broken, licking its wounds, trying to rebuild. It's still there. It still has assets. It can still turn itself back into a significant military force. But broke. And it has to rebuild. When the actual war with the evil Jews came, how did the Mukuama's greatest and most lauded and endlessly posturing and strutting and proud warriors actually fare? They collapsed. By the way, a great many connected the two. When the resistance became an enforcer for a tyrant, no longer for the Mustadafin, but for a new kind of homegrown Islamic arrogance, it lost its divine immunity, it lost its moral immunity and it became vulnerable to Israeli power. And then there's Iran itself. Let's look at the Mukawama in Iran. Iranians have come to hate the Mukawama. The draining of their national resources, of their the devotion of their entire government and economy to never ending confrontation with some imagined evil world order that most Iranians would now like to join. There is in Iran today a vast counter Muqawama sentiment in as much as we can measure it. Right? It's not easy to measure. It's not a fringe protest. It's the majority view. We have data from 2024 to 2026. It's contested data because the polling is online through VPNs. It's prone to a lot of self selection biases. It's hard to verify, but it's one data point among a great many data points that all point in the same direction. There's no data points pointing in any other direction. And these polls tell us that over 70% of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic system. 69% specifically want the regime to stop calling for the destruction of Israel. That's not that. 69% of Iranians now support Israel like Israel know anything about Israel or care about Israel. But the forever war. It's an ideological obsession. And it's an ideological obsession of their regime that has gutted the country itself. The Riyadh is in free fall. It has broken all records for falling and falling and falling Iranian records. You know, Zimbabwe I think was still worse. But that's, that's the terms in which you now talk about the Iranian economy. There are constant massive shortages of water, of electricity. The Iranian public increasingly views regional proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas as thieves of their national wealth of their own well being. There's a these are Gaman polls group for analyzing and measuring attitudes in Iran. These are the polls I'm talking about. They use encrypted VPN based surveys to bypass state surveillance. It's not actually easy for an Iranian to just go on the Internet and take a poll. But what it says is really extraordinary because most Iranians oppose the continuation of the Islamic Republic itself after the 12 day war in June. Right. So after that war, that's when Gaman polls 70% of Iranians just don't want the Islamic Republic. Those who said they do. Explicit support for the Supreme Leader, for Khamenei and for the principles of the 1979 revolution collapses to 11%. 70. 11. In this same poll, 63% of Iranians said it was a war between the regime and Israel. It has nothing to do with any national or patriotic endeavor. They're not part of the war. The scale of the dissent that we have seen since December, especially in January, has moved from sporadic rioting here and there, strikes of truck drivers and different industries. It has moved into a vast national uprising that rivals the revolution itself in participation. Some of the higher estimates talk about 5 million people taking to the streets in Iran. I can't verify that Iran was taken off the Internet and the verification is impossible. And maybe it was half that, maybe it was a quarter of that. That's unbelievable. That's unprecedented. That's 1979 scale. And they shouted fascinating things in videos you can find online. Neither Gaza nor my life for Iran. Right. Khomeini explicitly said Iran first is nationalism that subdivides the great Islamic Ummah and is therefore apostasy and idolatry. And now the protesters are saying, you've destroyed Iran to fight these endless wars. Iran first they shouted, our enemy is right here. They lie that it's America. These things rhyme in Persian. And they shouted, this is the year of blood. Sayyid Ali, meaning Khamenei is overthrown. No more mukawama. No more static and oppressive 47 year revolution. The regime that showed that it was willing to carry out Khamenei's threat to kill vast numbers of Iranians is no longer popular. The Iranian public has walked away from the idea of the revolution, from the mukawama itself, decisively, I'm fairly certain. No great expert permanently. Any strategy to dismantle the mukawama has to treat the Iranian street as a primary allied force, a main engine, not a victim of the regime. That's what strategy has to be about. Remember the move in the 1960s from Thawrah, from a fast time limited revolution that'll bring better things, destroy Israel, but still bring better things to Mukawama. Endless, you know, catastrophe inducing war to clear the way for this religiously coded but essentially Marxist revolutionary idea that's now being turned on its head. There's some extraordinary things you find when you begin to poke around in the Persian Internet. Since 2019, you have young Iranians talking about a new Thawrah, a new revolution, talking about it in Lebanon, in Iraq and Iran, directly challenging the Mukawama. They say the resistance has become a parasite, a shield for corrupt elites. Who they ask in Iran today is the arrogant and the corrupt and who is the weak and humble and willing to martyr themselves for liberation? Who is the black Shia and who the red shia? In the 2022-2023 Women Life Freedom movement, they understand themselves to be the ultimate anti Muqavama idea. The word life is in there. Woman, life, freedom. It's an explicit rejection of collective sacrifice. It's an explicit rejection of proxyism, of this endless war against the great imperialist beast that makes every conflict all conflicts and demands never ending war. The protesters in 2026 are no longer asking for a better, gentler, more competent resistance regime as in the past or revolution. They want the death of the ideology because that's the only way to save the nation. The regime tells them that without the Mukawa map, they will become the hollow man. The new generation's answer in Iran is we are hollow because you emptied our bank accounts to fill the silos of Hezbollah. It's a shift from this metaphysical struggle that the Iranian regime wants to be selling to material accountability. They're taking the red Shi' ism rebellion concept, but they're using it to rebel against the red Shiite tyrants that now rule over them. So for example, in the Gaman survey, 74% of Iranians in February 2026 prioritize economic stability over revolutionary export. It's explicit. And it isn't just Iran. In late 2019 already you have a massive wave of anti government protests in Beirut that explicitly use the term Thawrah revolution as their demand for sweeping change in Iraq. Protesters also in 2019 started using the word tishrin, which is the Arabic name for October, because the demonstrations began in October. But both of those terms became shorthand labels for this challenge to corruption, to sectarian political systems, to economic hardship, to the suffering of the never ending resistance in Lebanon. The call is explicitly about Hezbollah disarming. Protesters shouted all of them literally. The quote is all of them means all of them. What they're talking about is that Hezbollah's weapons also have to be taken away from Hezbollah. Everybody has to disarm because those weapons are no longer about protecting Lebanon from Israel. Hezbollah's weapons are about protecting a corrupt sectarian cartel from the Lebanese people. The muqawama has fallen. Nobody believes it. In Baghdad, in Nasiriya, you have Shia protesters in these Tishrin protests who attacked Iranian consulates and they yelled, we want a homeland. It was an explicit rejection of being a frontier of the Muqawama led by the irgc. Now, in each of these cases, the revolution fought back. The mukuama fought back, not against Israel, not against the arrogant powers, but against Muslims. IRGC militias backed militias, they're not literally the irgc, but they're backed by the irgc, armed, trained, sometimes in Iraq, use snipers against the protesters in Iraq. Hezbollah supporters attacked the tents of the protesters in Martyrs Square in Beirut. The resistance no longer leads any revolution. Nearly everywhere it exists, it is itself the target of revolution. It is everywhere, the enforcer of the status quo. That's what the Mukavama has become. And it can't help but become that. I know this has gone on a long time. I'm finishing up. The Mukuama can't help but be an enforcer of tyranny. Most people don't want never ending war. They don't want religiously validated endless poverty and suffering. The only way to keep the masses mobilized to the Mukawama on a permanent basis is by massive oppressive force. And so the mukama has lost its moral immunity in its core polities, in the places that are its, its base, its engine. It has reached ideological insolvency like, you know, good oppressors everywhere. The Mukawama has responded to mass protests with ever expanding layers and forms of oppression. The digital iron curtain is placed over Iran, removing most Iranians from the Internet to prevent coordination of protests and hide the massacres of the regime. Folks, that's desperate weakness. It doesn't just show the vulnerability, it is itself a vulnerability. If you have to massacre your own people to sustain a 47 year power structure, you're many things, but you ain't the revolution of the weak. As a side point, by the way, you're also vulnerable in another way. You expose yourself. There are a lot of people and a lot of intelligence agencies tracking each Iranian Internet outage. Because when the Iranian Internet is shut down, the haystack, so to speak, of civilian traffic goes away and there's this small amount of traffic that still remains. These are the, you know, white listed IRGC command and control communications, conversations with proxies, the stuff the regime allows to happen suddenly becomes very visible to global intelligence. Every Time they shut down the Internet. There's an intelligence bonanza. This is vulnerability in. In tactical terms, not just in moral or narrative terms. The Israeli war on the Mukawama broke Hezbollah, at least for a time, and embarrassed Hezbollah forever. The great Hassan Nasrallah lived just long enough to become hated by much of the Arab world before being killed by an Israel that had utterly penetrated Hezbollah. That's satisfying, right? And the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024 severed the land bridge from Tehran to Beirut, Syria. Under Ahmad Ashara, the Sunni led Syria transitioned from an artery of the Mukawama, an ally of the Mukawama, a base of the Mukawama, to its main barrier. There's. Ashara has many things he is not a fan of Iranian power, the resistance. The Muqawama is big. It's deep, it's uncompromising. It has completely co opted the Palestinian cause on the ground in the western left, and it is dying. And as it dies from its own internal oppression, its own internal fragility. Yes, fragility. How many hundreds of times have Israelis had to listen to Nasrallah promise that Israel's power is a mirage, a fake thing, a spider's web. It was just waiting for the mujahideen to reach out and touch it, for it to collapse. Turns out Nasrallah was projecting a very stark truth of his own inherently unnecessarily oppressive and fragile revolution onto the Israelis. When the Mukawama dies from its own internal hypocrisy and oppression, a great many peoples and regions will emerge from this trap of endless sacrifice. The cult of poverty, the cult of destruction, the cult of martyrdom, the obsession with this imagined piety to the point of mass death. Even the Palestinians, one can't help but hope, will emerge from that. And to get there, it'll take much more than an airstrike. We've come a long way together. Stay with me for a tiny bit longer and it'll be done. We've come a long way. We've seen the links and the conversations and the alliances and the fusion of ideas and ideologies and strategies that brought us here. This isn't a chart or a map. This is a unbelievably complicated web. We have only tasted, as we say in Hebrew, on the edge of the fork, this vast thing. This is real. These people are sophisticated and complex. None of this is simple. Every society I talked about is set against itself in a hundred ways. Like every human society, this is a web of cultural anxieties, political anxieties religious commitments, ideological answers to questions that a lot of outsiders in Western Westerners looking at Iran, looking at Palestinians don't even know. We're being asked why does Iran hate America? Don't ever believe the sort of Twitter warriors little shallow claim that it's because of some anti Democratic CIA operation in the 50s. Supporters of the Iranian regime have old and deep and mobilizing and culture fashioning and inspiring reasons to hate the West. Iranians aren't stupid, not even the Ayatollahs. They haven't been gutting their own society for 47 years because of something America did 30 years before their revolution. Their politics, their power structures, their ideas are big and they're fascinating and a lot of them are borrowed from the West. Some of the worst ideas of the west, unfortunately. But they made them their own and their own story and they merged them into Shiism and built an entire political culture on that fusion. And the first step is to respect the seriousness and depth of it. That's the first step to defeating is not innate to Arabness or Islam to be backward and incompetent and politically oppressive and radicalized. Someone did that to the Middle East. And it wasn't the few short decades of European imperialist rule in Syria or the much longer period of French rule in Algeria. It was somewhat, but not. But that's not the only explanation. Their deep ideas and traditions, the Middle Easterners themselves, when they grappled with modernity and imperialism and colonialism and their own options and modernization and new ideas and old devotions and commitments built this Middle East. Some of these ideas, the worst of them, are bastardized European ideological frameworks superimposed onto Islamic culture. And all of it can be swept away, all of it, but only by the peoples themselves. That's the only victory available here. Long term, permanent victory. And for the first time in a very long time, and mostly because of the Mukawama's own inner failings and a little bit because of Israeli military success which embarrassed it and forced everyone to face put those failings on the table. Just as Israel destroyed the Thawrah, the Arab nationalist revolutionary concept in the 56 and 67 wars, because they could no longer explain why they were not making Arabs more powerful, but in fact driving Arabs to defeat. The Mukawama's great failings and oppression is now very visible and in the light and nobody can look away from it. But mostly it's the Mukawama's own inner failings and oppression. Finally, because of all of that, we can begin to See how the whole edifice collapses? How do you defeat an ideology that views death itself as a strategic win and catastrophic destruction as evidence of piety and devotion? You don't just bomb facilities. You do bomb facilities a lot, but that's not enough. You launch a counter muqawama, a counter resistance, and you launch it across military, economic, cultural and ideological fronts. Everywhere. You strangle the financial lifeline. Sacrifice is all well and good as an ethos, but you still have to pay your fighters. Hamas has spent millions and millions over the past two years paying teenagers and young men to join the ranks. As the fighters died facing the Israeli army, they paid widows after they died, 20,000 widows at least. Even the most loyal fighter needs to feed his family. Hamas always seizes control of aid flows first, before anything else, just to secure that financial lifeline that it needs to fight. The IRGC is the same story, in fact, vastly more so. It's structured like a multinational conglomerate that also has a military, that also has a militia. It has these vast networks of shadow banks. Just Google the hawala networks. It controls probably more than half of the oil and gas infrastructure of Iran. Iran's regional influence outside Iran depends exactly in the same way on the ability to pay salaries and provide social services. Hezbollah has schools and hospitals. That's partly to keep the people on their side. They buy political loyalty in Lebanon. In Iraq, the Muqawama axis has become a narcotics cartel. In episode 83, I talked to Matthew Levitt on Hezbollah's narcotics empire, how it launders money for the major South American drug cartels. But never mind, because Hezbollah in South America, Syria, under Assad during the civil war was this massive captagon producer, the regional titan of captagon production and distribution, and possibly the world's biggest producer of the drug. And smuggling was everywhere. The Saudis had intercepted shipments of captagon into Saudi Arabia, destroyed them, pressured other countries around it to try and crack down on this. The Muqawama, to fund itself, has become one of the biggest drug producing networks in the world. You remember Qassam, the great holy warrior whose Islamic piety gave him his military discipline? Well, where's the piety in the Mukalama's vast drug empire? After Assad's fall, that trade has not disappeared. It's diversified. It's gone to Yemen and other places. Crisis. It's time for the west to designate everything connected to the Mukawama a transnational criminal organization and go after everything the system touches everywhere, every bank, every trading company, every shipping company, every Airline everything. Intercept the ships, intercept the trucks, shut down the banks. Disrupt the hawala networks that launder Iranian oil revenue. Blacklist regional banks that facilitate the transfer of Iranian revenue. Target the central bank of Iran's currency auctions in Iraq, which have historically been used to launder dollars and funnel it to the IRGC militias or the IRGC backed militias. That's an idea I got from a Wall Street Journal article two years ago. None of this stuff is unknown. None of this stuff is hidden from us. Deplatform Al Manar, Hezbollah's television station, Press tv, Iran's propaganda outlet. Disrupt Mahan Air, prevent them from flying and civilian shipping everything owned by the regime, everything that facilitates the funding of the mukawama of the revolution forced the regime over the edge into bankruptcy. By the way, the 2026 Internet shutdown, right, was devastating to Iranian business. E commerce crashed. There's these freelance platforms that allow freelancers to earn money online, which matters more than it sounds. It sounds like fiverr or something to Westerners, but this is one of the few stable lifeline earning dollars for young Iranians in a country with a currency that's in free fall. All of that stuff collapsed and Iranians on the ground responded by blaming the regime. It solidified the public view of the irgc. And you saw this in the protests and what they were screaming in the Grand Bazaar in February, just, just February, they were chanting, they take our bread to buy rockets for Lebanon. Force the regime to do it again. Learn from the FLN example, Learn from Fanon that forcing the oppressor to oppress defeats the oppressor, undermines the oppressor. Make it desperate to hide its weaknesses, make it crash the Internet and therefore also the economy. Make it devastating. Force it to choose between dismantling the regime, which it will never do, and hurting the people again and again and again. The people will support you. Exploit all the rifts in the proxy system. As Iran weakens, supporting its proxies becomes harder. They literally have run out of money for them. And the proxies are starting to find not only other sources of revenue, but other anchors of power. Iraqi Shia militias are increasingly turning inward to Iraqi politics. They're still radical in some ways, they're still problematic in many ways, but they no longer think of themselves as part of any mukawama. In the June war between Israel and Iran, the Iraqi militias explicitly said publicly, we're not part of this. And Hezbollah sat it out. Even and Hezbollah shouldn't have sat it out. Like all Hezbollah is, is that war. It was built for 30 years to be that second front for Israel in that war. That's how shattered it was by Israel's strikes on Hezbollah, by the pager operation and all the rest of it. But even those who were not shattered, like the militias in Iraq, decided to sit it out. The Houthis of Yemen are also less and less under Iran's thumb. The Israeli strikes, the decapitation of the Houthi leadership, the immense costs imposed on Houthi controlled parts of Yemen by Israeli strikes of the ports, of the ability to ship oil, all of that has had a massive effect. Iranian generals have publicly talked about how the Houthis are now finding local allies and are harder and harder for Iran to control. The loss of Syria left Hezbollah reeling. The participation in the war for Syria left Hezbollah reeling. The loss of Syria left it struggling to rebuild. Treat all of these insurgencies, all of these organizations, all of them as local criminals. Crack down on anything Iran does to try and connect to them, communicate with them, fund them, arm them, sever the mukawama surgically. And finally, and this is the most important part, and with this, I finish, attack the story. Expose the hypocrisy. That's the spear to the heart of the entire vocabulary and commitments and religious story of the whole edifice. That's what's weakened them this far. There's this, what one writer called the luxury paradox. The greatest threat to the mukawama is the luxury of its own leaders. The rank and file are told to embrace poverty. The rank and file are, you know, are told to suffer. The leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, of the irgc, what have you. They live in villas and luxury hotels. Naaman shamed them in a vast, well funded digital campaign. Target the families of the IRGC and Hezbollah commanders. We're not playing around here. Leak their bank records, leak their property deeds in Europe, in Dubai, the social media evidence of their children's Westernized lifestyles, lavish lifestyles. One of the things that went viral recently in Iran, just last month, was the wedding of an Iranian of the daughter of an Iranian general. She wore a white dress. Talk about globalization and arrogant cultural domination. And she wore a very flattering white dress, not at all in keeping with a regime that forces women to wear hijabs by threat of violence. Expose that lavish lifestyle, Western lifestyle of their children. There are no humble holy warriors anymore in this world. Shatter the mythological legitimacy of the whole narrative of mukawama. And then maybe also it follows, and we can make this argument explicitly when we actually know what Mukuama is and what this regime thinks it's doing, that this corruption might be why God does not actually appear, as Khamenei keeps insisting to be protecting them. Maybe this deep demonstrable corruption. You know, you don't have to abandon the Shia religious vision to suggest that maybe the fact that they're no longer meeting that standard might be why they're failing so badly at every turn. Are the Jews magic or are they just corrupt and failing? When you tell that story and when you hammer them after telling that story, while telling that story in the context of telling that story, you hammer them with kinetic strikes, with airstrikes, then the strikes become a blow to the story instead of being a validating suffering imposing on them a sacrifice which only validates their religious vision because collapse is validation in their religious world. It's a signal of their hypocrisy. The Iranian regime's greatest fear is not an American bomb. It's an Iranian citizen who no longer finds beauty in the grave. In the Bible, our Bible, Psalm 37, we read, but the humble shall inherit the land and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. The Iranian people are there in mass numbers. They are the humble and the weak, demanding liberation. Since 2019, as I've mentioned. It's not too dramatic I think, to argue that there is a new Thaura concept, a new revolutionary concept in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Iran, a new call for life giving revolution. Not against some imagined Western imperialists, but against the Mukawama oppression structures themselves, themselves. It's a rejection of constant, never ending war. It's a demand of life over martyrdom. The Iranian Gen Z has flipped Shariati's script. You suddenly find people arguing that the Islamic Republic is the new black Shiite Safavid dynasty, the stagnant oppressor, and that they are the true revolutionaries. Iranians are already doing this. The protesters are already pointing to the massive wealth and institutional power of the religious foundations of the Bonyads. These large state connected religious charitable foundations that control huge assets, whole industries, real estate, finance. These were originally expanded after the 79 revolution basically through confiscated property. And they're supposed to provide social welfare to veterans and the poor, but they have no transparency. They control vast sections of the Iranian economy and these Bonyads are ultimately controlled by the Supreme Leader. They are the deep corruption of the regime and talking about them has gone viral on Iranian social media as signals of the corruption in recent years. They go after the IRGC itself and its vast wealth and talk about it as the modern as the black Shiite court. Who's they? How many, what percentage of the population they represent? I can't tell you. I don't know. Iranian Internet isn't free and I don't have access to all of it. But there is already loud and repeatedly and for years, the argument that the clergy is no longer the voice of the oppressed. They are the jailers of the people. They are the oppressor. And in some places, we've even seen Iranians start to hold these traditional Shiite mourning ceremonies, the mourning rituals where they whip themselves in this mystical mourning for Imam Hussein's death and the abandonment of Imam Hussein by the believers. They dance in those places. They take Shariati's critique of the morning rituals as a stale, stagnant religion of passivity. And they use it to mock what the state has made out of those rituals, which is these state sponsored commemorations, the so called, you know, mourning rituals, as calls to rebellion, but which have really basically no longer become about rebellion, but about numbing the public, about again, passivity, about obedience to the sultan, to Khamenei. And so there are videos all over Iranian social media of young people dancing at the places where you're supposed to be mourning the martyrs. There's a battle underway in Iran online over the Imam Hussein narrative. The regime says Hussein died so that the Islamic State could ultimately exist. And to protest the Islamic Republic is to be the villainous ruler. Who killed him? Yazid. The protester's version is that Hussein died the great imam in the 7th century fighting a corrupt, tyrannical Islamic government. And therefore a protester who dies in an IRGC prison is the true Hussein. And the IRGC commander who killed him is the modern Yazid. Folks, this is the start of a catastrophic collapse of the regime's moral immunity, its ability to mobilize mass martyrdom as it falls. Let it work, do everything possible to encourage it, to enable the connectedness of this generation, this new rebelliousness, this new revolution. And this new generation has even taken Kanathani and started to reimagine the interconnectedness. But it turned it inward against the Mukallama. There are secret, there's reports on it. So it's not secret, secret, but clandestine networks of communication, digital, sometimes physical, that connect young people, groups of young people in Tehran, in Beirut, in Baghdad, in the new Syria of Shara, which is investing in encouraging this in the rebellion against the regime. In Iran, they used a lot of these decentralized online protocols. I don't understand very well. They use telegram, encrypted communication apps. And they share what they come to call counter epics. You know, instead of the IRGC commander being a hero, he's the new black Shiite nobility. One genre, it's like a trend. It's like they. It's like fan fiction. It's political. Fan fiction basically, is to rewrite the lives of the martyrs that the regime writes and pumps into Iranian media. Like Qasem Soleimani, right, the former head of the Quds Force killed by the US in 2020. Not to let them be those martyrs, but to rewrite them as these tragic figures who sacrificed the Iranian people's future for a mirage of empire. And they're driving what are coming to be called the graffiti wars in Tehran and Beirut, which are more and more synchronized. When a slogan appears in the Ecbatan neighborhood in Tehran, which if you follow the coverage, you'll know it's very well known for its protests, that that slogan will soon appear in Martyr Square in Beirut, sometimes within hours in some media reports. The new Thawrah is beginning seriously and in ways that can't be stopped to challenge the mukavama. It's, I think, not a small thing. I think it's the voice of a generation. Mukawama is inherently endless, generation spanning, unfalsifiable in the sense that it doesn't offer any outcome that it would recognize as a loss. It actually defines victory as never acknowledging that it has lost, no matter the consequences to its own society. And it is always, always oppressive live, because the only way to continue endless war and infinite willingness to suffer is to force people to suffer. And that's the heart of the mukuama. And when does it all end? When the world revolution topples the globalist, imperialist organism of the arrogant. It has to fall. It doesn't have to fall in the sense that I'm calling for it to fall innately, inherently in itself. It has no choice but to fall. And in Gaza and in Iran, not to mention Yemen and Lebanon and everywhere else, all these mukawa movements must oppress and destroy. That's true if their enemies are bad, if you don't like Israel and America, and it's true if their enemies are the good guys, it doesn't matter. They themselves inherently have to become oppressive and self destructive. They have no other option when the population no longer wants the endless war and poverty and oppression that it's required to sustain the endless war. And that's when the mukuama practitioner inevitably turns on their own population. And if you're Hearing echoes of communism. Yes, obviously this is communism. The mukuama is dying because it has no answer to the ordinary person's demand for life and prosperity. Shariati's Red Shiism was about the willingness to die. The new Thawrah is about the determination to live. Let's help it out. Iranians are, by the way, teaching us how this regime falls. There are four lessons I've drawn from their example. Lesson one against the mukawama. Joy itself, happiness itself is insurgency. The Mukawama relies on this very grim aesthetic, this somberness, but militarized well. Iran's Gen Z is rejecting what they call the call to the grave with these dancing protests in the exact locations where martyrs are supposed to be mourned. If the regime's legitimacy is built on the sanctity of death, then the celebration of life is an act of treason. It's not a lifestyle thing, it's ideological demolition. They're telling the irgc, we do not want your redemptive grave. We want a coffee shop. We want a future. 2. Delinking Kanafani's beast theory that everything is connected, so in vogue now in Western academia, is the regime's biggest psychological shield. They tell their people, if we fall, the west will swallow Iran whole. It will swallow our identity in Westernization. So you argue for a local counter narrative. The strategy has to focus on Iran first, Iranian nationalism, the very thing Khomeini hated, and Lebanon first, and Iraq first. You challenge the intersectionality of oppression that the regime uses to deny self determination to their own people. When a protester is shouting in Iran, neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran. They're surgically delinking the pieces of the mukawama. They're cutting the arteries. The goal is to make the mukuama look not like a global liberation movement, but like a kind of homegrown colonial foreign project that colonized Iran from within. It's the denial of Iranian freedom and Iranian self determination using Western ideas bastardized and applied onto, forced onto a kind of Islamic vocabulary. 3. Audit the great audit. Audit the incompetence. Audit the failure. The Mukalla MA claims to be spiritually superior. You hit them with material humiliation. You failed at everything. You screwed it all up. You don't just talk about the poverty of Iranians, you talk about the failure of the regime. That's what the young people are doing in Iran. You use a competence comparison, right? The IRGC's space program is very famously prone to failure. It constantly fails. They keep launching something, declaring they're going to Launch it ahead of time and then it blows up on the launch pad to the point where they stopped declaring, they stopped announcing the launches. And you compare that to the unbelievable flourishing of Iranian exiles. Iranian exiles in the west have been one of the most talented groups of people in Silicon Valley, driving math and industry and academia. There's this brain drain out of Iran because Iran doesn't know what to do with talent and can only be deeply incompetent. The strategy of life needs to argue that the mukawama destroys talent. It's a machine that destroys talent. The brightest Persian minds are taken and turned either into refugees or martyrs. And four institution build the new revolution, the new Thaura. I already mentioned that the Mukawama can't build a state, can't build a nation. The counter strategy has to show what can be built in the shadow of the mukawama, the civil society that's emerging out of state, failure in Iran and Lebanon, their underground schools. I just touched on it in passing. There are these mutual aid networks that don't go through the banyads in Iran. There's cryptocurrency, decentralized finance that bypasses Iranian banks. It's not a lot, it's not big, but that's a place where the west can really, you know, what did Archimedes say? Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the world. That's where the world can be moved. It's not a top down forever war. It's a bottom up act of survival. It proves that people can manage their own lives better than the guardians, the clerics can manage their lives. President Trump, please bomb the missile silos, please bomb the nuclear program. But also you have to understand that to be effective you need to bomb the institutions of the regime's oppression. You need to bomb, disrupt, intercept its sources of income. And you can't stop with the kinetic attacks, break the myth. It's already in tatters, but it could still recover or at least survive. It's built for nothing else but to survive. So you have to keep hammering away at it, not just from the air, on social media, in the press, humiliate it, show its hypocrisy every hour of every day within Iranian society itself, in every soft power arena of modern war, as the mukawama itself teaches, victory will go to the steadfast. That's a hard thing for democracies to do, to stick to something across election cycles, ideological swings, but it's a lesson democracies have to learn if they want to be able to face down the kind of bitter foe the Iranian regime represents, the kind of destructive power it represents. You have to be the steadfast one. You have to learn the enemy, you have to understand the enemy. And then you have to take the side of the people, the humble and the suffering, the mustadafin, who the enemy oppresses. As the Quran itself taught, following in the footsteps of the Hebrew psalms, it is the humble, with a little bit of luck and faith and determination, who will inevitably inherit that country after the regime is dead and gone. Thank you for listening.