Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
A
Sa. Foreign.
- [01:29]
B
I'm Jeremy Scahill coming to you from DropSiteNews. DropSiteNews.com it is Tuesday, January 13th. Welcome to our regular live stream. Today we're going to be doing an in depth dive looking at the large scale protests that have been taking place inside of Iran. We're going to talk about how those protests began, who's been trying to co opt them, what we understand about how the Iranian state has responded internally inside of Iran, because for the past period, most Iranians have been left without access to the Internet. But I think it's important to begin by, because this is a show and this is a news outlet that is based in the United States by just reminding people of a broader context here about Iran. Iran is a country that has consistently since 1979 faced threats of regime change, economic warfare, covert operations, more recently overt military attacks, not just by the United States, but by Israel as well. And Iran is right now in the midst of sweeping economic sanctions that have been led by the United States and other Western powers that have had a direct impact on creating the conditions that ultimately led to the initiation of these protests. And I think that it's important in a very sober way to break down what we're seeing in Iran into a few different categories. And we have, we have two guests that are going to be really great at helping us to do that. But just in brief, we're going to look at how these demonstrations began because it was largely merchants, small business owners, if you will, who initiated these protests in response to rising inflation, the collapse of the real by some estimates, the cost of food and basic goods has risen by more than 70% over the past year. Inflation is estimated to be at approximately 40%. We're also going to look at what happened as these protests started to grow. Because initially when the protests began, there wasn't a violent response from the Iranian government to speak of. But as they grew and other actors started to get involved, you had university students, but then you also had other forces and crowds with their own agendas coming in. You then started to see a dramatic uptick in violence both by the state and by demonstrators. And a lot of what has happened at the hands of the Iranian state has received intense focus in the Western media. And of course, this is a relevant part of the story and it's something we're also going to talk about. What has been less covered is that there have also been attacks orchestrated by people who either are demonstrators or are trying to co opt the demonstrations for their own agendas. Inside of Iran. And then the third sort of bucket that we're going to look at is how the us, Israel, monarchists, Zionists, the mek, other groups in the broader Iranian diaspora have tried to co opt the situation that we're seeing unfolding right now. You know, Donald Trump's all over the place in his threats, talking about 25% tariffs, additional tariffs on countries that do business with Iran. He's implied multiple times that the US May actively start militarily attacking Iran. There are estimates of hundreds of people that have died, according to non governmental organizations. But the Iranian officials today have told multiple media outlets that they estimate that approximately 2,000 people have been killed just in the past several days. That would include all sectors of this story, from protesters to demonstrators to security forces as part of the Iranian state. But first, I want to bring in my colleague Murtaza Hussain from Dropsite News. Maaz, I really do want to get quickly to our guests. But first, first I wanted to ask you, because part of this is that if you just sort of pay attention to or watch Western media coverage, you would think that the entire origin of this protest and that what's at the center of it is Iranians want regime change. And certainly there are Iranians that want regime change. But that's not the origin story of how these protests began. And a story that we did some months ago was looking at how oil sector workers in Iran, you did this story back in November and there were other protests in December, but there have been strikes in the oil sector in Iran. And the protesters who have demonstrated from the Iranian oil sector, and this was true of the early stages of this protest, were not out in the streets calling for death to the Supreme Leader. They weren't out in the streets calling for regime change, but they were protesting economic conditions.
- [06:53]
C
Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy. And you know, in your introduction, you laid out, you hinted at very severe conditions in Iran. They've been building for a very long time now. In the last year alone, the Iranian real, the country's currency has lost almost half its value. It's now trading at something like one to over a million, you know, trading rate with the US whereas after the revolution in 1979, it was like 1 to 70. It's been a tremendous catastrophic loss of value. And the, and the loss of value is accelerating as time goes by as well too. So, you know, effectively we've seen a situation where life is becoming unlivable for tremendous numbers of people in Iran, ordinary people, people working in the oil sector, people who in businesses which rely on imports and so forth. And part of this is due to, you know, inegalitarian policies of the government or mismanagement. Also, you know, markedly a lot of it is due to the sanctions on the Iranian Central bank and the escalating sanctions that the US Government been imposing on Iran over the past several years. And it's very important to note that the avowed purpose of these sanctions has been to generate the conditions for ordinary Iranians that we're seeing today where people, life is just completely not sustainable for increasing numbers of people. You know, basically basic things like meat and, you know, the necessities of life are becoming increasingly out of reach for ordinary households. So in that situation, people will revolt out of hunger. You know, they will, whether they have a plan or a new regime to replace the with or anything like that is almost secondary. They're infuriated, they're exhausted, and then they take to the streets for that reason. And I think that if you look at the statements of U.S. officials, you know, the whole idea of collapsing the currency was to kind of wage an economic war against Iran in lieu of a direct military conflict, which maybe before was not seemed as desirable. But now we're seeing kind of the breaking point of Iranian society perhaps in these protests. And it's not surprising then that they're devolving into the violence and that we're seeing take place today.
- [08:59]
B
Well, I, I do want to go to our guests. And again, you know, if we have, if you see the screen switching around, it's just because we were doing things on the, on the fly here. But, but first I want to introduce Samira Mohaddin, Toronto based Iranian Canadian journalist and the founder and managing editor of Online Media on the Line Media. Excuse me. In a moment, we're going to be going also to the Washington D.C. area to speak to Nargis Bajogli, who is another Iranian American and an associate professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University. But Samira, let's begin with you. And you could take this in any direction you want to, but I think it's important to just back up and remind people of the context of how this started. We alluded to some of it, but the broader media, and you've been covering this as well, the broader media narrative, particularly in the establishment media, is just that this is a regime change protest. That's a dramatic oversimplification and outright false because Iran's a very large, diverse country. But give us your perspective and sense of how this started. What was at the center of it.
- [10:11]
A
This, this really started first of all, thank you so much for having me, Jeremy. And dropside. But this, this, these protests started on December 28 in Tehran's Grand Bazaar by merchants when the real dramatically dropped. And you know, it was, was really on January 1st when you saw Mike Pompeo a couple days later tweet out on New Year's Day, you know, happy New Year to all the Iranians in the streets and the Mossad agents walking beside them. I mean it was wild to behold such a statement, reckless statement being made by Mike Pompeo. And then from there you saw Israel's heritage minister Amai Elahu giving an interview. This was printed in Israel Ham one of Israel's most, most read digital media saying our operatives are on the ground, they're working there. He the, the direct quote was we have a hand in this. And so that's when you saw really the state violence escalate because in the first couple days of this protest, Peseskian, the Iranian president came out and said people have a right to protest. Our economy is in shambles, we need to fix it. We need to listen to what people are saying. We. But then things turned very quickly and what began as you know, protests about economic hardship really turned into, you heard people on the streets calling for the death of Khamenei and all this. And that's, it's important to note that's not new either. I mean Iran has been in this just hamster wheel of successive protests really since 2017. And in 2019 is when you saw, you know, the oil prices go up and then you saw more protests there. Then you had the Masa Amini uprising and now this. But these protests are very different, particularly in the fact that we are seeing a level of violence on the part of the protesters also that we haven't seen in the past.
- [12:27]
C
Samir, I want to ask as well too we've seen some reports initially about the number of deaths that have taken place in the protest. I think the Human Rights activist network for news agency for yesterday reported about 650 people dead, of which I think about 130 were from the police or security forces and the rest being protesters or ordinary people. And today we saw some Iranian officials speak to a U.S. outlet and estimate perhaps death tolls in the Thousands. I mean 2000 people may have been dead killed. And there have been this very chilling images of morgues and other hospitals in Iran with large numbers of dead people, the identities of which were not fully clarified in the reports but clearly showing A tremendous devastation in the country over the past few days. Do we know anything yet with the limited Internet of what exactly took place in terms of the scale of the violence, where it was concentrated and who was actually who killed who and in what areas and situations? What do we know right now with the limited information we have?
- [13:28]
A
Yeah, one of the big areas where you're seeing a lot of protests happening is in Mashhad, which is, again, really interesting because this is supposed to be the center of religiosity, you know, and where a lot of Iranian government supporters are, etc. But you're seeing a swell of protesters there. A lot of the people killed were in, also in rushed. This is in northern Iran. And these images of hundreds and hundreds of people in makeshift morgues. Morgues that are overflowing warehouses. What's interesting is that Iranian government is broadcasting these images on state television. I've been watching Iran's state TV religiously, pardon the pun, for the past couple of days, and they never did this before. They never broadcast these images when they were killed people in 2019, for instance. And I'm not sure why they're doing this. I mean, the, the narrative that the government is putting out is that these are Mossad agents and that, you know, these aren't normal protesters. That's, that's sort of what they're promulgating. Whereas the, the, the reports that we are, are able to get out from protesters, some of them with Starlink are saying that there's been a massacre happening and that these are regular unarmed protesters that are being killed. And again, like you noted, there have been also images that have come out of policemen being brutalized, Iranian police being killed. And so there, this narrative, competing narrative is happening, all to say that Iran, Iran's security forces have killed hundreds and hundreds of people amid this Internet blackout. That is something that can't be denied.
- [15:22]
B
I want to bring in our other guest, Nargis Bogli, an associate professor of anthropology and Middle east studies at Johns Hopkins University. Also the author of a couple of books, one of which is Iran Reframed, another How Sanctions Work. Nargis, thanks so much for being with us here. We're unable to hear you there. See, again. Yeah, we're. We'll go back to Samira while we try to fix the issue there. So, Samir, I wanted to follow up on your, on the, on the point that you were just making there. You've also been talking a lot about the effort to co op these protests by, you know, obviously Mossad, Mike Pompeo, has said things, but just openly. The United States and Israel, you know, they're once again wheeling out or he's inserting himself. The Shah's, you know, son is trying to then you know, claim that he's, he's ready to step in and, and, and be the president. But I, you know, and you could touch on any of these, but what I really want to ask you is, you know, we saw hundreds of thousands. By some estimates it was more than a million Iranians who gathered in, in a massive display of support for the Iranian state. They said it was a demonstration against terrorism. And, you know, certainly all governments can corral, you know, people to their, to their needs or their desires, but it is not true that there aren't large numbers of Iranians who support that government. And I think that's a part of this story that is just ignored constantly or it's pooh poohed. I mean, Iran is an extraordinarily diverse society. There's party scenes in Iran, you know, there's young people doing their thing. No, I mean, seriously, you would think that it's just everyone's walking around with burkasan. That's the way that it is talked about in the broader, you know, narrative. And, you know, there are younger Iranians that I've seen write very interesting critical essays about protest within the context of not aiding and abetting regime change. Yes, people have all kinds of criticisms, concerns, maybe even outright opposition to the government there, but that does not equal. We want regime change. Unpack some of that, because I think this is so important, because it's always, it's either everyone wants them gone and the regime is just locking everyone's brains up and no one is free, you know, or it's that the entire thing is just Mossad.
- [17:52]
A
Yeah, those are the voices that really are being drowned out in this. Earlier on, when you were opening up this discussion, you spoke about the universities. In the first couple of days of these protests, university campuses were extremely active. Students were out, you know, giving that message of we don't want intervention here, we don't want US Intervention, we don't want Israeli intervention.
- [18:19]
B
We don't want.
- [18:19]
A
But they were also talking about human rights, democracy, etc, and those are the voices that you don't hear from what, what we're hearing in the mainstream media is this sort of Disney story of a prince, a benevolent prince, wanting to come back, help his people transition. And that's it. And you're, and you're hearing these chants on the streets of Reza Pahlavi's name. I'm not saying that that's not happening because it is. But on the other hand, you're not hearing the other voices that are saying we don't want intervention, whether it's Prince or anyone else, we can do this on our own. Those are the voices that you don't hear from now everything has really gotten complicated. Just to come back, what you mentioned about the co opting and the hijacking of these protests. When you have people like Gila Gamliel, this is Israeli Minister of Science and Innovation and Technology, or Naftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister coming out and saying rise up in the streets, we are with you. Who is that helping? It's only helping provide fodder to an Iranian government that already constantly parries away the concerns of its citizens by saying this is a foreign hand, that these are not, you know, these are not Iranians. And we saw yesterday images of hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets protesting on behalf of the government. And yes, many of these people are government workers, etc, but many of them aren't. And listen, Iran is a country that is the size of Western Europe. It is a country of more than 90 million people. There was a research done that showed that about 20%, about 20% of the population in Iran is, is backing their government. 20 of 90 million people is about 18 million people. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. And you can't just do away with 18 million people. You know, it's going to take a lot more than some 6 to 7,000 people on the streets. I put a call out to people asking them what their biggest fears are right now. And I got over 500 responses. Many of them brought up three important points. They were afraid of civil war in the country. They were afraid of the country becoming like Syria or Iraq. And they were afraid of the country being torn apart, Balkanized, you know, with East Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Khuzestan, you know, this sort of making of these bunch of stands and Iran becoming much, much smaller. Let's not forget that in June you had Israeli officials actually saying Iran is too big, we need to split it up. These are the realities on the ground. And if you mention these things, people get angry at you. They say that you're a regime supporter. I mean, we haven't even touched on what's going on in the diaspora. I'm not sure if you want to go into that yet, but. Well, I wanted to say about that too.
- [21:29]
B
I wanted to bring Nargis in and hopefully it's not Nargis's technical issue, it's ours. But any of what you've been listening to, feel free to address. But I also am interested in picking up on what Samira just said and the broader efforts to sort of co opt this. The interplay between the diasporic groups, some of which are also had been designated historically by some governments as terror organizations. But Nargis, take any part of this you want and just run with it.
- [22:00]
D
Yeah. So I'm going to pick up a little bit on what Samira was saying before she got to the diaspora. I'll let her take the diaspora if she wants to. I like to avoid that topic. But part of what I wanted to bring in was, you know, Iran has a very, very active and large civil society. The student groups and the student and the universities that Sameer was talking about, all of the women's organizations, children's rights organizations, these were at the forefront of many of the movements for change. Iran has been a society that has had uprisings ever since after the revolution. It's had them before the revolution. You know, for 150 years, the society has been demanding independence not only from foreign powers, but also sovereignty and representation from those who have been governing it, whether before the revolution or after. And they will continue to do so no matter what governing elite is in power over them. But what that means is that because this is a society that has gone through a revolution, knows what it takes to have any kind of regime change come about. And this is why one of the things that you have that's different, for example, with the women Life Freedom movement that happened three years ago is that that came on the heels of a lot of civil society organizations, political and social activists who had been working for many years and have been putting things like civil disobedience at the forefront of everyday action and everyday forms of resistance. And they were able to, in the span of just a few years, get rid of one of the main pillars of the Islamic republic. De facto mandatory hijab is no longer the reality in Iran. So you have folks on the ground who are pushing for change. Now, as you said, both Jeremy and Morteza, it's not some want complete change of the entire system. Some want different kinds of things. I've been talking to large bazaar families and they were participating in the first few days of this, in the first week and a half of this. And now they're saying this has gotten out, out of control and it's gotten out of where they were hoping Things would lead. So especially in going back again to some of the conversation you all were having before about what the Iranian state is also showing with the large numbers of folks who have been killed in Iran during these past few days. And we have a very severe Internet blackout. One of the reasons that I think that they are doing their tune is slightly different this time, as Samira mentioned, as far as they're showing people who have been killed, they are saying things like a lot of these are folks who have been working with Israel in the United States, but a lot of them are also ordinary people. So they're doing two things here. One is to scare people from coming out onto the street. Two is to further their narrative that ordinary people are getting caught up in this sort of broader geopolitical campaign that is going on. But a third is also to I think, recognize both themselves because they are in a catch 22. The economic situation in Iran is not going to improve unless there is some kind of budge on the international and especially US Sanctions on the country. They are up against sort of a wall as far as moving forward. And this is all in the mix here. And so there are a lot of people who are very angry and have been showing their anger, whether it's the workers move, the teachers unions, the different kinds of people throughout these many years who don't want civil war. They don't want the country to turn into a Syria, a Libya or an Iraq. But they want very real changes to happen. And then you have others who, as much as they keep pushing and they get repressed by the state, are sort of coming up into this exacerbated moment over the past many years saying, well, the state is not budging. We need to figure different things out. And this is what makes understanding the current moment so incredibly complex.
- [25:59]
C
Nikis, I want to ask you a follow up about that as well too, because you mentioned that a lot of this crisis, the economic crisis, is based on the standoff that Iran has with the US and the resulting sanctions and so forth. And really it makes any form of economic reform, if not impossible, almost very remote possibility inside Iran. There were some preliminary reports the other day that Iran may re engage with the Trump administration on talks and somehow a number of issues, including the nuclear issue, but also ballistic missiles and other things that the US Is demanding of Iran. It seems like a lot of the US Demands of Iran are extremely onerous in a way that it will be very difficult to completely sacrifice nuclear enrichment in the country. Giving up the ballistic missile program could be suicidal and since it would leave Iran open to attack and so forth. What sort of, is there a zone that Iran could even negotiate to have sanctions removed right now? And it seems like judging from US statements that really they are set on removing the government in some sense or causing the dissolution of the country or what have you. What do you see the possible response of the Iranian government now that this uprising has happened and now there's the looming confrontation or discussion happening with the United States?
- [27:13]
D
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the million dollar question at the moment. Apparently Adolchi has sent messages to Witkoff and they will be having meetings. That's being set. Trump administration, as you said, seems to want complete surrender of Iran. In many ways, the Iranians are not there yet, if they will get there at all. But, but part of what they could put forward is to not enrich on Iranian soil for quite some time, maybe, you know, do a decade long. I mean, again, remember the jcpoa, the Iran deal, which Trump tore up and then imposed maximum pressure sanctions, which is part of, you know, what, what we're seeing today is the result of, is the result of maximum pressure sanctions. The Iranians were very ready to give up quite a bit of, and have a lot of oversight over their nuclear program. They could go back to certain versions of that and maybe even offer more. I don't see them right now offering to negotiate at all on their missile program. And that really goes back to the experience that they had during the 1980s when they were, it was very difficult for them in the Iran Iraq war to buy weaponry to defend the country. And so I don't see that happening in this instance. The other thing is that if we all remember seven months ago, and you know, when Israel and the United States engaged in war with Iran and Israel attacked Iran sort of in a surprise attack that was in the midst of negotiations with the United States, in particular, Adolf Sheen Witkoff. So the Iranians in many ways have to negotiate, especially because the Trump administration is taking such a maximalist stance. You also have examples in the past of when Khomeini at the end of the Iran Iraq War himself said, I drank from the chalice of poison in signing that ceasefire. So there's also precedent in Iranian history of the Islamic Republic. So only in the past 40 some odd years of the state making.
- [29:20]
C
Certain.
- [29:21]
D
Kinds of deals in order to maintain the state and to maintain their political establishment. This is not a, you know, it's not a state that's going to go all out and lose, have the prospect of losing power over the country. They will negotiate in particular ways. The question becomes how, how long or what are they willing to give up the missile program? For now, I don't see any indications of them being willing to give up. I think they're going to continue to try to maneuver on the nuclear program.
- [29:52]
B
You know, Samira, this is all taking place at a moment when Netanyahu and the Israel project are on an arson tour and a mass murder tour around the region. I mean, you have the genocide in Gaza, you have the intensifying, every single day intensifying attacks on the occupied West Bank. When Bashar Al Assad was brought down in Syria, the Israelis then took the opportunity. Well, Netanyahu himself has claimed that Israel was sort of at the center of that. I mean, that's a whole other show that we could do. But the Israelis took the opportunity then to systematically bomb the entire conventional military infrastructure of Syria, including eliminating its air defenses. And there are Israeli pundits on television now saying that that's what they want to do in Iran as well when given the opportunity. You know, Israel has also bombed Qatar. You know, they bombed the residents of Kahlil. Dr. Khalil Al Haya, the head of Hamas in Gaza. They are continuing to massively bomb Lebanon on a regular basis. And, you know, you've talked about this also that there are these narratives online where there seems to be an attempt to kind of pit Palestine solidarity folks against Iran. And you see a lot of Zionist influencers and very clearly orchestrated organized campaigns to try to accentuate those divides. But Iranians themselves, and, you know, both of you have been laying out legitimate grievances that people have against the Iranian state. Iranians themselves, unless they are full blown supporters of Israel, are in a really dangerous position right now because you have these narratives that are backed by the force of two nuclear powers that have shown that they're willing to mass murder in this reviving of Dick Cheney's wildest dreams. I mean, Trump one, oh, we're against the neocons. Trump two embracing the sort of John Dulles way of the CIA. You know, one of the first CIA actions was to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohamed Bosaddegh in Iran in 1953. So he's combining the worst, you know, aspects of COVID CIA history with the worst aspects of the neocon agenda by saying, well, we're going to actually redraw all of these maps in the broader region.
- [32:20]
A
It's a horrible time to be a person with critical thinking skills. That's all that's all I could say. Because the. The moment that you, you know, apply any of that, you are labeled an Iranian government supporter or, I don't know, a reformist or anything. I mean, this week alone, I' been. I've been a communist, I've been a Marxist, I've been a pinko commie. I've been a member of the mujahideen. I mean, these are. This is what's happening in Iran's diaspora. But again, that's also not new. It's just being ramped up right now. This is a great time for Israel. I mean, Israel is diverting attention away from its genocide, and it's using, as I've pointed out, Israeli influencers like Hen Mazik, Hanana Naftali, who used to be a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu, and a whole slew of other people that you see on social media with a lot of followers saying things like, where are all the encampments for the Iranians? Oh, you don't care about these Muslims. You only care about those Muslims, or you only care when Israel attacks. I mean, this is the narrative that is being pushed, and I'm sorry to say that it's been very effective. This is something that is also being promulgated by a lot of Iranians, sadly. So the attempts to create this binary and make it so that you can't at the same time support Palestinian liberation or be critical of Israel and yet at the same time be critical of what Iran is doing, that is what has been set up. And as I said, it's been very effective.
- [34:02]
C
You know, I guess I want to ask as well, too, that, you know, in the last couple weeks or last week, especially Reza Pahlavi we talked about earlier, has been really everywhere in the media, and he's been meeting with Israelis. He's been on CBS last night. He gave a very long address. You know, it's very interesting because it seems like it's very much a set narrative that's, you know, I think you put it really well. It's almost like a fairy tale that the prince will come back, as Samira described this way, the prince will come back to Iran and he'll be restored to the throne. It seems to me that it's very curious narrative in a way that, as far as I'm aware, Reza Pahlavi does not really have any state institutions backing him. He doesn't really have an organization per se. He's alluded to the fact that he claims to have mass defections in Iran. People ready to defect on his behalf or restore him to power. I don't think we've seen, based on whatever has taken place last week, has there been any defections, security forces to date, on his behalf or otherwise? How is he viewed in Iran? And with the caveat, of course there's a divergence of opinion, but generally speaking, what's the perception of this sort of campaign? And what do you make of his claims? That he has this mass support or that there are people in the inside the regime who are siding with him? Because. So to date, none of it's been substantiated.
- [35:17]
D
Yeah. I think it's important to put this in a broader perspective, which is that both the Iranian state and its enemies, including Israel, the United States and different opposition groups have been invested for many years in making sure that real opposition does not actually take form. Because none of them want an Iran that is democratic and actually sovereign and independent. Right. Because again, if we look at Iran's history, there are two main themes that you can always point to. One is sovereignty from outside powers, and the second is having a state apparatus that is, that responds to the people's needs. When these two things are not met there you again begin to have uprising after uprising after uprising in Iran. So the fact is that all different forms of Iran's opposition in many ways have been attempting to kind of get to and build real opposition either to the Islamic Republic or to have something new come about that would have more of a buy in across the political spectrum in Iran. That is not in the interest of the Islamic Republic. It's not in the interest of Israel. It's not in the interest of the United States either. The interest of Iran, the Islamic Republic, is to maintain power. And the interest of the other United States and Israel is to have a weakened Iran, whether it's Balkanized or otherwise. So because of this, over the past especially decade and a half, you've had a lot of surveillance and repression in different forms of opposition movements that have come out. Reza Pahlavi is a weak political actor, both him in and of himself. Right. He doesn't, we can't really point to anything that he's built over the past 47 years that he's been in exile. So it's not like he can point and say, look at all these things that I've done. It's not like he's, you know, one of those leaders that is a charismatic leader that can say, I'm going to come back and I'm going to fight with you all on the streets. He's not that kind of leader. He is very much a weak leader and that serves certain kinds of interests. Now, the fact that they've been propping him up in this particular way, and you do have some protesters on the streets in Iran saying, chanting his name, we also have to put that in a context of part of what Samida was saying earlier, which is that you have years now of multimillion dollar satellite television stations, Internet stations that have been beaming into Iran with this kind of, this kind of rhetoric of trying to sort of whitewash the past and making the comeback of the monarchy be something that is desirable to Iranians. And part of what that's doing is saying like, look, you may not like your life now, but look at how free things were in the past. This taps into a very real frustration that some Iranians have who don't necessarily know about the history of the past or even much about Pahlavi himself today. So this is sort of, he doesn't have organic support enough to be able to really move things on the ground. And again, I mean, I really want to stress to folks that revolutions are not vibes, right? It's not enough for people to be angry. Revolutions require actual institution building that can take over power. And that means that you also have to be able to, as you said, like bring over institutions that, that are traditional spaces of power in Iranian society. And you don't have that happening in Iran right now in relationship to the current sort of circumstances.
- [38:59]
B
If I know our guest has to, has to leave in, in two minutes, Samir, and we'll keep you on, but I just before Nargas goes, I just want to ask you one other thing. You know, there is this multi decade history of US Covert and overt war against Iran. Also Israel, you have the assassination of Iranian scientists, you have a whole array of covert operations that have taken place. You, you have very explicit regime change, threats from, from Trump, the narrative of the Iranian state. I was just watching an interview on Al Jazeera with the Iranian foreign Minister. I also watched the speeches at the massive of pro government rallies yesterday. I think it's a mistake to say everything that these guys are saying is false. And that's a lot of the news coverage, is that this is just an authoritarian regime that is just making these are true trends that they're citing. I mean, there is massive foreign involvement inside of Iran. And my question to you is how does a state like Iran that exists as a counter to what the United States wants to see in the world, how do they respond then to these kinds of actions, given that the backdrop of a lot of this is interference by the US And Israel and other actors. Because the position seems to be, well, Iran should just not do anything. And if Iran is accurate, and so they say they have evidence that there is direct foreign involvement in some of the violent acts that have killed security personnel and have attacked other infrastructure in Iran, that's a legitimate grievance that the Iranian state has against foreign actors, if it's true, paying people or having their operatives on the ground. We know that Mossad is active in Iran. They also announced that they are all the time. So you see what I'm saying. Like, the Iranian state does have a right. It is the government. It has a right to respond to foreign interference. And at the same time, it can also be abused, calling in that card to then attack people who have nothing to do with foreign actors.
- [41:05]
D
Right. And this is where, you know, things become quite complex, I think, to understand for a lot of people, you know, the Iranian state, as you're saying, is standing up to all of these different forces around the region. But when you are an Iranian living inside of Iran and you've been raised inside of Iran and all you hear is the government saying, you know, what is happening to us is the fault of outside powers, after a while, you get exhausted of that argument and you're like, I'm done. I'm done hearing everything is the fault of everybody else. But you all never take the blame for anything. And so this is sort of the game that. The narrative game that is being played out right now. Iranians are exhausted. This is the same thing, actually, that is happening in Venezuela and Cuba, too. And all three countries have been under maximum pressure sanctions and maximum pressure policies by the Trump administration. And then the Biden administration continued it, and we have sort of all three sort of coming to a boiling point right now is that you have these populations that are legitimately exhausted. They are exhausted with their economy being in the state that it is. They are exhausted by hearing the same kind of rhetoric from their state over and over again. And they are exhausted that when they are asking for reforms, that the governments and their regimes use the excuses of outside to not make legitimate reforms that need to be made inside of the country. So then this becomes a question of legitimacy, right? And how does the state regain a particular kind of legitimacy among its population in the aftermath of the war? In June, when the United States and Israel attacked, there was a big shift that happened in Iran because for the first time, the United States and Israel being enemies of Iran was not a distant thing, and it was not just rhetoric. Right. Because again, as all of you have been mentioning, Iran is a very vast country geographically. So, yes, it's in the Middle east, but the things in the Middle east feel very far away when you're sitting in Iran, because Iran itself is so big. Israel feels extremely far away. All the different wars that have happened in the region also feel far away. So when bombs started dropping in Tehran and other places, that was the first time that imperialism really came to people's doorsteps. And so that really began to deepen the geopolitical understanding. I mean, as we mentioned before, there's a very robust society in Iran, but this robust civil society, one of its pitfalls these many years is that it hasn't had a very deep geopolitical analysis. And part of that is because they've been focused so much on internal reform and internal sort of transformation that they are desiring. The other part of that is because they sort of have turned a blind eye or have thought that a lot of the things that the Islamic Republic is saying about what is happening in the region and geopolitically is mere propaganda. And this is why it also took Iran, Iranians quite a bit of time to see what was happening in Gaza in order for it to no longer sound like it was the things that had come out of state television. So in order right now, part of why we're seeing so much on Iranian tv, showing specific instances when, you know, a mosque will be set on fire, and they're highlighting, like, okay, this is the agent provocateur. Let us show you what is happening. Part of what they're trying to do is to also communicate to their own population that we know that you don't always believe us, but let us show you what is going on here. Now, this is going to have to be something that, and this is another reason that they keep showing and the, the different kinds of vandalism that has been happening, because part of it is not just to instill fear, but part of it is to say that we're not exaggerating things. And, but the, the, again, what, what makes all of this so messy and what makes it so hard is that you are caught between a very real authoritarian state that also has to deal with very real imperialism and dealing with nuclear states. And this is sort of why it's such a cauldron.
- [45:24]
B
Well, Nargis, I wish we could, we could have you on longer, but I know you, you do have an art Out a heart out. Nargis Bajogli from Johns Hopkins University. Thanks so much for being with us.
- [45:35]
D
Thanks so much for having me.
- [45:37]
B
Thanks Samir. I cut you off there because I wanted to just make sure that we got that last comment from Nargis there about this kind of balance that the Iranian state has to contemplate because there is this explicit regime change threat, the covert operations, the actions by the Trump administration, the threats from the Trump administration and others. But you also had wanted to pick up on something else that, that she was saying, so take it where you want there. Either what I was just talking about or what you were going to say before.
- [46:04]
A
Yeah, I wanted to pick up on this aspect of what she mentioned with the satellite televisions, these things like Iran International, Manoto tv. These stations are beamed directly into people's homes in Iran. Couple that with Instagram, which is what, what most social media, when they have access to the Internet right now in Iran, that is what Iranians are on. You have pages like idf, Farsi and other pages which are constantly, I follow them religiously again, but they are constantly beaming messages into Iranians that Israel is your friend, we are your friends historically. So they're, they're appealing to this sort of biblical times, Cyrus the Great, when Israel, you know, and, and the great people of Iran were joined together and there is a real anti Arab racism as part of this. Another fear that I have actually is watching Iran devolve into what could possibly be a very authoritarian, nationalistic, racist, secular state. That's another fear that is very probable if this government falls. But I want to come back to Reza Pahlavi because we've, we've mentioned him a lot here. Let's look. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. Nostalgia is very powerful and people are tapping into that. I firmly believe during social movements and, and what we're seeing in dinner table politics and psychology, which is something that I think people just, you know, do away with. They don't think it's important. But you have aunts and uncles and other people saying things like, you know, when I went during the Shah's time, you know, when we would show our passport, people would bow to us. This is a generation right now in Iran. Gen Z. This is a demographic fight also in Iran because they don't care about these things that have happened in the past. They care about the fact that they hold a passport that they can only go to, you know, 20 countries with. They care about the fact that they can't party above ground. These are the things that are really at the forefront of a lot of people that are on this on the streets in Iran. They're sick and tired of this government, which in their eyes has no legitimacy. You know. And so this threat of a civil war happening inside the country is what a lot of people are afraid about, are afraid of. Because listen, the Iranian government still has a very strong base inside the country, whether people like it or not. And when you look at the demographic that they bring out, they're mostly people above 60 something years old who still, you know, harken back to the time when, you know, they brought the Shah down. But there is a real demographic fight that is going on in Iran which a lot of people don't pay attention to either.
- [49:19]
B
I just wanted to, before you follow up, I just want to tell you something that I'm just noticing here that Donald Trump has now posted on Truth Social after indicating that there may be, you know, some negotiations. He was claiming that the Iranians had had reached out. Trump just posted, Iranian patriots, keep protesting. Take over your institutions. Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protesters stops. Help is on its way. Miga Make Iran great again. President Donald J. Trump. And of course there were a lot of capital letters there.
- [49:56]
A
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
- [49:58]
B
You didn't say that this time. Anyway. I just wanted to put that on the table because this is the whiplash way that they're, they're handling it. It does, does seem like it's very much on the table that there could be attacks against Iran militarily and even an attempt to kill the, the leadership, which of course Netanyahu and others have been pushing for, for a very long time.
- [50:20]
C
Yeah, that actually leads into what I was going to ask as well too, because Samira, if, if there is an attempt to decapitate the leadership of the country, Iran, as you mentioned, is a very big country and there's a tremendous complexity, ethnic complexity in the country as well, too. There's minority groups, many of which don't like the previous monarchy or the current government for different reasons. If there is an attempt to wipe out the supreme Leader or the Beita Rabari or the people around him and so forth, the leaders of the irgc, again, furthermore, than happened during the war last year, is there a possibility that Iran could dissolve on ethnic lines as well too? And do you think that that may be the aim of such a decapitation? Because one thing that seems Very clear from Israeli statements and US Statements is that there's not just a problem with the current Iranian government. They have a problem with the idea of in Iran that's a very large powerful country outside their control and maybe the dissolution of the country or the weakening of it internally, maybe the goal. Do you think that's a realistic sort of prospect? And if that were to happen, how may the government respond and what kind of lines of fracture may exist in the country?
- [51:28]
A
Look, the Iranian government will respond with force because it, it wants to remain in power. And Iranians are under no illusion. Some of them may be, but the majority of Iranians are under no illusion that Israel and America just want the best for the people that there, Israel and America want a weakened Iran, they want a smaller Iran. They want an Iran that they can control. Don't forget that Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world. And if they can, you know, split Khuzestan, which is where a lot of those oil fields are, and, and, and take over that area as they've done in Iraq and, and, and Venezuela now, they will certainly do that. Iran will dissolve into anarchy. Iran will dissolve into a civil war. That's, that's really the, the fear and that's really what I see. I, I, I really am afraid of what is to come, honestly, because you, at the same time that you have these very real threats coming from the United States States, you also have a population that is out on the streets hoping for something to change. And as we've seen, thousands have been killed. You know, there's this pendulum swings between hope and fear. And, and it's a horrible time right now. A horrible time. Who knows what's coming of this, this, this president is maniacal. A lot of people say he's actually just showing signs of dementia right now already. So we don't even know what we're dealing with, you know, and the threats are non stop and people in Iran are deathly afraid. Don't forget that Israel and, and America killed over a thousand Iranians back in June. People just, you know, forget that. But there could be a major bloodbath death coming in Iran, you know, and.
- [53:35]
B
And let's, let's not forget that the, the, the president who just posted that on his social media site is, he and his administration are on TV justifying their own jackbooted thugs, you know, shooting American citizens in their cars and having the last words that that woman heard be a misogynistic expletive hurled at her. They're conducting these gestapo style raids across the United States. They are facilitating a genocide that's being live streamed and has not ended to this moment and has a long history of dirty tricks, covert involvement, regime change, destabilizing other countries. And Trump just got done with his big tour of Arab Gulf states that I don't remember the last time that Mohammed bin Salman was subjected to an election. Iran is a record breaker of executing people. None of these countries are democracies to speak of, but they've bent the knee to the king, to the king empire. And in a way, isn't Iran's great crime because when the US Talks about human rights or any of these things, it's nonsense, total, complete nonsense, because the US doesn't have any equal application of those standards whatsoever. It's who's in the best interest of the US who's not. When Saddam Hussein was a convenient ally, he was our guy. When not, you know, he's hand him out to Hitler. So things shift. But isn't it, isn't it that Iran's biggest crime from the perspective of the American empire is that it's refused to bend the knee? I mean, isn't, isn't that a big part of what we're talking about? I mean, we're talking about the micro situation of what's happening with these, these protests right now and all criticisms that, that, you know, you've, you've leveled against the, the Iranian government respected. Isn't the big crime of Iran that it's just not, it's not bending the knee, it's not playing by the same rules, it's not saying, yeah, we're going to accept your, your dictates or we're going to make these kinds of deals that are favorable to you or we're going to give you a 400 million dollar plane, you know, as a president, as you come and marvel at the marble in our palaces.
- [55:46]
A
Iran's biggest crime, I mean the Islamic Republic's biggest crime since 1979 has not, has been not to allow Western hegemony to just take over the entire region. It has acted as a bulwark against that. There's no doubt about that. You know, and at the same time, the complexity is that you're dealing with a completely authoritarian government who has shown that it will kill its own citizens in order to stay in power. But America and Israel want to do away with Iran's refusal to bend a knee. That is what is happening here. And, and in a lot of ways, you know, there are a lot of Iranians on the Ground who don't care. They want to join America and Israel. They want to be a part of the international community. They want to be able to visit these countries. They want to have, have a currency that matters. This is what is on top of mind for so many people who are out on the streets in Iran. And unfortunately, as. As Nargis called it, we are, we are in this cauldron. All of this together and this mix just keeps happening. And you have a president who, you know, in the United States is threatening missile strikes on who knows what. I mean, what, what are they going to bomb? Exactly. Now, who knows? The other thing I really want to bring up that, that people don't talk about when you bomb Iran. Iran is one of the places in the world that is most prone to earthquakes. When they did that bombing in June, where they just bury and buried, buried, Ferdos, there was a very likely cause of a major earthquake to happen. And people don't talk about that either. I mean, there are so many things that could occur in the next 24 to 48 hours that would be horrific. And, you know, you have people who are sitting there going, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. I mean, wasn't that McCain? You know, rest in peace. I mean, all of these things are happening. Pompeo opining all these Israeli officials saying, go for it, it. And you have this population that is just, you know, wanting a better life stuck in the middle of all of this. It's really, really tragic what's happening.
- [58:09]
C
Samir, I want to ask you one final question before we sign off. You know, it seems like, at least for now, based on the truth social post that Jeremy just read, that the path to some sort of negotiated detent is, at least for the time being, not open. I know before that the, these protests started, there was like a push for certain people inside Iran kind of aligned with the system or parallel to it, to release certain political prisoners like Mustafa Taj Zadeh, who maybe, you know, had a broader base of support inside the country, including people support the current government, but also wanted to have a shift and maybe use that as an opportunity to pivot or even have someone like Rouhani, maybe as a successor to Ali Khamenei, a supreme leader who could sort of pivot and thread the needle such that Iran can maintain sovereignty, but then and also have a detente with the US that allows it to save face and maintain strategic capacities and so forth. It seems like for the time being, that may not be the case because the US Seems like it's dead set on a confrontation with Iran and is not entertaining any sort of, sort of deal. But do you see a path forward potentially through the gloom that we see right now that the system may be able to right itself and win back popular support to a degree, or at least be able to bear through the current situation and rectify sort of the collapsing social situation we see at the moment?
- [59:27]
A
You mentioned internal actors, activists. In the first couple days when these protests started, 17 of those activists got together and put out a statement asking for the regime to not kill protesters, to listen to the demands of the protesters and to come towards a coalition and have this, you know, a referendum, which a lot of people are calling for in Iran, for the people to decide themselves what system of governance they want after 47 years. Those voices are completely drowned out right now, and I really don't know what's going to happen. The Islamic Republic has survived many protests, but the level of foreign intervention that is happening right now has never happened before in any of those protests that we saw before. So I really don't know if the Islamic Republic will survive more strikes. I really don't know if the Iranian people really understand what could happen.
- [60:32]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it is true also, though, that Iranians, Samira, to the point you're just making Iranian officials, officials have confronted that narrative and they are predicting, they're saying, you know, we've heard this before now, you're right, the level of foreign involvement and some of the scale of what we're seeing appears to, to be historic in, in nature. And the level of hostility overtly expressed by the United States is at record levels in terms of direct threat to the leadership, sovereignty and government of Iran. But Iranian officials are saying the situation is now, you know, under control and we have seen a dissipation, it seems, although, again, as you've pointed out, we don't have a great sort of, you know, open line of information to know what's happening, particularly in areas outside of Tehran. But the Iranians are saying we've, we've been here before and we're prepared for, you know, all eventuality. We'll see. I mean, you've done a very good job, I think, of, of putting a bunch of pins on the board for people to look out for. And I encourage people to also check out Samira, her own podcast and media, her accounts on X, as well as on Instagram as well. And thank you, Samira, so much for all your work, particularly all the work you've done over these two years of the genocide against the Palestinians and the voices you featured and your interventions and willing to punch back.
- [61:57]
A
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
- [61:59]
B
It all right. That does it for this live stream. Thank you, Maz, very much for, for being here and we'll continue to cover this story. Also, we're going to have I encourage people to look at the the reported piece that we just got from one of the great reporters who covers Yemen, Iona Craig, good friend of of of Dropsite News. Iona is going to start reporting for us on the situation in Yemen, another one that doesn't get enough attention, but people should keep your eye on it. And as always, we continue to publish on the ground reports from Abdul Khadr Sabah and Gaza and other Palestinian reporters. On behalf of everybody here at dropsite news, dropsitenews.com I want to thank you all for your support. If you aren't yet a paid subscriber to Dropsite News, you know, there's we don't put things behind the paywall. I mean, there is some benefit to people who pay to become subscribers, but really we're on the honor system and we understand times are tough for a lot of people if you can't become a paid subscriber. We're not sticking anything behind a paywall, but that is a major part of how Dropsite is achieving its sustainability. So if you aren't yet a paid subscriber, I would encourage you to hop onto dropsitenews.com and join as a paid subscriber. Tell your friends, your family, even your foes about our work until next Tuesday where we'll have another live stream at 9:30am I want to thank you on behalf of everybody at the Dropsite News team. I'm Jeremy Scahill. Thanks so much for being with us.