Transcription
After October 7th happened, I'm like, okay, well, these are proxies of the regime. These are the same terrorists that have killed my family and my people. Obviously, I'm not going to stand with this. What people in the West seek to do is try to rationalize fundamentalism. They think that there's a cause and effect to fundamentalism; they don't understand that fundamentalism is just insanity. This is a religious fundamentalist ideology that believes that in order to achieve the prophecy, it has to get rid of Israel. These guys are trying to develop nuclear weapons; that's pretty scary.
I've been following you—well, not literally following you—online for a while. Oh, you haven't been actually following me? No, I haven't, only because I'm in London and you're in LA. That's what every state says. We've been talking for a while. Your commentary is very interesting, actually. We wanted to have you on, first of all, to tell us your story, because that's very interesting, and then to talk about the Middle East, Iran, and so on. So who are you, and what's been your and your family's journey?
My family, like a lot of Iranians here in the diaspora, left around or after the revolution—or should I say the coup—that happened in 1979 in Iran. I think most people are somewhat familiar with the story. I don't know that they are, actually. Oh, okay. So it was under the Shah's regime. The Shah was the king of Iran at that time, and then there was a revolution—an uprising, I guess—that overthrew the Shah. But what people don't understand is that a lot of the same factions and the same elements that were involved in that movement are the same elements that are involved in what's going on now in the Middle East. We can get into this; I don't want to get distracted, so we'll put a pause and come back to it.
The movement was the jihadist-Marxist alliance, the Islamist-leftist alliance, where these ideologies of communism were being taught in the universities in Iran. They kind of had this—I guess what the alliance is based on is this idea that the jihadists are this kind of reactionary force that will come in and dismantle Western imperialism and capitalism. So the leftists align with them in that capacity. Basically, the same thing happened there: the Islamists come in, and of course, the communists are the first people they kill. So that's how the Islamic revolution came to Iran in 1979.
My dad, at the time, was in London. He was getting his PhD at Oxford. Under the Shah's regime, the Shah was sending out the top university students to be educated abroad because it was part of this kind of progressive movement. He was getting international studies and things like that to come back to Iran. Then the revolution happened in 1979, and I guess he had to drop out of Oxford because they cut off his funding due to the change of government. My mom and my mom's entire family were still in Iran at that time, so they kind of experienced firsthand everything that happened after the revolution. My mom told me they would throw acid in women's faces if they weren't wearing the hijab.
Pretty much immediately after the Islamic Republic came to Iran, after Khomeini came into power, they started enforcing mandatory hijab, mandatory dress codes, and things like that. There was a lot of dissent; there was a lot of uprising against this new regime. People were like, "Oh, actually, we made a mistake; we don't want this." Then there was a huge crushing of dissent. A lot of people were executed. A lot of my family members—my mom was in Evin prison briefly; my aunt was in Evin prison as well. Evin prison is the notorious prison in Iran where basically it's like the prison of no return. In the early 1980s, in the kind of nascent years of the regime, when it was at its most brutal, they would have a row of hanged bodies lining the walkway at the entrance of the prison so people would understand what they were going into.
My aunt was in prison; my mom's sister, and she was pregnant with my cousin. Her husband was also in prison; they ended up executing him. They let her go to give birth. My cousin now has epilepsy because they fed her so much poison when she was in prison. Eventually, my mom got really sick after that time. She got a medical visa to go to the UK; that's where she met my dad, who applied for asylum, became a British citizen, got married, and brought her family over. We all lived together in a very dysfunctional household. I was born.
It sounds so weird that people don't understand this, but you see pictures from Iran before the revolution, and it's literally like if people are listening to this in America or in the UK, it's like you have your fairly progressive society, and then there's a revolution, and suddenly you, as a woman, now have to wear a hijab or even a burqa or whatever, and you get beaten or killed if you don't. That's really what happened; it was like overnight you went back a few centuries.
What a lot of people say is that it was, in fact, becoming so progressive that it was almost like a backlash or jihad lash to the amount of progress that the Shah was implementing. He had all of these reforms, like the White Revolution, where he was rapidly progressing to the extent that he was putting women in high positions in government. It was really developing, and that was an affront to the kind of burgeoning Islamist movement that was in Iran and the Middle East at the time, where they were just like, "Oh, this is Western imperialism." Every semblance of progress or modernity or equality is Western imperialism to these people, right? So it was like we need to get rid of this Western imperialism; we need to get rid of the cinemas and the bars and the equality for women and the right to exist and the right to wear what you want and be in government, and we just need to replace it with this oppressive regime to oppose Western imperialism.
Why didn't the Shah crack down on this? Did he try? Didn't work? No, no. His attitude was very much like, "If the people don't want me, I'll go." Wow, so he was actually very liberal in his approach? Yeah, he didn't fight to stay. But also, you have to remember that he was very sick; he had cancer. It's actually a very interesting story—the Shah's illness. They've made multiple documentaries about it. He was basically hopping from country to country because he was being kicked out of every country after he left Iran. That was because Iran was calling upon the ummah. I don't know if you know what the ummah is?
No, explain. It's like this concept of a collective Muslim body. So, you know, we as Muslims are all kind of moving together at the same time. When the Shah was in Egypt or Morocco, wherever he was, the ummah needed to rise up and have him removed. It was causing so many problems wherever the Shah would go. The ummah was rising up in Egypt and wherever he was being housed, and he would have to go. Then he was going to America, Morocco, Egypt—all different places.
Anyway, what ends up happening is that he needs to do this surgery on his spleen, and he has the best doctor in America do this surgery—the best spleen surgeon in America. Now, at this time, let's rewind and talk about the fact that Jimmy Carter, who was the president of the USA at that time, betrayed the Shah, who was a close ally to Carter. He betrayed the Shah by conspiring with Khomeini to bring this revolution to Iran and to overthrow the Shah. This was revealed in declassified documents that were produced in 2016, which revealed this correspondence between Khomeini and the White House, where Carter agreed to basically suppress the Iranian army and to help disseminate this propaganda against the Shah that ultimately fermented this revolution.
Just keeping that in mind, because I don't know how much of a conspiracy theorist we want to be about this, I think it's just open to consider. The Americans really didn't want the Shah to survive and ultimately potentially come back to Iran. So he undergoes this spleen surgery by apparently the best spleen surgeon in the USA at the time, but the surgeon doesn't drain his spleen. When you see all these documentaries, there are surgeons from everywhere—from Mexico, here, there, and the other—who say there's no such thing as not draining the spleen after a surgery. You would get an infection and die; everybody knows this. That's exactly what happened to him; he got an infection and died.
So we fast forward to 2024. What is life like in Iran now for the average person and for women in particular? I mean, for women in particular, it's obviously extremely oppressive. It's extremely repressive. You have this forced dress code, this forced hijab. But, you know, the situation with the hijab is really just the tip of the iceberg. The degree of oppression and repression in Iran is so severe that that's really just the veneer on top of all of it. You have a lack of political autonomy; the economy is in ruin because of all the sanctions that have been placed on the regime due to its constant violations over the decades. You have no ability to oppose the regime because they kill you, torture you, rape you, and you can't even vote meaningfully because every candidate is handpicked by the Supreme Leader.
I always just refer to the state of Iran now, after the Islamic regime came into power, as just that—it just went black. Everything shut down, and there's just no life there. There's just like no life. But bearing in mind, there have been very brave people, brave women, who have stood up, so that gives me hope because it makes me think that actually there are people pushing back.
Like this student—this story is incredible. Tell it to our listeners and viewers who might have missed it. So last week, there was a woman whose name is Amini. She was essentially accosted by the morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly. She was a PhD student at a university in Iran.
Sorry, you've just used "morality police." People might not be aware of that. Who are the morality police? Okay, so the morality police, in Persian, "Gasht-e Ershad," are the police that are specifically employed for ensuring that women comply with the dress code. There was a period of time when the media was reporting that the morality police had disbanded, which was not true; they had moved to kind of surveillance instead of patrol. But I guess they're back on patrol again.
In response to being accosted by the morality police, she decides to take off not just her hijab but all of her clothes. She decides to undress and just roam around in the streets in her underwear, basically, which is, you know, a lot of people would say it's like a suicidal mission, but she did this in defiance of the regime.
What would happen to a woman like that who chose to protest—not only to protest but to protest in the most explicit manner? What they're basically already saying is that she's been forcibly institutionalized. Amnesty actually reported today that they are aware of the tactics that the regime has used when they forcibly institutionalize women for defiance of the hijab laws, which can include electric shocks, forced drugs, intravenous drugs—just stuff that you would think of when you think of the early 1900s, you know, what they used to do to women for hysteria, which involved a lot of the same things like electroconvulsive therapy, ice baths, lobotomies, even in the extreme cases.
There's a lot of concern right now about what the regime is doing in response to that. Let's talk a little bit about what the regime wants because this is something that people in the West just—I don't think people in the West are capable of understanding the mindset of passionately, deeply religious people, which is who runs Iran. So what do they want? What is their objective? Why are they doing many of the things they're doing?
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You know, I think you bring up a good point because what I often find about what people in the West seek to do is that they try to rationalize fundamentalism. They come up with these stories like, "Well, you know, I guess if America did this, then obviously they would do that." They think that there's a cause and effect to fundamentalism; they don't understand that fundamentalism is just insanity. There's no why; there's no reason. It just is what it is, and there's no rationalizing it.
So they're always kind of imputing their own rationality onto fundamentalism, which just fundamentally doesn't work. Yeah, I get why they do it, by the way, especially as we're sitting here in LA. You look outside; the sun is shining. All you need to do is make money and live. Why would anyone go and blow themselves up? Well, they must be really annoyed; they must be really upset; they must have a good reason. You know, I would only blow myself up if blah, blah, blah, right?
I think it's a failure of imagination. It's also just a failure to understand true evil. People don't think that it's possible to just be evil. They don't think—like, they're like, "But I wonder why Hitler did that. I'm sure he was just abused." But he was just evil. You know, just give up looking for the why because sometimes people are just bad people who do bad things.
So come back to what they want because one of the things that might be strange to people who are familiar with the Middle East is that Iran is very far away from Israel, right? So their objective and their desire to wipe Israel off the map, which is one of their objectives, seems to a lot of people kind of difficult to understand. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, we can talk about that. So basically, Iran—there are two types of Islam: Shia Islam and Sunni Islam. The regime in Iran subscribes to 12er Shia Islam. The reason it's called 12er Shia Islam is that they believe that the descendants of the original Prophet Muhammad are not the correct lineage of the prophets; it's of his son-in-law and cousin. So the 12th Imam, which was Prophet Mahdi, is said to have gone into occultation. He went into hiding around 937 CE.
He's gone into hiding; he's gone into occultation, and the theory is that the final Prophet emerges once justice and equality have been achieved in the world. The thing that achieves this justice is that the last drop of blood of Israel falls. So the end of Israel brings back the final Prophet.
Oh, I've never heard this; that's fascinating. So it's a religious thing; it's a prophecy thing? Yeah, yeah. So they need to destroy Israel. They need to destroy Israel, correct. So that's why—for the prophecy to be fulfilled, exactly. So that's how you get into the proxies of the regime, right?
So you have the regime—almost immediately after the regime comes into power, within the next two years, between 1979 and 1981, they create Hezbollah. Hezbollah is essentially a second IRGC, which was created for the purpose of destroying Israel from the closest possible border. Because, as you said, Iran's not close enough to Israel to be able to accomplish that. So they were like, "Okay, let's take Lebanon; let's put an army of the IRGC in Lebanon."
The IRGC? Sorry, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Okay, so the system in Iran is like this: you have a regular government, which is for all intents and purposes just symbolic because it's under the Supreme Leader. The system is called Velayat-e Faqih. You have the Supreme Leader, and under the Supreme Leader, you have the IRGC, which protects the Supreme Leader. Then you have the regular government, which is Parliament, Judiciary, and Executive President, but all of these are under the rule of the Supreme Leader.
The IRGC essentially protects this system of the Supreme Leader. So the second IRGC is created in Lebanon, which is Hezbollah. After the revolution is successful, Assad comes to Iran to congratulate Khomeini and says, "What do you need?" Khomeini says, "We need a passage to Lebanon to create this second army to destroy Israel." So they go through Syria, and they come down in Northern Lebanon.
At the same time, this is around the same time that, remember, Israel's now in southern Lebanon. This is why the Western world often says that Hezbollah was created in response to Israel's occupation. Well, that's completely false. First of all, Israel was occupying the south of Lebanon at the time to remove the PLO that were fighting and throwing rockets into Israel. In fact, the Lebanese in the south were actually allying with Israel to help take out the PLO. Hezbollah is coming down in the north and is basically killing everybody who's not submitting to their rule—even Shiites, even Shiite Muslims, Sunnis, Christians—basically everyone.
They start engaging in a series of terrorist attacks, bombing the American Embassy in Beirut, kidnapping Americans, killing them. Then it goes into the kind of Iran-Contra affair, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Anyway, the whole point is that this regime created proxies in order to start satisfying its goal, which is the destruction of Israel. That's how it ends up also funding and providing training and assistance to Hamas and the Houthis, basically wanting in furtherance of the same goal.
So I'm guessing that they don't really particularly care, the Iranian regime, which is funding all these proxies, about civilian casualties? It's not just that they don't care; it's that they need civilian casualties. It's part of the propaganda machine. You can't turn Israel into a pariah state, right? Which is the goal—everyone thinks this is the most evil state in the world—unless Israel is forced into striking areas where they've put munitions in schools and in hospitals and places like that, right?
So it's actually part of their strategy to maximize civilian casualties. In fact, this was something that they read in a leaked report that a senior official had even admitted himself—that they need as many civilian casualties as possible. Because when they have civilian casualties, then the rest of the world is like, "Israel's evil; we need a ceasefire; we need to end all of these things," and then Hamas lives to see another day.
The thing that I find really interesting about all of this is that Biden gave Iran a lot of money. Now, I don't understand why that is. Could you explain the amount of money that he gave? Yeah, and there must have been a rationale behind it. So what was the rationale?
In August of 2023, about two months before October 7th, Biden ends up giving $6 to $7 billion to the regime as part of a hostage prisoner exchange deal, where you get a couple of Iranians from American prisons and a couple of Americans from Iranian prisons. Now, we've done these prisoner exchanges in the past without any transfer of money. Under the prior government, under Trump, they exchanged and got back two American prisoners—Xue Wang and Michael White—with no exchange of money.
So this was very curious. We were like, "Why are you giving them $7 billion?" Mind you, they also didn't retrieve one American national, Jamid Shad, who I don't know if you heard about this. They executed him last week. This is a man that the regime had kidnapped; he was a dissident to the regime, like the rest of us. They tried to assassinate him in California in 2009, and when they failed, they kidnapped him from Dubai and took him to Iran. Biden's administration didn't try to get him back, and then they ended up executing him last week after Israel struck the regime's military bases.
So first of all, we were like, "Why are you giving them money?" Second of all, "Why aren't you bringing them all back?" So then what we end up finding out is that you have this lead negotiator in Qatar come out and basically say, "You know, these are laying the ground for getting back into the second JCPOA," which is to get back into another nuclear deal with the regime, which was what Obama did, if you recall. He gave $150 billion to the regime to get into the JCPOA, the nuclear deal.
What does that mean to get into a nuclear deal? Because there will be people who go, "Look, you've got two choices with these regimes: you either isolate them, and then they go into the arms of Russia, China, whatever else, or you try and work with them and hopefully bring them into the fold, and then that way you can have soft power over them."
You're smiling; you think it's clearly bad. It's a 45-year history of a failed strategy of appeasement. They tried the same thing with the Nazi regime, and they appeased for so long that they ended up having to kill 50 million people to take them out. You're just delaying the inevitable.
That's exactly what Obama thought. He was like, "Oh, maybe if we just give them $150 billion, they'll stop committing terrorism and suddenly start liking us." It's like, "What part of terrorist regime do you not understand? They want you gone; they want you dead, and they're trying to strategize every way they can to pull one over on you."
So that's exactly what happened. They got into this nuclear deal, which didn't do anything, mind you, because the provisions of the nuclear deal expired after 10 years anyway. So they could then enrich to their heart's content, and they had $150 billion. At that time, there was actually another revolution in Iran, the Green Movement, and the regime was on its last legs. They ended up empowering the regime once again. Obama comes out a few years later, and he's like, "Oh, you know what? I made a huge mistake. I should have stood with the people of Iran to help them take out the regime."
But that was what they believed at the time; they thought diplomacy would sort this out. You said something that made me think: do you think the war with Iran is inevitable between Israel and Iran at this moment? Between Israel and Iran? Well, it's kind of already happening, isn't it? Yeah, there kind of is a war already.
But I mean more—yeah, I think more is coming. Yeah, and do you think it's inevitable, really? I do think it's inevitable because you have—it's at the point now where everyone is hitting back from the last hit. I mean, it's going to require one party saying, "You know, I'm completely just abdicating this; I'm not going to continue with this," and I don't see why either one of them would do that.
The regime has already come out and said that it's going to strike back on Israel after the previous attacks. But what's so interesting about this is when I hear people who are talking about this, particularly people on the left—and look, they've got their concerns about Israel's conduct during this war—but they never talk about Iran. They never talk about these Islamic fundamentalists who are funding this.
Let's be honest about it: tragic as it may be, the Palestine situation, the Lebanon situation—they're essentially proxy wars for this coming conflict, which is going to be really serious. And you think this could actually spark something even more serious as a result? So I guess my question is, why are we not—why are they not talking about that instead of talking about what's going on in Palestine?
Well, the thing is, you know, it's all linked. When people think that this is like a gotcha, where they say to me, "Oh, but what about the casualties in Gaza and Lebanon?" I'm like, "That's exactly what I'm saying. You don't see what's at the root of this." We're not disagreeing that these casualties are a problem; we're disagreeing about what's the cause of these casualties.
Because you're obviously only capable of one layer of thought if the only thing that you can see is that this one is striking this one, and that must be the problem. You can't see what's going on behind this. You can't see the amount of munitions that have been lined in these civilian homes. You can't see the terror tunnels underground. You can't see the fact that October 7th happened; they kidnapped these people, they've taken them to Gaza, they've refused to return the hostages, they've refused to disband, and they're strategically locating themselves.
They're positioning themselves in and among civilians; they're putting their munitions around civilian areas where the camps are so that when Israel does strike, you have these secondary explosions. Nobody wants to talk about any of that stuff, right? Nobody wants to talk about jihad being at the root of all of this, much less—I mean, they won't even consider Hezbollah and Hamas being at the root of that, much less going back a third layer of thought to go back to the Islamic regime in Iran. They can just see that first layer, and that's it.
But the thing is, all of this is by design, and it's so important to understand that the regime hasn't maintained power for 45 years with stupidity. They've played the long game for a long time, and they've come up with all of these strategies. They've come up with these strategies where they're like, "Okay, if we play on public emotion by publishing these gruesome pictures of casualties and things like that, people are going to have an amygdala hijacked response where they're going to shut down their prefrontal cortex. They're not going to be able to see, 'Wait a minute, this comes from Hamas, which comes from the regime.' They're not going to be able to do that processing anymore because their emotions are triggered, and they're horrified by this, and they're going to blame the thing that's in front of them."
So there's a very deliberate plan that's making sure that people are always looking over here so they never look over here and understand that the root of all of these casualties, all of these horrifying things that we're seeing, is coming from this constant involvement. It's coming from this constant push from the regime.
And I guess the question is, Elika, so we're sitting here in LA. You have to stop showing off. Yeah, it's an Airbnb. Just in case anyone thought he was still in London. Exactly. No, no one would be able to afford that fire in London, let alone any of this. Yeah, that would be against the law in London; you can't burn energy. That's disgusting.
Transphobia! That was a little break—a comedic break. Let's talk about nuclear war. Yeah, the nuclear war—this is less fun. So why get involved? Is the question. Me? Yeah, you. Because I think that there's something to the fact that I know very well what it means to lose your country to a lie. Okay? Which is essentially how we lost Iran—to a lie. And that same lie is coming here now, and I'm like, I'm not going to see that twice.
What's the lie? You have to read my book to find out. Gladly! But you've got to tease people a little. No, but it's the whole thing. The whole thing is the lie, right? I mean, we could be sitting here for hours to describe it.
All right, tell them what your book is called. I can't say. Oh, your book is not out? No, it's not out yet. No, I know, but I didn't mean—I wasn't trying to plug; I was just trying to say it requires—like she said, "You'll have to read my book," but she wasn't trying to plug at all. No, I haven't. The book's not here.
What's the lie? What's the lie? You lost your country to a lie. What's the lie? The lie is essentially the entire thing that the jihadists have basically engaged in in order to convince people that they—you know, which is everything that they do, everything that we're talking about right now—that's all the lie. But it's like there's a whole thing to it, you know?
What's the thing? What are we talking about? Okay, so like just for example, what we just said, right? When we were talking about the emotion and blah, like that's an example of one of the things. Well, all that is, in terms of the Western response, the way I think about it, it's kind of like the kindergarten teacher mentality. She walks out into the playroom; she sees two kids fighting—one's on top; that's the bad kid—and it never goes beyond that.
Yeah, I think with that example, though, there's a degree of innocence. I don't even want to use the word innocence, but there's a degree of just like, you know, making a snap judgment and then being nothing else behind that. I think that there's more to it where it's like orchestrated in a way that you want this kid to look like the bad guy, and there's extensive planning and positioning and strategy so that when the teacher comes out, they're like, "Oh, you're the bad kid."
Oh, yeah, but that's what bullies do. Bullies are very good at making themselves look like the victim. I think, yes, exactly. The question I wanted to ask you, and it's something that we've had many, many people want to talk about this, but I've never asked as directly as this: what is jihad?
So this is a matter of contention, I guess. The term jihad quite literally means—it's an Arabic word; it means like struggle. A lot of people just say, "Oh, jihad just means like a struggle against oppression." Regardless of what the kind of etymology of the word is or the root, what it has come to mean for most people's understanding is it's a vying for power of Islamists over a region, essentially, in order to create a state under Sharia law. So they want a caliphate.
So it depends whether you're talking about Sunni extremists who want a caliphate or Shia, which is what is in Iran in the Islamic Republic, right? So jihad is the struggle to achieve a single state under Muslim control in the Middle East, or does it go beyond that? I mean, if they're going to return to the prior caliphate, if that's the model that they're going to use, then I'm guessing the Middle East and North Africa.
I don't know what their aspirations are beyond that. And why do the Iranian jihadis hate America? Why do they chant "Death to America"? You know, is it American foreign policy? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you could say that, but I think in general, you have to remember that they really hate American values.
They hate American values because they're almost diametrically opposed to the values that they have, which are really, really very—I don't even want to say conservative because it's more than conservative, right? It's repressive; it's very extremism. This idea of liberalism in any form—and I know this word liberalism has come to be contentious when we talk about it in America—but to them, you know, it literally just means dressing how you want or whatever.
The values that America has are just really irksome to them. Also, the fact that you have to remember that America and the Western world, in general, are constantly responding to this regime's acts of brutality and violence. When you're that bully, right, there's something about when you have that mindset where no matter what you do, when someone responds to you, you think they're the bad guy.
If you try to go after someone and they defend themselves and hurt you, you're like, "Oh my gosh, I've been attacked." It's actually just the way they think, and they're not even capable of accountability or self-reflection. So like when they create Hezbollah, for example, and Hezbollah commits all of these suicide bombings and kills CIA agents and stuff, and then America does something like puts sanctions on the regime, something like that, right?
They're like, "Oh my gosh, I've been targeted by the big bad American wolf." It's like, "But you know you did something, right? You know you did something first that was really bad, and then you got a reaction." Right? You get that? It's like, but they don't get that. They don't see it that way. They're like, "Oh, I'm being oppressed by Western imperialism."
I mean, in fairness to them, with sanctions—like my mother's Venezuelan—when sanctions were being imposed in Venezuela, it's never going to be the ruling class that suffers; it's always going to be the innocent civilians who've got no choice in the matter of the fact they're ruled by these nutbags.
Well, you know, that would be true if it wasn't for the case—if it wasn't for the fact that the regime is extorting the people anyway by taking their money and everything they have. The Supreme Leader's net worth is like, I don't know, like $100 billion or $200 billion—just ridiculous amounts of money that he's extorting from the Iranian people.
So that would be a good argument if it was like a "but for" argument, but for sanctions, Iran would be flourishing. Wouldn't be, realistically. No, it wouldn't be, and it never is. The thing that I find really interesting about your story when you speak about it is you talk about the cyber attacks from Iran. Now, this is something that I've never really heard of, so explain to us what that is like.
So the regime—first of all, let's remember that the regime has a long history of assassinating dissidents from the '80s through to the '90s in France, in Germany. I guess what happened after a period of time, the international community was like, "Okay, we're going to do arrest warrants, international all of this stuff." They were like, "This isn't ideal." So what they do now is they have more like a phased attack against dissidents.
The first phase of the attack starts with character assassination. So they start by saying, "This person is a Mossad agent, a regime spy, or this, that, or the other terrorist," which is what they said about Shad, who they just executed last week. Then they move into the phase of attempted kidnap or assassination. The whole point is that once they cause you this harm, they've already laid that foundation of character assassination, so essentially no one will care, right?
So this is exactly what happened. After they executed him, they told the world, "You see the New York Times and all of this media posts like, 'Oh, this man was assassinated on terrorism charges.'" Where are you getting this information from? Did you actually review the fact that he was convicted alongside Biden and Trump and every American official of terrorism and sentenced to death? What has Biden done that then? Did you investigate that?
And so then it's like, "Oh, well, I guess it doesn't matter if he was a terrorist," right? And that's how they whitewash their crimes and get people to look the other way because they're like, "Oh, well, I guess it's not really that bad if this person was a Mossad agent or a CIA or a regime spy or a terrorist. I guess it's not that bad."
It's interesting because they also do—they assassinate character in a different way as well. Some of the things they've accused you of—didn't one of them accuse you of being Simon Le Bon's daughter? So that one was funny because first they said that I was hiding the fact that I was Simon Le Bon's daughter because he was a raging Zionist, and I didn't want everyone to know that I was the daughter of a Zionist.
Well, the lead singer of Duran Duran—he's a raging Zionist? I don't know; is he? I've never heard his opinions on Israel. I'm going to be honest with you; I have no idea. The only person in the world that in the music world that hasn't given his opinion on Israel? Yeah, I have no idea. He probably is a Zionist.
Yeah, so yeah, probably. Yeah, don't sue us; we don't know. We love him. Disclaimer: we actually have no idea what Simon Le Bon's views are, but you're not his daughter. Yeah, no, real huge apologies to Simon Le Bon, who's gotten the salty end of this campaign against me. He doesn't have a daughter; that's, you know, me.
And then afterwards, they switched it to saying that—so they had created this whole reputation that I was like secretly Simon Le Bon's daughter, and then when that became accepted, then they were like, "She's not even Simon Le Bon's daughter; she just lies about it for fame." I was like, "That's good; that's pretty good credit."
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Yeah, we were actually just talking about this, where I had put up this post about Jamid Shad, where I was like, "There was no evidence of this claim that he was a terrorist." Then someone, like the journalist of Press TV, which is the regime's media, comments on my thing like, "No evidence," laughing face. Then they attach the article, and the article is again just repeating the accusations without evidence.
I'm like, "Number one, they will say the most ridiculous thing in the world; they won't substantiate their claims; there's never any evidence," which is already something. But then the other thing is, people still go for it. It would be fine if everybody understood that this was ridiculous, but people still go for it, and that's why they do it. They're like, "What's the point of trying harder when this is successful?"
It's interesting when you compare it to, for instance, the case of Salman Rushdie. The Ayatollah, I think, was it '81 or '82, issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and then never rescinded it. Everyone kind of forgot about it and went, "Well, I think everything's fine now," and then Salman Rushdie was nearly killed.
So it just shows that there's real power to these threats and to these accusations. There's real, real—I mean, this is extremely, extremely dangerous work. It's almost like there's a double edge to it, where it's like the more you speak about it, the more you become known, the more of a target you become. But then also, at the same time, the more you become known, the more it's for them a little bit of a problem if they try to go after you because they also don't want the international community realizing that they're terrorists.
You mentioned before we started that talking about this has caused a lot of your friends to react to it. What's going on there? So, I mean, you guys are from London, so you know that being pro-Palestine is kind of part of the culture, and you really can't stray from that or you're just evil and horrible.
So after October 7th, for me, there was an obvious overlap because I've been talking about Iran for the past year since the revolution in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini. After October 7th happened, I'm like, okay, well, you know, these are proxies of the regime. These are the same terrorists that have killed my family and my people; obviously, I'm not going to stand with this.
But my friends took a very different approach. They were very supportive of October 7th. I mean, just obviously, right? On October 7th, they posted Palestine flags and just stuff that was, you know, obvious. But the thing is, for me, that's obviously very dark because you're supporting the terrorists that, you know, are an extension of the same terrorists that have killed my family.
For you, there's no meaning behind it, right? And so as it just developed, they would post stuff in defense of Hamas. They would repost like Gabor Mar quotes that would be like, "Oh, Hamas hasn't even done 1% of what is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "This doesn't even mean anything to you. You don't even know what you're talking about."
This is like—they weren't even willing to hear me despite me having an obvious connection to this conflict. It was just a decision that there's something wrong with you; you must be a raging Zionist if you don't support Hamas, and we just don't want to know you anymore.
Elika, one of the things that we've touched briefly on, but actually now that I'm putting together several of the things that you're saying, this is a religious fundamentalist ideology that believes that in order to achieve the prophecy, it has to get rid of Israel, and these guys are trying to develop nuclear weapons. That's pretty scary.
Yeah, right? Now the obvious question, therefore, is how close are they to having nuclear weapons? Do we know that? That I don't know. I know they've been a nuclear threshold state for a few years. I don't think that's something that they've come out and revealed. It's kind of like the same thing with Israel. They don't say—we know about Israel.
I love it; Israel's position on nuclear weapons is hilarious. It's like, "We don't have them, but if the state of Israel is a threat, we're definitely going to use them." We have them. Yeah, yeah. If it's at threat, then we have them. Yeah, we will have them. But if it's not at threat, we don't have them. We don't have them.
But Israel has nuclear weapons. Yeah, but we don't know how close Iran is. I don't know because I'm guessing that from Israel's perspective, if what you're saying is accurate and if it's understood to be like that in Israel, I just don't see why they haven't bombed the shit out of Iran's nuclear facilities already.
Yeah, because that's what I would do. Objectively, if there was a guy across the street whose prophecy would only be fulfilled when I'm dead, I go and take care of it. You know what I mean? Yeah, but then you know what would happen to you? You'd be on trial and get convicted of murder because this poor innocent man who just wanted to be your friend and has never done anything wrong is just so good and kind, and you're just so evil that you decided that you wanted to end his life.
You're mean and jealous and miserable. Sounds like me. No, but I see your point. Preemptive action is very difficult to justify, not least because sometimes it is unjustified. You know, Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and I think that's part of the skepticism in the West about this stuff.
But I think another thing that I was going to say to answer your question is that, you know, Israel is very much restrained by the international community, especially America. Because America has this strategy—a failed strategy of appeasement for the past 45 years—it's very much just anti-any type of escalation.
Even if Israel wanted to do its escalation a little bit further, it would be punished by America. If it's punished by America, that's a problem. So it has to really operate within the confines of what America decides is appropriate. That's why another reason why this election is going to be very—well, by the time this goes out, the election's happened.
So the world either we're all dead or Carla Harris is in charge. Yeah, yeah. You're laughing just like her. No, no, no, no, no. Kidding, kidding. No, no, no, no, no. It was a joke. I apologize. I apologize. That was rude of me.
No, it's okay. It was rude of me to talk about the president of the United States that way. Is that what you think? It doesn't really matter what I think; by this time, it's happened, so we'll find out.
But I don't understand why more people aren't aware of this stuff, right? Because if it is a religiously motivated agenda, and you've got this—that's one component of it. I wouldn't say it's like entirely that; you know, they're just feuding their rivals, but yes, and they want control of the region too, right? That's why they're feuding with the Sunni states.
Well, I think also like another huge part of it is that the Jewish state disrupts the Islamic hegemony in the region, right? So you can't have any type of caliphate or united Islamic rule where the Jewish state exists. Even if it wasn't a prophecy, you know, like there's many reasons why the Jewish state is a huge problem to kind of you in power in the region.
But it's also as well like you talk about Islamic hegemony; they don't like each other anyway because the moment they get rid of Israel, the Sunnis are going to look at the Shiites and they're going to be like, "Well, you're the problem," and then they're going to have a fight amongst themselves because they're mental.
Well, this is the thing—like a lot of people diagnose from Dr. Foster that one billion Muslims in the world are mental. No, I'm saying the extremists who want to—yeah, yeah, please don't get—anyway, well, the funny thing is I was just reading about something the other day that when the US began its negotiations for the nuclear deal with the regime, they actually concealed this from Israel and the Persian Gulf states because they were like, "Basically, Israel and all the Arab states really hate the regime, and they don't want it to become empowered."
I was just thinking it's really funny how people don't know that everyone actually hates the regime. Like these people in the West that are like, "Oh, axis of resistance," like you don't know that all of these countries in the Middle East really despise this regime because it's like psychotic extremist. No, no one—like, I don't know; it's just weird. People don't get that.
So yeah, they do not want to merge with the regime. Definitely not. No, they don't want to merge. And let's say the regime got its wish to wipe Israel off the map. There wouldn't then be this peace in the Middle East because it would be Sunni versus Shia, and then that would be a whole new thing, and then they would all be at war with one another.
If you can convince them, you know, think I should—yeah. El, what would happen if the West stopped supporting Israel? If the West stopped supporting Israel? So, I mean, I guess this question is a little bit dynamic because I wonder if Israel can sustain itself. I'm actually not sure the answer to that question.
So I don't know if you mean militarily or emotionally or philosophically. I guess I mean militarily. And this comes back to our conversation about nuclear weapons because I guess if the West stopped supporting Israel, Israel would be weakened by this, right? Necessarily, which would mean that its enemies would be emboldened, which would mean that they would be more likely to attack, which would mean that Israel would find it more difficult, at the very least, to defend itself.
Which would mean that if it turned bad for Israel, eventually Israel might be in a position where its survival is at stake, at which point Israel might feel that it has to use nuclear weapons, which it would do very reluctantly, of course. So that's kind of like the two pathways, right? So if Israel were to use nuclear weapons, obviously it would be catastrophic in the region.
That might be the situation if it feels like it has nothing else that it can do. The alternative, where Israel actually loses hypothetically, then what would happen is that we—well, the goal, right, is that Hamas would create a second Islamic Republic across historic Palestine, so across Israel and the Palestinian territories, which would be like a second Iran, basically.
It would turn into a second Islamic Republic, and that would be deeply problematic. Then you have two Islamic Republics stationed here and here, and then they would go—the next mission would be Lebanon to turn Lebanon into an Islamic Republic. Now everyone is asking for assistance to the people on the ground who are trying to rise up and defeat their terrorist regimes, just as they've been doing in Iran, right?
And then where does that end? You know, and what would happen to the Christians, the Jews, the atheists, the women if that were to happen? So we can just rely on history for that. Under the caliphate, they were basically relegated to dhimmi status, which is basically that if you're a person of the book—Christian, Jew, otherwise—you can exist on this land, but you have to trade.
Basically, we'll give you protection as in the right to live on this land in exchange for subordination to Islam. So basically, as long as you're subordinate to Islam, we'll let you be here. They would just be relegated to dhimmis again after I imagine quite a lot of them being slaughtered first because it seemed to me like when ISIS took over parts of the Arab area, they didn't just make people subordinate; they also tortured, raped, and murdered on a mass scale, right?
Yeah, well, I mean, at the end of the day, most people won't accept that, and that's why there's so much murder and slaughtering and raping and all of this stuff is because people are just like, "No, I don't want to do that." And they're like, "Okay, well, then we'll kill you." So that's the result if you don't want to submit to that. But if you—I mean, if anyone, whether you're in Iran, whether you're Jewish, whether you're Christian, whatever you are—if you just agree to shut up and stop existing and don't you dare resist this regime and the rule, then they probably would just let you be.
What does that mean, submit to Islam? So there are various tenets that apply to dhimmis. I mean, I guess it changes over time because we have to look back. Then it would be like, for example, you can't own property; you can't ride horses. I mean, we don't have horses now. I don't know what the modern-day equivalent would be. You can't be in positions of power; you can't be in government; you can't have any meaningful power in society; you can't be a meaningful participant in society.
And you have to pay the jizya; you have to pay the jizya, which is the tax. How much is that? I don't know; it's 25%. Oh, okay. I didn't trust the duty. Yeah, and then you would—like in Iran, they would beheaded if they didn't pay the tax. So it's not, you know, it's bad.
What would you like to see the West do in all of this? Because I know that the Shah's descendants are ready to kind of go back and start leading their people again, but then again, a lot of people will look at the Middle East and go, "Do we really need to overthrow another regime here?" type of thing. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, so I think the thing is, like, this idea of no regime change because of the bad regime changes that we've seen has created—like, I like to describe this period as like a war hangover. People have like a war hangover where they're like, "Never again with war." It's like, okay, but your failure to take action in a lot of these places has literally resulted in the worst-case scenario.
Not only that, but America had a hand—a huge hand—in putting the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic in Iran. It's like you can't just do that and then walk away and be like, "Oh, war hangover." You know, I think this puts us in a difficult position, a precarious position, because first of all, people are like, "Okay, war's really bad." Okay, agree; war is really bad. What's the alternative?
This is the thing that frustrates me more than anything is that people, because of their desire to literally just like feign moral superiority, they're like, "Oh, I'm so against war." It's like, are you? Like, who loves death? Of course, everybody doesn't want that, but my question is, like, what do you propose in the alternative? I would have so much more respect for people that were like, "Look, we don't need to do war; we can do this system of deradicalization; we can do this system of economic sanctions; we can do this system where blah, blah, blah."
They don't have an answer, so I'm just like, "What? Okay, you don't want to do war; that's great, but what will you do?" Because, you know, you have to do something. The problem is most people believe that you just don't do anything, and while this threat continues to rise and increase as it has, I think one of the most tragic things of our time is that—well, just times in general—is that people can never see what's happening as it's happening. They can only see it in hindsight.
I guarantee you during Nazi Germany, the rest of the world that were not in Germany were probably just looking at it like they're looking at the Middle East now, like, "Oh, I guess it's quite bad, but I mean, we're not going to go to war. I mean, I'm sure it'll fix itself." It was just that continuously ignoring it and it getting more and more and more and more and more, you know, this strategy of appeasement where they're like, "Well, maybe if we give a few more parts to the Nazis, a few more parts of Europe, maybe they'll just be satisfied with more Lebanon, more living room."
Based on that appeasement, Hitler's going and invading all these other countries because he can do it, right? I feel like this is kind of like the plague of the human experience is that we never see how bad it is as it's happening, only in hindsight. So I don't actually have the answers of what to do at this point.
I know that there's that saying that's like, "If I wanted to get here, I wouldn't start here," which is very much how I feel about this, where it is that I would like us to be, which is that there's no Islamic Republic, the proxies are gone, and there's freedom and stability in the Middle East. I have no idea how to get there from here because where we are now is 45 years deep of appeasing and giving money to this regime, and I don't know what to do at this point.
Well, Elika, thanks for coming on the show. Before we head on over to Substack, where we ask you our audience's questions, the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
I think we're not spending enough time talking about Iran, to be honest. Well, we just did! I know, so you got your money's worth! Right now, head on over to Substack, where we ask Elika your questions. What is the most significant issue that the West gets wrong about radical Islam?
Jeremy F says, "How can we convince people in the US that their own lives are truly blessed by comparison to others?"