Julian Dorey Podcast - #307 - Iranian Dissident on Israel, Bill Clinton’s Miss & Overthrowing Regime | Roya Hakakian

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) GhostBed: Use Code "JULIAN" to get 10% off your new GhostBed Mattress https://ghostbed.com/julian Stream "Getting Older" by Sydney Ruth:Apple: https://open.spotify.com/track/3qG9MtWQWmmq2hdGufuR3j PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Roya Hakakian is an Iranian American Jewish journalist, lecturer, and writer. Born in Iran, she came to the United States as a refugee and is now a naturalized citizen. She is the author of several books, including an acclaimed memoir in English called "Journey from the Land of No," "Assassins of the Turquoise Palace," and "A Beginner's Guide to America." ROYA's LINKS: X: https://x.com/RoyaTheWriter BOOK 1: https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Land-No-Girlhood-Revolutionary/dp/0609810308 BOOK 2: https://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Turquoise-Palace-Roya-Hakakian/dp/0802145973 FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 0:00 - Escaping Iran in the 70’s, Ayatollah Takeover 7:25 - Tehran US Embassy Hostage Crisis, Shah of Iran Reign 17:55 - Marxist & Fascist Iranian Revolution, Hamas/Israel Protests Today, Iran Protests 30:21 - Children growing into terror motives, Israel’s POV, Palestinian Suffering 40:25 - Jewish Exodus from Europe to Israel, History of Israel, Uganda Zion, Escaping Iran 50:32 - Roya’s Father (9/11 Story), Israel & Palestinian Failed 2 State Solution, Kurds 1:07:54 - Israel Strategy, Bill Clinton Peace Agreement, Sadam Hussein Debacle, Water Protests 1:18:53 - AI Future w/ Wars, Iranian Regime vs US Political Machine 1:22:01 - Why Iran Wins Propaganda War, Neglect of Domestic Issues 1:28:45 - Middle East Democracy Failure Debate, Women’s Rights in Middle East 1:33:04 - Global Interconnection, Threats Spreading 1:43:37 - Roya’s CIA Story 1:51:48 - Isolationists vs War Hawks, Democracy vs Tyranny 2:00:21 - State of World Since 1950s, Historical Revisionism 2:15:22 - Worst American Crisis, Steven Pinker 2:20:21 - 1979 Iranian Revolution, Moment Roya turned on Iranian Revolution 2:36:09 - Escaping Iran to America, Jewish history in Iran 2:47:08 - Solution to Israel/Palestine Conflict 2:55:41 - Roya’s work CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - In-Studio Producer: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 307 - Roya Hakakian Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a world where we are all surrounded by tyrannical regimes, democracy is under assault. This is how history takes shape. When the war between Iran and Iraq was going on, Ayatollah Khomeini gives a major speech, and he says, how lucky we are that this war started, because now we can all do what we are meant to do,

which is to become martyrs. September of 1980, Saddam Hussein sees Iran vulnerable, attacks Iran. Do you know what it says? My leader is the 13-year-old who straps grenades to his back, throws himself under the way of Iraqi tanks, and becomes a martyr. There was this 13-year-old who did that.

What happens? Generation after generation of people who think that to be a good citizen is to blow yourself up. And I think we're in another major crisis. We can sit here and agree that Israel is inflicting suffering upon Palestinians in Gaza. Of course, what is getting left out of this discussion is. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Raya, thank you so much for coming in last minute.

I really appreciate it. My pleasure. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, you have an amazing story, and I was actually unfamiliar with it until our mutual friend, Joby Warwick, was like, I got the person for you, you gotta talk to Roya. So I had, just for context for people,

I had planned months in advance to have two podcasts where I knew a topic that would come up would be Israel. Like, we really haven't done one that focuses on that since October 7th when we did the one like that day. But you know, I was gonna have someone who was pro and someone who was against Israel or whatever. And so we recorded both podcasts about two weeks ago. They went great, both guys did a great job,

but a couple days unrelated to the podcast, unrelated to the subject matter, a couple days later, the person who represented the Pro is Real View had a serious thing go down, so I really can't put out that podcast, unfortunately. So, you know. I'm your replacement. You are, you're not a replacement.

You're the starter here. I'm better than the original. That's what we're looking for, but they did a great job, and I am wishing them all the best You're not a replacement. You're the starter here. I'm better than the originals. That's what we're looking for, but they did a great job and I am wishing them all the best because it's totally out of their control. But you have an interesting story with this because your life started in Iran and you essentially escaped the Ayatollah's regime. You grew up in the regime, you grew up before the regime took over, right?

Yes. So what was Iran like in the 70s before it took over? How well do you remember it? Well, enough. I was a little girl when the Iranian revolution took place in 1979. And so, you know, the transformation, uh, is staggering. Not just to look back at it, um, from the perspective of an adult,

because, you know, it was a middle-class life. Um, Iran had modernized. Um, you know, things weren't perfect, but they were a lot better than they are now. And then all of a sudden, there was this belief that, you know, that a revolution could bring about democracy to Iran, could bring about a lot more freedom that Iranians were enjoying.

And so there came February of 1979 when millions of Iranians took to the streets and overthrew not just the government that had been in power, but they basically dismantled the history of 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran. So we didn't just move regimes. Iran didn't go from one form of government to another.

Iran went from being an ancient monarchy to being a republic and not just any republic, an Islamic republic, something that the modern world hadn't seen in centuries. So my life changed, but I, you know, in looking back, I think everybody's life changed. I think if any of us has any illusion that 1979 didn't really affect us,

and that we are still living in a world that is still experiencing the reverberations of that revolution. That person is wrong. We are all wrong. We are living in the world that Ayatollah Khomeini created. Yeah, and you cover when we were talking about this before camera, but you cover all the things that are happening to and you speak out about it in the Western world, which I know they don't like,

because I don't like anyone speaking out against them. But it's a brave thing. And there's certainly more than a handful of people who have come from Iran and Are brave enough to do that and it's I can't imagine something like that, you know, because you're dealing with a totally Unreasonable regime that to say that that's probably a nice way of putting it and you know, they're also We were just talking about a couple stories just as anecdotes, they're, they're brutal and brazen, and they will go hunt people where they are if they don't like what they say. Exactly. So here's, here's the interesting thing, you said that I'm being brave speaking out. But in my view, I'm not being so brave as I am being protective. I left one country.

There is, you know, I used to be in another part of the world, have another home, you know, speak another language, feel safe in another, on another continent. And this is where I came to take refuge. And I feel like if I'm driven out of this place, where would I go next? So part of the reason why I'm speaking, obviously, I have my own creative and artistic reasons, but it's really out of self-preservation too. I feel very strongly as an American. And I feel that we must recognize as Americans the threats that that ideology that took over Iran

45 plus years ago and the way in which, despite everything that we think, it has infiltrated our public opinion sphere, our, you know, a lot of other spheres in our academia, in our media, that we're not aware of. Can you explain some of those things? Just make that concrete for people? Sure.

So, you know, I was still in Iran when the US embassy was taken over in Tehran. And I'm sure a lot of your audiences are too young to know, but the most humiliating experience after the Vietnam, after the loss of the Vietnam War for America, was the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in November of 1979, where these Iranian students, Islamic students, who were hugely radicalized

after the Iranian revolution felt that there's nothing else to do in the world but to take over the American embassy and drive the Americans out of the embassy because they were plotting the overthrow of the new government, the new revolutionary government. So they scale the walls of the embassy, they go inside and they take all the diplomats hostage, not just for one day or two days or three days,

but for 444 days. And they blindfold them and tie their hands and march them outside in front of the television cameras of the whole world. And these are Americans, and that's not what America looks like to the world. It was hugely humiliating. And... and that humiliation has become a theme.

The aspiration to humiliate America. And the belief that it is the job of, you know, this revolutionary Islamic fundamentalists to avenge themselves on America, that the number one enemy of the world, certainly according to their definitions of Muslims in the world is America. And the job of these radical Islamists is to

humiliate America is a theme that we're still living with. You know, the slogan, death to America, down with America, started out in Iran. It's still going on, the chant that I grew up hearing, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, God is great, God is great. Um, we heard on October 7th, being, you know, being echoed by the Hamas terrorists who went into Israel. So I believe that there were certain themes that were set in Iran in 1979 that became global themes. Oh, that's interesting. I don't think I've, I probably haven't talked to enough people. I don't know if I've heard people put it that way before.

Yeah. But. So it's not history. That's all I'm trying to say. If it were history, I wouldn't be interested in it. Yeah. You know, because how many times can you review history? It is a period that changed our lives and a period in which we're still living while we are not aware that that's what's happened to us. All right, so there's a lot on the bone here, and I wanna get this, we'll bring this back

to where it comes to the present day. I think that's a great point you're making. But I wanna go back to when it happened, and the buildup to that. So, you had the Shah of Iran in power. He had been in his dynasty, had been in power, I think since 1954, 1953, something like that. Well, earlier than that. So there were two Shahs.

Right, his father was the one in power. Right, early 50s, something like that, right? Um, he came to power in the 20s. And he... So the father was in power already for 20 years until the son came to power in the 40s. And then he ruled Iran for another 30 years. So the father and the son ruled over Iran for half a century until the downfall which

came in February of 1979. Right. Which the way you made it sound, it also seems like it kind of happened fast. Is that fair to say? It happened fast. Is that fair to say? It happened fast. So the 50 years that these two monarchs ruled over Iran did happen fast. But in many ways, in terms of the transformation that took over Iran, it was, it represented changes that oftentimes take decades to take place. So I think, you know, the Russian communist leader, Lenin had said sometimes it takes, you know,

decades pass and nothing happens. And sometimes, you know, days come and go, and, you know, it's as if decades have taken place. And I just butchered his statement. No, that's right. That is to say that, you know, a lot happened to Iran, in Iran, during the 50 years that they ruled. And I think it was so important those 50 years

that it really changed the destiny of Iran from what it could have been, as compared to its immediate neighbors, including Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. So Iran became a relatively modern country while others were still struggling. You might not be able to turn off your brain, but at least you can have a great mattress. And that's where GhostBed comes in. They're true sleep pros, a family-owned company with

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sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue check out today. covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. But it's kind of, to your point, it's kind of like death by a thousand cuts. Like it builds up slow and then all of a sudden like, oh, here we are. I like that example you give of what Lennon said, because I think that explains a lot of how takeovers happen. It's just when you get that, like vacuum comes, you're like, Oh, my god, like, yesterday, we were going, we're going to get coffee over there. Today, you can't, you know what I mean? Like, it's a crazy, I can't imagine it, but you lived it. So what was the big, like, you said, you said something like things were okay, like it's not like it was amazing, people were doing fine, but they weren't happy. But there was enough that people could foment across society enough anger that a radical group

could come in and take power. So maybe in that year before the 79 revolution, what were the biggest issues with Iran that people were complaining about? So here's a way of explaining it that I think would be very tangible, which is that here is this king, the Shah, as Iranians refer to him, who has suddenly

in the span of two, three decades made huge strides. And suddenly you have a middle class. Suddenly the rates of literacy are have improved by leaps and bounds. Women have rights. You know they have the right to divorce. They have become able to participate in the society in every way. Women are able to take jobs. Most importantly, perhaps in looking back at all the recent protest movements in Iran, women have the right to choose what they want to wear. In other words, the society has opened up enough

to allow those women who want to cover their heads and wear the Islamic dress code can, and those who don't want to don't. So you have a society that basically allows choice for women, right? So all these changes have happened, which is fantastic. And then at the same time, there is one fundamental change that hasn't taken place, which is that there's political

repression. There is no multiplicity of political parties. There is little free press. And so it's very, it creates a very tense situation where you on one hand educate people and then you expect those educated people to live by the rules of a hundred years ago of the backward society from which you brought them out. So he created in some ways the Shah, the king himself created this dichotomy, this paradox where he brought them up, he elevated the society, but he wanted this new elevated society to live according to the rules of that backward society

out of which he had taken them. I got you. And so this is, who wants to do that? So people wanted freedom, um, because they had become middle-class enough and well-off enough to dream of a better life. But they chose the wrong Trojan horse essentially. Okay.

And they were used in that way, those people who maybe wanted that, because they bring in a regime that ends up being massively like Islamic conservative, does in a way worse way than the Shah was doing, all the things that the Shah did, shuts down their ability to vote, decide on anything. And then some. And then some.

And I was talking, my friend I was talking with last week was telling me, and I hadn't really heard this before, but he was saying that the Marxists, there was like a Marxist element where people were were radically left wing, and they were essentially used and propped up by the by the incoming Ayatollah. And that party be like, yeah, keep doing that, keep saying that. And then the minute that the Ayatollah took power, of course, he doesn't agree with there. He's on the opposite end of the spectrum. He had those people in prison or killed,

and basically was like, ha-ha, joke's on you. Is that fair to say? Very fair, very fair. And because I said, like, five minutes ago, at the start of our conversation, I said, we are living in the themes that got set in Iran in 1979. I'd like to say that what you just described,

you know, the marriage that the ultra-left communists went into with the ultra-right Islamist conservatives in Iran, took place in Iran in 1979, because the leftists thought, we're too smart to avoid this, and we can outdo these conservatives, because look at them. You know, they're a bunch of, you know,

backward turbaned, you know, ayatollahs, how, you know, we are smart, we are the educated leftists, we are urban, and we are, you know, we have read books, and we can definitely, we can definitely defeat these people. Yeah, we should bring them in power, test it out. You know, let's just join with them, be united, and then we will force them out, right? And isn't that what's happening on our university campuses?

Isn't that what's happening across the world when you watch a lot of these demonstrations, massive demonstrations take place? Members of the LGBTQ communities, you know, wave flags of Hezbollah and Hamas. Why? Because they still don't know that the Iranians tried this in 1979. And it went really badly. My favorite, my favorite is the trans for Palestine movement.

That's my favorite. Yeah, gays for Palestine. Take a flight there. Right, right. You know, I support your rights here, but they're not gonna support that. Like you're in the wrong party, I think, for that one. It's interesting that you draw that distinction.

I guess I probably should have drawn that when they were telling me that. That's interesting that it's still the same way. Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's a formula that Aito Le Romain, and I keep referring to him because he's the Islamist leader who created in some ways a part of all the miseries that the world has experienced in the past 50 plus years. And this was his invention. He thought, you know, initially in the 40s and

early 50s, when he starts appearing on the scene, all he's talking about is how he objects to the idea that the king of Iran, the Shah, has allowed women to go to work and to be without hijab. That's all he's talking about. He has these long diatribes against corruption of women, because he thinks that, you know, allowing women to be equal in the society and, you know, have jobs and, you know, hold official posts and participate in government and be without the dress code of the Islamic laws, this corrupts the society, right? So that's all he was talking about. But at some point, he realizes

that he will never be a national leader if he keeps talking about, you know, women's rights, because it makes him sound like an obsolete and out of touch guy. So he suddenly begins to change his tune. And after a while, he abandons talking about women, and we're talking about, you know, early 1960s. He abandons talking about women, and he starts talking about anti-imperialism.

He starts talking about how the king of Iran is selling the country out to the Americans. And as soon as he changes his tune, all the, you know, secular, educated, you know, communist Iranians who were keeping him at arms length until then say, hmm, you know, he seems interesting. And he gathers momentum from then on.

And the reason I'm mentioning this is because he figured out... And the reason I'm mentioning this is because he figured out if he stops sounding like this disgruntled chauvinist who just doesn't like to see women rise in the society and starts to take these popular themes from, you know, academics, which is anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, but within his own vocabulary. So he doesn't call it anti-imperialism. He has his own vocabulary, but they express the same thing. That he will become more popular and he can become a national figure and he does. And that's

still true, that you see how Islamist movements, especially since October 7th, are infiltrating the most academic spheres and secular spheres and, you know, leftist spheres using those anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist things. Yeah, it's misdirection. Yeah, that's a really, that's a good point. So they're basically saying everyone, no, no, no, just look right here. Yeah, you see that? See the shiny object?

That's, we agree on that, right? Okay. Don't worry about this other stuff. And then they're just making useful idiots. Because none of these people, I think, would ever be invited to Iran at the invitation of the Ayatollah. I kind of get that sense, you know? Uh, you know, in 2022, um...

over, you know, after you guys probably saw that there were, there was a huge women's movement in Iran in 2022, it came as a result of the killing of a Kurdish girl who was, you know, very young, who had been on a subway with her brother, and a morality police stopped her and said, And a morality police stopped her and said, you know, your scarf isn't totally covering your hair or you know, you are not dressed according to our rules. And so they take her away and they beat her so much

that within three days she dies, she slips into coma and then dies in the hospital. And then that was sort of the start of the largest anti-government movement in Iran since 1979. Hundreds of kids under the age of 21 died, were brutally killed. And university students, high school kids, took to the streets in the largest mass demonstrations that Iran has seen in over 40 years.

And as this was happening, or a little later after this had happened, after we had seen that this is a regime that kills the children of its own country, kids in the United States on university campuses are advocating for Hezbollah and Hamas, the very inventions of the Iranian regime. And so it is extremely mind blowing to me, as it is to a lot of Iranians who are living this experience or have lived through this experience,

that this can happen, that we can live in an age where I am a refugee from that regime in this country because I couldn't live a safe and free life under that regime. And at the same time, that very regime is being celebrated by a new generation my age that just refuses to believe what the truth is. Well it's interesting because it does feel like a lot of it is like almost a lack of homework in the sense that it's very easy to trace the fact that Iran funds Hezbollah, they fund Hamas, they fund some of these other groups that are, you know, radical groups, if you will, to say the least. But each issue, when you look at Iran and the freedom uprisings there, some of these

people that right now are like advocating for Hamas sometimes on campuses, and it's not all of them, but to your point, there's some who literally do. They're like so cognitively dissonant, stuck in their zone that they don't realize that that is literally advocating for Iran, which in the past, prior to October 7th, they would have been advocating against. Like when those things were happening, when those protests were happening in 2022, I remember there was, there was louder noise on social media from younger people like, right this regime sucks good for These girls rising up to the oppression and now they don't realize that

There's an aspect of it that they're on the other end of it now if they just were like hey We don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza. That's one thing. That's that's fine That's not what I'm saying, but to your point when it literally then comes to well actually, you know I understand why Hamas did that on October 7th. That's where I'm like, all right, this is why we can't have nice things because, like, that's kind of, it's not kind of, that's crazy talk. Like, I don't care who it is, whenever there's a form

of terrorism or anything along those lines, like, that should be condemned. It should be pretty easy to agree on that. And it feels like we've gotten to a point where you can't even agree on the simplest things. Right, right. So I don't know, at some point somebody or some bodies convinced us that black and white

is not a very good thing. That there are all these shades of gray. And maybe when it comes to, you know, history or, you history or various ways of trying to understand the differences between people, that makes sense. But when it comes to the moral realm, black and white are the only colors that need to exist.

And when we stray from that fundamental belief And when we stray from that fundamental belief is when we begin to think that, you know, rape women or killing innocent kids who have gone to a rave party, you know, to listen to music is okay or is a form of resistance. Um, that's when we not only judge one situation in a wrong way, we make ourselves and our civilization vulnerable to what could subsequently happen to us.

It's the over empathy curve. I don't know if that's a term, but I'll explain what I mean by that. You feel bad for, let's say, what you view as a downtrodden group of people, in this case the Palestinians, I'll separate it from Hamas for a minute, that you empathize with their position so much that then the worst element that exists within their society, you decide to now carry that empathy to the acts they do. And this is always something I do my best to separate. Like, I'm never gonna empathize with what a terrorist

or anyone who kills people indiscriminately does, okay? The action and who they are and what they do, I'm not gonna empathize with that. You make that decision, that's who you are, that's a scumbag move to the highest degree. What I do try to empathize with that. You make that decision, that's who you are, that's a scumbag move to the highest degree. What I do try to empathize with to try to avoid these problems in the future is empathize with where they came from. Right? So when you look at the young men who were the Hamas terrorists on October 7th, I believe most of them were between 17 and 23 years old.

So this is October 2023. That means that when Gaza was handed over in 2006, you're talking about kids that were like zero to six years old. So their entire reality has been shaped by being basically stuck in this 20 mile section of land where, I always say this, they have four borders, right? North border is Israel, East border is Israel, South border is the Sinai, which is no man's land run by terrorists, the West border is the sea, three miles out it becomes Israel,

they can't even get to the nine mile out coral reef to create an economy for fishing, right? So I understand why Israel can't just let people come in and out because there are elements in there that would take advantage of that and don't like Israel. I also… But they were going in and out because there are elements in there that would take advantage of that and don't like Israel. I also- But they were going in and out. They were, but I'm saying I understand why it can't be this we're not watching you like a hawk,

we're not suspicious of what you're doing, therefore creating kind of that us versus them type thing to keep it simple. I get that. But it does create like a self-fulfilling prophecy where you can get a power vacuum of a group like Hamas, seize power, stay in power, I should say, once they're put in there and say there's no elections, we run this place.

And tell brainwash kids and be like, everything that's bad about your life economically and your lack of opportunity is because of the Jews next door. And so, to me, it's like, how do we create an environment in the future in this, whatever it is, two-state solution, whatever you want to say, where you are not going to have kids grow up who want to do these types of things? Because I got to tell you, when I see tens of thousands of people being indiscriminately bombed because there's a few Hamas guys in there. I see why the... I'm not gonna support these kids

when they, right now they grow up to be terrorists, don't get me wrong, I'm not gonna support them when they do that, but I'm gonna see, I'm gonna empathize with how it starts right now. There's a lot of terrorists being created, and I get it. Yes. Um... So we're doing Israel. We're leaving...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna weave in and out. We're gonna go in and out. So when I was a kid in Tehran, and, you know, the revolution hasn't even come. It's a few months prior to the revolution. I see a slogan or a graffiti on the wall of our street, which says, death to these three leaders. Carter, meaning Jimmy Carter, our president, Anwar Sadat, who was the president of Egypt, and, and Menachem Begin.

So it was, there, there was a triangle in black, um, on the wall of my alley, with, um, Carter, Begin, and Sadat at each corner. And the slogan underneath said, Death to these corrupt leaders, Carter, Sadat at each corner. And the slogan underneath said, death to these corrupt leaders, Carter, Sadat, and Pagan. This was right after the peace accord

with Israel and Egypt, broken by US, right? Exactly, exactly. Now, let's think about it. This is 1978, 1979. The Iranian revolution hasn't come. And they had signed a peace agreement for God's sake. And by the way, Iran is a non-Arab nation. The language is not Arabic. As far as religion is concerned, Iranians are Muslims, but there are Shiites, which is,

you know, only 10% of all the Muslims in the region, right? Mm-hmm. And for the love of God, this is about... uh, the overthrowing of a monarchy, which everybody agrees is standing in the way of democracy and freedom and free speech and civil liberties in Iran. Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion standing in the way of democracy and freedom and free speech and civil liberties in Iran.

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-5 one twenty six hundred to speak to an advisor free of charge but MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Why should Carter, Begin and Sadat be any part of the conversation that was going on in Iran at all. And the answer is... that... for nearly all of the Arab leaders in the region, in the Middle East, the cause of Palestine had become a pawn and a tool

in order to create disenchantment. That they were the greatest obstacle standing in the way of peace before Israel ever was. When Aito al-Khomeini came to power, one of the very first, if not the first, world leader who came to Iran was... was Arafat, Yasser Arafat, who was the head of PLO. Um, the, the first embassy that was shut down and run over wasn't the American embassy, it was the Israeli embassy in, in Tehran. Why should a country that doesn't even share a border

with Israel or a leader who has just overthrown a monarchy and has a massive country to run and figure out who to put in power, you know, what kind of cabinet to build. Why should they worry about this other cause, you know, several countries away. The Palestinians have become, have been suffering for sure. But I am here to say that the overwhelming majority of the suffering that they have experienced is by Arab and Palestinian leadership, by regional leadership who have believed that whatever happens, that they are going to stand in the way of peace and object to any agreement that Israel wants

to strike with the Palestinians because Israel has to be annihilated and wiped off the map. And so we can sit here and agree that Israel is inflicting suffering upon the Palestinians in Gaza. Of course it is. But I'm not sure, and I'm here to say, that if you trace the origins of that suffering, that the lion's share of the blame is with the Arab and Muslim leaders in the region. I agree with you on your point that Palestine,

for a long time, has been used as a pawn. I think that's something we overlook. I think even, and I also agree with you, that they've never had the best leadership as well, for sure. I mean, Hamas, that's a whole nother story, but even the PLO has had a lot of problems in the past, and there's arguments there, and obviously, like, they've conducted some acts internationally,

where it's like, well, that seems like terrorism, or straight up is. And why should their leadership have billions in their banks? When their people are starving. When their people are starving, and by the way, you know, Khaled Mashal or Sinwar, they didn't invent Microsoft or Apple or the internet. So what is their great industry

that could allow them to accumulate billions of dollars in foreign banks. Oil? No. Donations and funding that came from the EU and the United States for recovery and reconstruction. There is vast financial corruption within the ranks of Hamas, PLO, and it's nothing new. It's been going on for years. So for them, war has become a profitable industry because there is destruction and then money pours in from the EU and the United States and all the countries that want to make it go away and they become rich. And after a while, they start back to cycle up again.

So... I just think that the best way to understand this very complex situation is to not see it as a binary between Israelis and the Palestinians, but as a regional situation where there are lots of corrupt and tyrannical leaders who are unwilling to make their own countries democratic and grant their own people freedom, who use the Palestinian cause to silence their own people

and benefit from it economically. Do you think that, because there's two timelines to go on the history here, the first timeline is the full thing, which is thousands of years and disagreement over this land. We can do that, but right now focusing focusing on since 1948 when Israel's founded, do you think that the number one fear of an Iran or a lot of these different countries in the Middle East who are not democracies, do you think their number one fear is actually not so much that it's like, oh, there's Jews

right here and we're Arabs. It's more this is a democratic state and we're Arabs. It's more, this is a democratic state and we're worried about that ideology spreading to our own countries. Okay, before I answer that question, because I think you already know the answer, I'm gonna tell you something that blew my mind. I don't know if I know the answer to that question.

I will give you the answer, but I think we do. Something that blew my mind. I will give you the answer, but I think we do. Something that blew my mind. Mm-hmm. So, um, you know, at the end of the 19th century, um, Herzl, Theodor Herzl shows up on the scene, and they start thinking about picking a country to go to,

and then there are disagreements about where they should all, you know, send the Jews and find... They want to go to Uganda, I think, right? Uganda was one possibility, Latin America was another. And then there's talk, some of which comes from actually Eastern European parliaments where they're saying, we have to get rid of the Jews. And some of the parliamentarians say,

send them back to where they all came from, which is Israel. And the Zionist leaders who are beginning to think about how to solve the problem say, oh, if the Eastern European parliamentarians are already saying we should go back to where we came from historically, so let's do that. Highly contentious piece of land though too. Right. But they say this is very interesting because you know Amos Oz, who's one of the greatest thinkers, intellectuals and writers of 20th century Israel, once said that his parents were driven out of Europe saying Jews go back to your home,

so they came to Israel. And then when they were in Israel, they said go back to your home, so they came to Israel. And then when they were in Israel, they said, go back to your home, meaning to Europe. So, where ought they go? You know, where do they... Where is the home where they won't be bothered? You know, so that's sort of the irony that stays here. But, um... Going back to, you know, the late 19th century, when the Zionists, you know, decide that the destination Going back to the late 19th century,

when the Zionists decide that the destination is going to be Israel, they go to this land, which is actually the least prosperous part of piece of land as compared to, you know, the rest of the region, right? Like, if you, you know, it didn't have oil. It's probably the only piece of land in all of the Middle East that doesn't have oil.

It's something that, you know, Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, used to joke about, say, they looked and looked and looked and found the only part of the Middle East that didn't have anything good to prosper on, and that was Israel. And they said, OK, we'll stay here. So they went there. They couldn't make anything grow.

It was so hard. There was no water. The land was completely not friendly to agriculture and farming. So they began to do all these things. But these people who are totally destitute and have moved to this completely unfriendly climate and country, one of the first things that they built. So if you and I go, if I, you and I friendly climate and country, one of the first things that they built.

So if you and I go, if I, you and I go to a place where we don't know the language, we have come destitute, we, you know, we are on the harshest, under the harshest circumstances imaginable, what would you decide is the best thing to build? A community. A community. I would agree with you. But the Jews who go there build a university as early as 1912. That's 30 plus years before 1948. Right.

That's long before they even know that they're going to stay there or they're going to have a state. And that becomes Technion University, which is the Israeli equivalent to the MIT. And about seven or eight years later, what else did they make? They built a second university, which is called the Hebrew University in 1919. And by the way, on the board of governors of both of these universities are Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein

and a whole host of other hugely notable Jewish thinkers, philosophers, inventors of 20th century. Why is this important? I'm mentioning this just to say that they have gone there to build, to make a future, to dream, to imagine. And this is long before they even know that a state is going to come about or will be possible. And this isn't the reality in any of the countries neighboring Israel, or neighboring what was Palestine at the time, whatsoever. Not in Egypt, not in what becomes Syria, Iraq,

or Lebanon, or Jordan. They have yet to be, you know, partitioned and called that. But it is what they do. Even before there is the possibility of a state. And so to go back to your original question, one of the greatest Arab-American thinkers and intellectuals, Fuad Ajami, who has several wonderful books

about sort of the predicament of the Middle East and the question of democracy in the Middle East or the absence of. He says something very beautiful. He says, you know, all these Arab countries looked to Israel after 1948. And rather than saying, look what the, what a bunch of Jews did there,

and should we be inspired to replicate that, decided to do the opposite, decided that rather than aspire to, you know, allow that Jewish experience to spread through the region, they're going to do everything that they can to destroy it. And these are not my words, these are Fuad Ajami's words. I think that's really cool that they set up like universities and places where there's going to be education, where they can build community and try to better their next generations.

The counter argument there, not for like the regimes and how they would look at it to take advantage of the situation, but just from the people living there, would be, for example, you have all the Palestinian Arab people largely who have been living in that land, they've been subjugated to the British rule, they're supposed to end up getting it on their own, like this is where their families are from and their father's father's and father's father's and all that. And now you have a new community coming in. Great. But then, you know, to me, when you when you build universities, and it's for your people,

like that's that to me is a sign like we're setting up shop here, we're here to stay. Which is fine. But I see why that ends up creating a problem. I'm not saying, like, oh, that's really wrong or whatever. I'm saying I see why that ends up creating a problem for the people who are there, when that then gets enough momentum and the post-World War I immigration, to say nothing of the immigration for the people who were escaping the Holocaust as well, afterwards, which is obviously...

Whose ships were turned around after they had come to the safe harbors. That's right. And then they went back to their deaths. That's right. And then even after the Holocaust happened, the ships were still getting turned around sometimes to go back, but they're trying to come to this land, and it's a different group of people.

And so, I see why the people living there would be like, and this would happen anywhere, whether you went to Uganda or whatever land, if you're going to get new land that then becomes your own country, it's a zero sum game, somebody's got to lose. So I see where the, I don't know, like, where the up, where the Palestinians would get upset about that and that would cause a problem, then they are then used as a pawn by these other countries to start wars like what happened in 48, 67, 73. Yes. You know, first of all, you know, and I know that the history of the world is the history

of human movement, displacement and I know that the history of the world is the history of human movement, displacement and replacement. So there's... We're living in it here, by the way. Exactly. So there is nothing unique about what happened in Israel or in Palestine prior to 1948, with With the exception that while we as Americans came to a country or a piece of land where we had no roots, Jews who went back to Israel happened to be returning to a country where they had historically roots. That's sort of the theme that makes that return

or that resettlement different from many other resettlements throughout history, including our own in America, right? We came to a land where we didn't have roots. But I think what's also significant is that all of these other conflicts, no matter how brutally they were done, and surely brutal things happened to the Palestinians in this process for a fact, they were resolved. You know, whether the population moved to a new country.

I was, I'm a refugee. I came to this country as a refugee. I have no claim over Iran anymore. I am an American. You know, I wish I hadn't been driven out. It wasn't my choice. My father hated it. Nobody wanted to be uprooted. We had dreams of building our home again.

My father had been a poor Jew in one of the most destitute villages of Iran for many, many years, and yet this guy had become educated in Iran. He went to college. No Jew went to college when he graduated. He went to army. He became a second lieutenant in Iran. You know, who had ever heard of that? And you think my family woke up one day and said, goody, we're going to leave this country where we have made such great progress in. No. But you move and you reconcile because that's what... humanity has forced people to experience.

This is a common historical experience. And once we move, then we build new lives, you know? And that's precisely what we did. I don't have any claim over Iran anymore. I don't have any claim that, you know, I need to return and, you know, people owe me anything. I came here. But that wasn't your choice. Exactly. You were driven out. I was driven out.

Right. But I'm saying by the time that 30 years go by and, you know, I have children who've been born It wasn't your choice. Exactly. You were driven out. I was driven out. Right? But I'm saying by the time that 30 years go by and I have children who've been born and raised in this country, I'm an American, right? I understand that. Right? And you've lived it.

So it's interesting to hear that experience because you can speak to what that's like, but you also have a very positive attitude towards that. Do you understand why there's people who would be like, same shoes as you, my father's father lived here and his father's father lived here and damn it, like if I was driven out, the minute I can get a chance to go back, I'm going back.

Of course. Yeah. Do you think, you know, I have actually a piece that I wrote about my father, on 9-11, did something I never thought he could or would. What was that? So my father never learned proper English. He was always sitting on this balcony in Kew Garden Hills, in Forest Hills, New York.

Um, and from the balcony, he had this sliver of a view to, um, the New York City skyline. And he would sit on this balcony for years composing poems about how much he missed Iran day after day. So I'm not talking about, you know, one or two or three or four or five things. I'm talking about books and books

that my father wrote in Persian about his love of Iran. And it used to frustrate the hell out of me. Because I, you know, I used to come home, and I would say, what did you do? You know, and he sat, you know, on the balcony as opposed to, you know, go out and discover this new beautiful world. He sat on the balcony, and he composed poetry about how much he missed Iran and how much nothing, not the smell of the air in New York, not the taste of food in New York, not the look of the fruit in New York, was ever as good or as beautiful or as satisfying as the things he knew in Iran. So, you know, as immigrants, we have choices to make.

You either reconcile and you say, this is a new reality and I'm gonna get along, or you can be, you know, which is, I guess, my experience in some ways, or you can be my dad and say, that's it, you know, everything else. Nothing matters except for the things I've lost, right? So, just to bring it to the earlier note I made, is that, you know, he...

I thought he didn't like America or didn't love America, and then on 9-11, my father, who hardly could see anything because he had macular degeneration, walked out of the apartment and about three hours later, he had bought the biggest American flag I'd ever seen in my life be sold on a, you know, in a regular store, dollar store, and hung it on the balcony rails.

And I was so touched, you know, to the point that I thought, maybe I never understood, you know, what my father did or thought. But my point being that, yes, you know, you can keep dreaming, but... but there comes, and you can keep writing about it, and you can keep dreaming about it, and you can write in history books about injustices that happened to you.

And those things are perfectly fine. But the history of the world is that we make agreements and people move on. And whether it's Pakistan and India or North Korea or South Korea, we make partitions. We come up with, you know, UN decisions and agreements or whatever contracts, and we abide by those contracts. And the only exception to all of these contracts

and agreements and universal settlements is the case of Israel. You think it's the only one? I would say there's still, for example, extreme dislike between North Korea and South Korea. That's just one off the top of my head. Yes, but nobody's saying, you know, let's return North Korea to South Korea.

Everybody wants it to be reunited, right? North Korea does want South Korea though. Yeah. Yeah. But the rest of us in the world aren't sitting in America saying, oh, you know, down to South Korea. Right. Or, you know, let's eradicate Pakistan because it really belongs to India.

We are saying, you know, whatever it was, it's for them, you know, let them sort it out. It's now history. I think part of the issue here is the recency of this one, this being 1948, it's the post World War Two world. Well, Korea is 50s. Yeah, yeah, I know. But I'm saying like, if we're bringing it back to why this one is such at the forefront, like Korea, they fought a war over it, we were in the war as well. And then once the war

ended, like, okay, this is what it is. And we can argue about whether or not there's still distaste there on each side. It's a different story. In the Middle East, those are two countries that formed in Korea. North Korea is obviously a dictatorship hellhole. South Korea is at least not that. In Israel-Palestine, you basically had an Israeli government form, and then Palestine, which had been under British rule, didn't form a government.

Because it refused to. There was a partition. So, you know, twice, there were agreements to partition the land. The first time around in the 30s, where the UN agreed or actually it was... League of Nations. League of Nations and other international agreements gave 20% of the land in, I think it was in the late 30s,

I forget the exact date, and then 80% of the land in to the Palestinians. And they refused. And then the second time around, it was after World War II, and the agreement, the partition was to do nearly 40, 60 between Israel and Palestine. Israel agreed. The Palestinians didn't. Because they're giving up, here's the argument though,

they're giving up what's theirs. That's how they view it. They're like, but we have 100%, why would we give up 20? Right. We have 100%, why would we give up 40? I understand that. Right, of course. But, you know, every partition, somebody loses and somebody gains.

And, you know, this is... This has happened throughout history. It isn't... It wasn't happening for the first time. And that's the exception, that Israel is the exception. You know, generation after generation of Palestinians are born outside of the region, outside of Gaza, outside of West Bank, and they still call themselves refugee.

And these are the only people in the world who can hang on to that title. Right? But... other people, including myself and hundreds of thousands of other Jews who've been driven out of various Muslim countries throughout the region, throughout the Middle East and North Africa, have moved, whether to Israel or to Europe. We don't consider ourselves refugees anymore because you can't keep being a refugee, you know, once you naturalize and resettle in another country and your kids who are born here can't claim to be refugees anymore. So what I'm trying to say is that

the entire system, whether it's UN or, you know, within the Arab world, has set up this expectation that Israel cannot exist even, you know, with the agreement that the UN issued in 1948 as a piece of partitioned land. And so the idea is that Israel has to be eradicated, whether it's in the echoes of slogans that we hear on the streets of New York, you know, from the river to the sea or, you know, in the fundamental idea that Jews have to be eliminated or in from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, that said during his first term of presidency that Israel has to be wiped off the map of the world. Israel remains the exception that needs to be eradicated

and Palestinians remain the one and only people in the world whose refugee hood gets passed on from generation to generation, from country to country, no matter where they go. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I see how it was set up to be a lose-lose at the beginning. I also, like I've talked a lot about the Kurds on different episodes of the show. There are people that still have no country.

There's 30 million of them. I wrote about them. My second book is about the assassination of the Kurds on different episodes of the show. There are people that still have no country. There's 30 million of them. I wrote about them. My second book is about the assassination of the Kurdish leaders in Berlin, Germany. Yeah, we got to talk about that too. So you're obviously well versed and well aware. And I love them. And I feel very close to them.

I think that's crazy. That is crazy. Like they should have their own land somewhere. But to your point, that means someone technically has to lose, right? Like the border's gotta be redrawn somewhere. Like Turkey or Syria or, you know, Iranians or Iraqis. Probably all four, in a way, if you look at where the Kurds are.

And that would also create a huge problem. So it's like it was set up that way. And the Jews didn't have their own land for the longest time. And they did have like an old school historical stake to this. Now, like if you hear Netanyahu talk about it, he's like, imagine you were kicked out of your apartment and one day you come back and you say, I want my apartment back. It's your apartment. I'm like, yes.

That's good. Thank you. But yes, in theory, that's right. But that apartment kickout happened 1300 years ago, or 1200 years ago at the time you go to take the apartment back. So I can't do the Netanyahu voice, but they were Jews who were still living in Palestine. Yes. Even after they'd been driven out.

I think it was as much, maybe we can check this, Alessia, I don't want to get shit wrong. A few percents. I want to say it was as much, maybe we can check this, Alessia, I don't wanna get shit wrong. I'm sure the comments will tell us. A few percents, yeah. I wanna say it was close to 10%. It was like eight to 10%, somewhere in there. And by the way, by the way, now that we are doing this, they were considered second class citizens in Palestine, which is- Oh, I believe that.

Yeah, because under Ottoman law, rule, which is the rule, you know, those who ruled in Palestine prior to the British, Jews were second class citizen and were considered demis by Islamic laws. So imagine you are the native people in the land, and the leadership considers you second-class citizens, as if we told the Native Americans or, you know, the Native Americans.

Right. So what if... So say it. What if... I think about this possibility all the time, because you look at the history, some of the stuff that happened to Native Americans is terrible, not even subjectively, just objectively it's absolutely terrible. And they still have a population here. What if five years from now, something happened in the world and the Native Americans rose up and said, this is no longer the United States of America. We have total claim to this land. Discover the magic of BetMGM Casino,

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So join Rakuten and start getting cashback at Sephora, Uniqlo, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cashback. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at rakuten.ca or download the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Rakuten.ca I'm not disagreeing at the front end of that. They did. And a lot of shit happened and people lost and unfortunately they lost. But like, as an American, I wouldn't be happy about that if they like rose up and ended

the country. But could you say that we had it coming? I don't know. It's a very strange thing to try to plot out and think about it in your head. Right. But again, that's the history of human civilization. I happen to be working on a new book project

that deals with events that took place in Iran in the late 19th century and early 20th century. And in the process of researching this book, damn it, I found out. I mean, it's not that I didn't know, it's just that, uh, I learned it as a kid in school, but I'm now revisiting these facts as an adult. And so they struck me in a way that they never had before.

Nearly one-third of the entire Iranian area, region, was lost in the beginning of the 19th century to Russia. So all of these, you know, Tajikistan and all of these, you know, caucuses used to be Iranian owned. And now they're friends with them. I mean, friends are no friends. But, you know, to think that some of the richest culturally, geographically most diverse, interesting parts of the country were lost to Russia. And then, you know, a lot of the rest of it was lost to the British Empire.

So, you know, map of the world has been changing. You know, if you look at how human beings have moved and big populations have crossed borders and borders have, you know, expanded and shrunk and expanded and shrunk, you'd be, you know, you'd realize that this is how history takes shape. Yeah. My friend Eric Zuhliger says, countries are just stories, right?

And borders are these lines to get drawn to make the story make sense. And it's very true because, you know, you can look at the map even with the recency bias of the last 150 years, for example, and see all the changes that have occurred. And all the, all the places that didn't used to be this way that now are this size or shrunk down to this size or whatever. And as we've been saying over the last 30 minutes, it's like, that means that yes, there are winners and losers with that stuff. And sometimes it was just like, basically almost a monkey throwing a dart at the board.

When you talk about like Britain and France and I think it's the Sykes-Picot agreement, just like randomly, they're not even involved. And they're like, yeah, we'll just carve up this country here, carve up that country there. It's not even fair, but like, that's how it went down. And we learned to accept that order. So I think there's a way we could. What it's always felt like though is that, again, I understand in 1948 Palestinians having

an issue with their land being given up and then it gets worse because then there's a war. But ever since then, you've had all these things happen where Israel does get the upper hand and the Palestinians aren't able to have a military. And basically what I'm getting at is you do kind of make it right to have a self-fulfilling prophecy where some sort of violent organization will take the power vacuum if you don't allow an actual system of government to be set up. So do you think that that's a part of the strategy that they should change and maybe

for the West Bank and even Gaza, which are geographically separated, you could have Israel recognize some sort of state there to where they are able to form their own government and military, where it's not associated, obviously, with PLO or Hamas? There is a clip, um, of a President Clinton speech that, um, is circulating on the internet, and it's been circulating even more after October 7th, where he says, um says that he struck an agreement where 90% of everything that the Palestinians had ever wanted was given to them.

And with the 3% agreed to be given to them, some other arrangement and they didn't sign a contract. They didn't agree. And so what I am trying to say... Yeah, can we play this clip so people can see it? Let's do that to give them context. Let me hear it at last. Yeah. with the Palestinian. When I tell the young people, for example,

who are understandably in America, they are super sympathetic with the Palestinians. They've been killed. A lot of those Palestinians have. And all they know is a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis and I tell them what Arafat walked away from and they like can't believe it I said oh yeah he walked away from a Palestinian state with a capital in East Jerusalem, 96% of the West Bank, 4% of Israel to make up for the 4% that the settlers occupied that were beyond the borders in the 67th war.

And I go through all the stuff that was in the deal and they, And I go through all the stuff that was in the deal. And they, like, it's not on their radar screen. They can't even imagine that that happened. I think. And what is getting left out of this discussion, What is getting left out of this discussion, especially given my own history, is the significance of the Palestinian issue for the corrupt and tyrannical leaders in the region. You and I have talked about it, but I think it's the one thing that is not within the scope of the conversation. You know, again, going back way, in September of 1980,

Saddam Hussein, who used to be the president of Iraq, sees Iran vulnerable and attacks Iran. So, you know, Iran and Iraq share a border. And so all of a sudden, have not just a country being Iran, having just experienced a massive, you know, seismic revolution and change. And by the way, it's lost all of its diplomatic ties with the United States because, you know,

they are keeping 52 American diplomats hostage. Then Saddam Hussein attacks Iran and takes over lots of swaths of land in southern Iran. So what would any normal leader say? Would say, we're going to drive these enemies out of our country and reclaim our land. But that is not what Ayatollah Khomeini says in September of 1980, when Saddam Hussein attacks Iran. Do you know what he says? No.

He says, we're going to drive out the enemy forces from southern Iran, reclaim our land. Then we're going to march into Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. Okay. Yeah. And from there, we're going to march to Jerusalem and free Jerusalem. Good luck with that. Well, not just good luck with that. And by the way, none of that worked out after nearly 10 years of one of the bloodiest,

if not the bloodiest war in the second half of the 20th century, where, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on both sides were killed and maimed. Not only that didn't work out and, you know, so much was lost for both nations on both sides, but why would that be a goal? You know, because the Palestinian issue has become a political issue to manipulate a destitute public that will never be granted democratic rights,

will not be given civil liberties, will not be given freedom of the press, will not be given a vision of a future for its youth to look forward to. So these corrupt tyrannical leaders can continue to pl say why they're justified and why they are on the side of, as you said, the downtrodden. And why democracy doesn't work. Democracy doesn't work and can't work.

And by the way, don't worry about democracy because they're Palestinians. Right. We can't have a democracy, but how can we have a democracy until the Palestinians are freed? So to answer, there was a question I asked a while ago and we went on a long tangent, but that question was, do they care more about the fact that these are Jews who are in that land or do they care more about the fact that it's a democracy that's been set up that

is antithetical to how they rule? And it seems like the answer is they care more about the fact that it's a democracy that's antithetical to how they rule? And it seems like the answer is they care more about the fact that it's a democracy that's antithetical to how they rule. Yeah, because everything that their nations should expect, they should expect to be able to address the huge environmental threat that's most dire in the Middle East. There's water scarcity in Iran,

like nothing else anybody is experiencing anywhere. There has been water protests in Iran, especially in the southern parts of Iran. protests in Iran, especially in the southern parts of Iran. So much of the land in Iran has already become uninhabitable and will become uninhabitable very soon. What has the Iranian regime done? Completely misused and mismanaged the water resources of the country. And given so much of it over to the Chinese, who care nothing about what happens to the land in Iran and whether or not, right? Iran's a useful idiot for them.

Exactly. And in the meantime, what has Israel done? Desalinization. They have figured out how to recycle water and how to make water that is not potable and turn it into potable water. That's just one example. They have built universities. They have become one of the, you know,

they've become the other Silicon Valley in the world. And they have democratic rights and they, you know, they have free and fair elections. Yes, they sometimes they, you know, go bonkers and they choose somebody like Netanyahu, who is antithetical to the democratic future of Israel. Yeah, Bush, Cheney were here. Yeah, yeah, but that happens in democracies.

Yes. Yes, and I think that's a good point. People are not their governments, and I think we do that too much around the world where we assume maybe a government who's not as good gets into power, and then we assume that all their people support that. Israel's got a lot of parties, so I think Netanyahu wins with like 27% of the vote or something.

He's got mass demonstrations in the streets against him to this day. Every Saturday night. Yeah. Hundreds of thousands show up. I always defend like the Israeli populace in that way because they're not, you know, people like to make this black and white in that respect and they're not supporting what Netanyahu does across many of them. So you know, it's a bad, it's a particularly bad moment for Israel because of some of the people who are in charge and because of some of the actions that are being taken. And by the way, we shouldn't lose this in the point. A lot of, you know, what's going on in Gaza with indiscriminate killing is bombing and drone strikes,

which is particularly, what's the word I'm looking for, manipulative to me of the leadership to their people, say IDF forces or whatever, because it separates people from the personal nature of killing It's not the same as I mean the end results the same but it's not the same as Nazis taking orders and Killing people point-blank range or turning on the gas chamber right in front of them or whatever. It's it's more Depersonalized personal right and so someone takes an order. Hey, yeah

I know we're sitting in this in this shed right now with remote control, make sure you hit that building right there that you see on a grainy screen. And then big thing goes up and you go, wow, they find out later, you know, 60 people die. One of the greatest, greatest, most dangerous aspects of the, you know, on-coming AI future is the kinds of wars we're going to wage against each other, which is these impersonal wars where, you know, you have machines and robots and drones decimating far more than human beings could have,

um, in the field of battle. Yeah, it's scary to think about for sure. Yeah. And it's, I mean, for now, it's only gonna get worse. And I'm talking about across the world, just with that, because it's like a new tool that people have, and they're learning how to play with it, for lack of a better way of putting it.

But, you know, Iran has, we've been talking about this all day, they have all this influence in funding Hezbollah and funding Hamas and funding some of these other groups. My question here is, we've in America at least, who's like the leader of the Western world, we've obviously put massive sanctions on them for years. You can't do business with them. We've shut them off from a lot of our world and a lot of the West. And yet, because they have oil

and because they have some deals with Russia and China, they're able to subsist and make enough money that they're able to wield some power. But when you talk about their ability to propagandize a population, the counterargument there is how can they be doing so much propaganda when they're already, like, kind of muted? You know what I mean? Like, how is that...

How is that possible that their propaganda, which they definitely have, to be clear, you know, could be nearly as loud as our propaganda in America? Let's even just put it on our foot here. Because they don't aspire to do anything else but propaganda. So, you know, I have said this to many different audiences. The difference between the Iranian regime and say the US government, when you compare the two and say,

how come Iran, you know, with so much stress on it, with so much pressure and so many limitations is succeeding by leaps and bounds, even as compared to the United States in the propaganda war, in winning hearts and minds across the globe? And the answer is, A, they have completely lost their own internal domestic population.

That aside from their own very limited constituency that's on the payroll of the regime, the vast majority of Iranians wish that they wake up in the morning and this regime has fallen or is gone. But they win the global war of propaganda because they're not doing anything else. They're not trying to solve the environmental crisis.

They're not trying to figure out how to advance the cause of education in Iran. They're not trying to build new universities, or they have no other ambition other than prolonging their own existence. And when you're so focused on just one or a couple of goals and you forego everything else, well, you do those couple of things a lot better than any other government system that has to tend to millions of people and address, you know, a whole range of other demands.

And Iranians aren't. They're not trying to, you know, win hearts and minds within the country. You... Just as you and I are speaking, the truckers in Iran have... are going on their sixth day of national strikes. We know women, as we saw in 2022, came to the streets, took their Islamic dress code off, men joined them.

So we know women have been, which is nearly 50% of the nation, have been against the regime, have been against the harsh rules of the regime. And when I say women, I include women who are believers, women who dress in the Islamic dress code. They say that we don't want to see it imposed on others because good know, good Islam, it doesn't come by force. And so if Islam is going to have a future in Iran, it needs to be embraced, not put on, not imposed.

How have they not overthrown the regime then? If so many people, if it's like you... The way you're making it sound is like it's unanimous. many people, if it's like you, the way you're making it sound is like it's unanimous. I mean, my friend David Satter, who's covered Russia since 1976, always talks about 15% of the population took down the Soviet Union. You don't even need 50. Like 15 will do. So why hasn't that happened? I mean, there was a moment in 2022 where all these protests were happening. It's like, I thought to myself, all right, maybe finally we're here.

But I was thinking, maybe that means 30% of the country has come around. You know, 20% of the country. But you're making it sound like it's damn near 100. I'm not making it sound like. I, you know, you can look at all sorts of polls and data that various groups have done in Iran anonymously. And people are either vocally against the regime and actively participate in anti-regime protests or believe that the regime is completely corrupt and believe it to be illegitimate, but can't figure out or are too fearful

to rise up against it. So, I think the problem with Iran has been the problem in some ways comparable with Venezuela. You know, right? You know, uh... Is there anyone who doubts that the last elections in Venezuela went to the opposition, right? They have been rigged in Iran time and time again. We know in 2009 when the Green Revolution came,

when millions of people took to the streets in Iran and raised signs saying, where's my vote? That that election had been rigged, or the Venezuelan elections was rigged. And we know, for instance, in Russia, the elections are rigged all the time. The problem is that we are facing an era of solidarity between authoritarian regimes, North Korea, China, Russia, Venezuela,

Iran, among several others. But these are the five, there are people who refer to them as the axis of misery, who prop each other up. Why should North Korean soldiers be fighting against Ukraine in Russia's war? Why should Vladimir Putin send troops or, you know, summon its air power to put out the Syrian revolution, you know, when it broke out? These regimes have been holding each other up. And, you know, the solidarity that Russia has shown and China has shown with Iran in trying to salvage its economy,

in trying to prop up, you know, all of Iran's air defense systems is given to Iran by Russia. air defense systems is given to Iran by Russia. So as long as you have world tyrannical superpowers that are keeping you alive, populations that are peaceful and nonviolent can't have a prayer against you because you are just too powerful. And I think to that end, I think what has also been incredibly damaging is that every time Iran has come to the brink,

and it just perhaps needed a little bit of support from the United States or Western governments in order to really weaken the regime so the population can finish the job, the US and Europe have withdrawn and have refused to, you know, allow Iranians or help Iranians to go the last mile. This is where I think it gets really weird because I for one would love to see the regime in Iran toppled. I mean, it's- Any conscientious human being should.

Exactly. It's a common sense issue. To the point you just made though, they are in alliances with two powerful countries who we got some problems with in Russia and China who are way bigger than them too and way more powerful than they are and Looking at the bigger picture This is where it also gets down to like there's just winners and losers sometimes and it's like a rounds just on the short end of the stick right now it's like do you want to go in and

start another war in the Middle East we We haven't been too good at those. And you know, take someone out of power and once again, try to spread democracy and realize you're going to fail at that and what takes over somehow is worse. Because if you would have told me that like it would get much worse than Saddam Hussein, you know, in 02, not that I was thinking about this, I was very little, but like, let's assume I wasn't and I was me now, I would have laughed at you. Said, I can't get worse than that. It got worse. It got worse.

It got worse. But now it's better. I am not. Okay, I might need an explanation here. I'm just citing where Iraq is right now, which is far better than where it was in 2001. You know, as far as... Really? Yes.

Today? Yes. There is more freedom, there is, you know, there is a government that is allowing certain, you know, civil liberties to the degree that a government that is allowing certain civil liberties to the degree that a government that is being torn apart by still various tribal and religious factions can afford. Iraq today is better off than Iraq was in 2000 and 2001. That said, I am not defending the idea that we should have gone in. I don't think we did the right thing to go in, you know, in the way that we did. But I

also think that Iraq is better off. The more important issue to raise is this, to think about. Military interventions are bad, right? And we haven't been good at them, right? We didn't do well in Afghanistan. Oh my God, those images of us leaving Afghanistan, you know, that summer after President Biden came to office. Right, it was terrible. It was terrible. And everything that happened in Iraq

during the period that we were there, they were devastating to those populations and to our troops, to our lives as Americans, economically and in many other ways. But... does that mean that democracy can survive if democracy as a universal idea isn't globally embraced?

Do you know what I'm saying? Can you explain that a little more before I answer? Sure, I have been, so this is what keeps me up at night. And I'm not pretending to have the answer. But as I'm watching what's happening in the United States, democracy is certainly on the retreat in our country, here in the U.S., that in all the years that I've been in this country, this is the least free and the least democratic

I've ever seen the United States to be. Um, and the threat of it is growing. Right? We don't want to get into that conversation. But isn't that, in a way, a result of the global democracy being under assault? And can democracy... Can democracy live and thrive in just one place, when in every other place, it's waning and it's under assault?

I'm here to argue that it cannot. That it's not different from, you know, for lack of another parallel. You can't have COVID in one country and then say the rest of the world can be healthy. Right. We're interconnected. We're interconnected by...

Oh, this is a fun one. This is a good conversation. Keep going. This is a good conversation. We're interconnected in... Oh, this is a fun one. This is a good conversation. Keep going. This is a good conversation. We're interconnected in a thousand different ways. We're interconnected, you know, by the web. We're interconnected by, you know, the state of our health. We're also interconnected by our democratic state of life. And if it comes under threat in one place, in a democratic state of life.

And if it comes under threat in one place, it can stay healthy and thriving in another part of the world for too long. Where they want it. Where they want it. Where they want it. And I don't know of any place where they don't want it. So that's how I always thought too.

And I've been rethinking this because other people I've spoken with who kind of give you the hard pill on some stuff and say like, look, the world isn't how you want to see it, the world is how it actually is. And one of the things a lot of my guys who have... My guys? Different people I've had come through.

I just liked the phrasing, my guys. Who have been in, you know what I mean. I wish I had guys that you just don't have guys. I got a guy for everything, you're in New Jersey. But when they come through and I'm talking about the people who have spent a lot of time in the Middle East and lived among it, and actually I don't wanna speak out of turn here, but I think Jobie's even actually agreed with this as well, who's obviously spent a lot of time in the Middle East and lived among it. And actually, I don't want to speak out of turn here, but I think Jobi's even actually

agreed with this as well, who's obviously spent a lot of time there. It's like, yeah, we agree democracy is the best system and we agree everywhere where it possibly could be, where there's going to be support to have it, it would be great to have it. And hopefully we would be better at setting it up than we have in the past. However, when you look at certain countries around the world, the tough pill these guys point to is that, you know, especially if you zone in

on the Middle East, these are collegiate cultures. This is what they do. They don't want democracy. There are places that may say they want it, but they end up reverting back towards a system that isn't quite that. And I'm not saying that that's because that's consciously how they want it, but subconsciously, that

is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of culture. And so for example, if you went to set up, just take the US system and plop it in Saudi Arabia, it's not going to work. So that isn't to say, by the way, that therefore something like Ayatollah Khomeini should exist and that's who should be running Iran. Or therefore,

that means it should be Saddam running Iraq. But human nature says that unfortunately, in these situations where, like in Khiliji culture or something like that, there will be human fallacy to where people who get their hands on power, because it's not democratic, will take advantage of that. And that's the great catch 22 with it. But do you understand why a lot of these guys would say there's places where in theory it's great, but in practice they're not gonna wanna do it? I have heard this, and I think it's talking points

And I think it's talking points that are being generated within the halls of power in the Middle East that are being sold to us as the truth. Now, here's the thing. It... Who started... Which group of women in the world started driving without the Islamic dress code,

uh, and getting arrested and going to prison for it. Saudi Arabia, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So are you trying to tell me that women in Saudi Arabia, A, don't want to be... No, I'm not trying to tell you that. Right. Yeah, yeah. Let me correct that.

I'm not trying to say that therefore everything that comes with that and daddy government taking away, daddy ruler taking away my rights, I'm not saying that's what they want. I'm saying that those are individual cases of like, yeah, fuck that, I'm going to drive. But that doesn't mean that they want the government to, like, it's going to work culturally for the government to not have some sort of strong man type leader. You see what I'm saying? You know, the reason we get so bogged down in seeing this as clearly as we ought, in the same way that you laid things down very clearly early on in our conversation,

you said, you know, you kill innocent people in terrorist acts, you are done. I'm not going to have sympathy for you. So I say the same thing about the state of women in the Middle East. As a woman, I vouch for all the women I do not know, I have never met, and I will never meet in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Saudi Arabia,

in Qatar, in Jordan, in every... You know, throughout the region, Egypt, that none of us, none of them, none of us, will ever want to not have the right to divorce, not have the right, equal rights after divorce to child custody. We all want to be able to choose our dress code. We all want to be able to choose our dress code. We may want to keep the, you know, cover ourselves up from head to toe, but we want it to be our choice.

We don't want to be told. So when you look at what's happening in the region, we are facing a new age of feminist transformation that the world cannot see because the world looks at that region and says, oh, it's Muslim, we can talk about it because we are Christians. But it's not about Muslim and Christian,

it's about what women have been moving towards for at least a couple of hundred years. And how men have stood in the way for as long as that, if not longer. When you... At the end of the day, when you think about the regime in Tehran, I think about how they killed a 21-year-old girl because her hair was showing from under her scarf.

When I think about the Taliban, I think about how they have struck the right of women to be heard in public. When I think about Saudi Arabia, I think about the fact that women had to go to prison before they could be given the right to drive. So so much of what is happening in the region, from Iran to Saudi Arabia, back, you know, back and forth, wherever you look, is really... not a war of Islam and Christianity, although to some degree, it is that too. But in the most tangible ways,

it's a feminist uprising and a feminist struggle for equal rights. For basic rights. For basic rights that the rest of the world loses sight of because it's behind the filter of Islam. And as soon as we look at it there, and we see the filter of Islam. And as soon as we look at it there, and we see the filter of Islam, we say, oh, you know, it's Islam.

We don't know, it's not our culture, they're different people, they have different traditions. It doesn't matter what the religion is, or what tradition is. A woman is a woman is a woman wherever she is. And she doesn't want to be told that she can't be heard aloud. Right.

You know, or she can't, she has to go into a bag in order to walk on the street. There's also like a recency bias in society with that, because like over the last five, ten years, post all these wars going on and on forever, because it wasn't, I mean, after 9-11, people, I mean, you run the radio tapes and TV tapes, people had no problems saying anything

about Muslims or whatever, but then it was like, oh shit, our bad, we really fucked that up. Therefore we won't comment on some of this stuff. So I see what you're saying with that. And also to your point, what you are talking about right now is that catch-22 I talk about where? Okay, you want collegiate culture But someone's gonna get their hand on that power and they're gonna use it to do bad things because that's unfortunately human nature. So To make your point steel man that the antithesis of that is democracy.

It's just we have trouble seeing where it has worked. So something happens there where, let's say, you look at pictures of Afghanistan in the 1960s. Can we pull that up, Alessi, so people can see that? Afghanistan Women University, 1960s. This is crazy to look at. It's it's 60 years ago. I know what it looks like. Yeah. So I'm happy you're pulling it out. Yes. That's perfect. Even better. Do the color one the second one. Perfect. So we have what I would

call westernized right like it like women going to universities not wearing a hijab or any coverings or whatever. and we all know what happens next and where we are now. You would think the world would turn on the right axis, but it's turned backwards. So obviously, it's not like these women were like, yeah, you know what, we want to be subjugated and not have any rights. But something happens there where the system gets to a point where it's not working. And for some reason, culturally, they want to turn towards a strongman ruler. And to be clear, by the way, let's be fair here.

This happens in democracies too. We've seen that, to where people, you know, times are bad and people want someone who's strong. But there's at least a system in place that can stop that from getting out of control. With the collegiate culture, to argue against myself, there's not really a system in place to stop that from getting out of control. With the collegiate culture to argue against myself, there's not really a system in place

to stop that from getting out of control. Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it? It's the best deal, the highest cashback, the most savings on your shopping. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Uniqlo, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back.

Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at rakuten.ca or download the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N, rakuten.ca. This reminds me of an encounter I had of all places at the CIA where I had been... Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I confess, I had been invited and I wrote about it. It's an article called A Cappuccino at the CIA. Comment section just got lit.

You brought an agent to your program. God damn it. No wonder she said the things she said. Joe be sitting at home now, hitting his head in the fucking table. But I wrote about it, so it's no secret. OK. That makes it OK. It was an essay for the New York Times.

But anyway, I had been invited, and I was way too curious to be inside that building to say no. And I had been invited to give a talk on my first book, on my second book, and then a talk on sort of the state of Iran at the time, which I think was maybe 2014, 2015. I don't remember exactly. Oh, this is all at the same time? I was supposed to give three consecutive talks.

And then afterwards, I went to lunch with the heads of the Near East Department at the CIA. And I, over lunch, was talking to some of these people and one of them, and they were all, by the way, non-interventionist, I know this sounds really odd, I know it goes sort of against everything we think about the CIA, you know, non-interventionist CIA, uh-huh. the CIA, you know, non-interventionist CIA, uh-huh. I know all that, but they were all arguing on behalf of, you know, hands-off policy. And so one of them said, you know, what's wrong with letting Iran have its own kind of democracy, which is an Islamic democracy. And so I said, humor me and tell me what is the difference between democracy, democracy and an Islamic democracy? How is it different from our

democracy, democracy? And he hemmed and hawed and said, I don't know. And so I said, I know, and I can tell you what is the difference between an Islamic democracy and our democracy, democracy. The difference is that in the Islamic democracy, men are still in charge and they want to be in the position to tell the women in those democracies what to do. And that's how it becomes Islamic. It doesn't become Islamic because you all have

to become Muslims, although, you know, eventually you are better off becoming Muslims. But you, it becomes an Islamic democracy because of everything that they wish to do internally, domestically. I'm not talking about what they wish to do globally, because that's a whole other element. But domestically, when they say Islamic democracy, they're first and foremost thinking about

how they want to run the lives of women, which is as second and third and fourth class citizens. So let's wrap it up. First of all, I think the struggle in the Middle East is oftentimes being defined as sort of a religious struggle or a cultural phenomenon that we don't understand and therefore need to stay away from. Whereas I see it as the next chapter in feminist history

that the world feminist fail to see and take ownership of. What happened in Iran in 2022 is the continuation of the suffragette movement, if you ask me. But because it's in Iran, because Iranians don't speak English, because they're not Christians, we have a hard time making the connection because we immediately say,

oh, this is a different culture, you call it Khiliji, you know, they say something else, and we disown it. But we can't disown it. We all want these things, Muslim or not, Middle East or not, whatever, right? The other very important point that we have to recognize is whatever we did in Iraq that was wrong and stupid to do and the failure both in Iraq and in Afghanistan on many fronts were enormous and incalculable. Whatever those

were, what is the benefit of non-intervention? I'm not advocating for military intervention by any means. Wherever we have not gone or been, our absence, our vacuum has been filled with Russia and China. Which is how Syria suffered from 2011 when they rose up until 2025, when they finally, 14 years later, hundreds of thousands dead, tens of millions or several million driven out of the country, traumatized for decades to come,

not to mention all the atrocities that took place in prisons. Why? Because we decided, contrary to what many of our political leaders, including the late Senator John McCain, we decided not to intervene in any way, even to give air cover, you know, to at the peak of the civil, you know, the movement, right?

So the point is, if we haven't figured out how to properly intervene to keep democracy alive in places where people are demanding it, in places where people are taking their lives in their hands and walking in front of tanks and machine guns in order to demand equal rights. If we fail to do that and leave, the only thing that fills our gaps is tyranny. So I see exactly why you're saying all this, because you've lived it. And I understand your perspective. And I think there's a lot on the bone here. So I want to make sure we hit all this and then we're gonna let you run with it. But I think there's, there's a really interesting connection you make.

Like when you say like the suffragette movement has turned into the movement we see now in Iran and you're saying, right. So you're saying it's all interconnected. There's two sides to this argument. And I think they're both wrong. I think the answer is in the middle. The one side is pure isolationism, which says not our problem, not going anywhere, not dealing with it. If I'm looking at it from an American perspective, fuck it. If it's not American, whatever, they'll figure it out. The other

side of it is the military industrial complex, which to cite John McCain, he was like the face of, you know, never saw a war he He didn't like never saw a place we couldn't intervene you know that's wrong too because they make a business out of it and companies usually for America profit off that and People they don't care about the human loss. We see that in Ukraine right now. They don't give a shit about the human loss there This is just about yeah, you, stop Russia. Yeah, okay. It's a lot more complicated than that. Russia's not good, but there's a lot of other issues there as well. So people right now

in America, because they have gotten so tired of these wars over the past 25 years, that we are going very isolationist now. And I understand that. And there's a lot of people right now who are probably ripping the two of us in the comments section right now for even entertaining some of these conversations. But I don't give a shit. We have to entertain them. That movement to move purely isolationist will end badly. Just as it ended badly on December 7th, 1941, when America was rabidly isolationist and then suddenly had, you know, got our asses kicked and now we're not so isolationist.

The other side of it though, saying that every place is interconnected and therefore every place needs to be our problem, which is difficult for me to say to someone like you who has skin in the game and comes from a country where this is an issue. The other side of that is dangerous because we do not have the capability to be the police and and the standing government for every single place around the world and we have demonstrated a poor ability to set that up. To go back to your Iraq point, you know, I don't know if I could speak on, you know, June 2025 Iraq perfectly, which is my own fault. So I'll be looking into that after this, but I can speak on Iraq between 2003 and 2020,

shithole, because we made it that way. And then people came in who were the vacuum and totally annihilated the many people there who wanted nothing to do with this, by the way, and who were collateral damage. When I see the images of Mosul in 2017, it makes me sick to my stomach. Because those are all men, women, and children who died

because a few terrorists took over the place. It was more than a few, but you know what I mean. Like a group of terrorists took over the place and just shot a death to America, and then we had to go in, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, and everything goes south. So people don't want to see that. Like, even if things were somehow like a little better today

than they were in 2002, the path to get there, as human beings, I don't think people in this country, myself included have the appetite to see that happen again. So when we talk about Iran and like you're having this conversation, you said back in 2014, 2015 with the head of the Near East division. and I understand why you want intervention there. It's like, how do we know that, I mean you don't know, but how do you feel confident

that on the other end of that we're going to set up something that's better that truly does free women, for example, long term. My degree of confidence in that is not high considering how we've handled every single war like One more thing on this when you look at oh one after 9-eleven. I will always support us going into Afghanistan that had to be done Taliban was running that place that were harboring the guys who did 9-eleven period end of story. That's just how it is But we didn't stop there. We went to Iraq and part of that was because Netanyahu comes over and says you must go to Iraq you must go to Iran. Okay, we'll go to Iraq and part of that was because Netanyahu comes over and says you must go to Iraq. You must go to Iran Okay, we'll go to Iraq, you know

And I understand why he wants that but like it caused all these problems and now all these other wars started in Syria God damn near started if Congress didn't vote against it, you know so I'm not saying what happens there for example in Syria over the next 14 years is Acceptable or good, But I'm saying like, how many of these are we gonna start and not finish? Do you understand why a lot of people would think that here? Of course. And do you understand that I'm not, again,

for the fourth or fifth time in our conversation, I'm not advocating for military intervention. I understand that, yes. I am saying that our absence and our indecision and our isolationism can be and is as problematic sometimes as our intervention. I agree with that. Okay. Yes.

I agree with that. Okay. So, we cannot withdraw, not just because for the sake of those people in those countries, ultimately for our own sake, we can't keep up our democratic standards and our lifestyles if the democratic standards and democracy in general, globally is under assault,

because it becomes unsustainable in a world where we are all surrounded by tyrannical regimes that because tyrannies can be incredibly efficient. Because- What do you mean? Okay, well, look at what happened in China after COVID. They shut it down. They shut it down. Could we shut things down?

We're still arguing over who should go to prison because of, you know, shutting schools down. Because democracies are not as efficient as tyrannies. So in many ways, they're going to be ahead of us because they say to people, do as we say, and they'll do it. So they can leapfrog ahead of us because we are a democracy and we need to go in a corner and take a vote and convince each other, which

will take days and weeks and months. So inefficient democracies cannot survive in a world of efficient tyrannies. We will be the losers. That's a good take. I've never heard this argument. You're cooking right now. Keep going. Okay.

So we will become the losers, right? Democracy needs to live healthily in all the places where people are demanding it. And if they don't, and if they don't thrive, then it will come eventually to wear ours down. You know, as Churchill said, democracy is not the best form of government, but it's the best kind of government as compared to all the others that have come before. Right. And that's our predicament. It's not great. And certainly, we have failed at promoting it through military power.

Okay, we haven't figured out. But if we can't figure out how to support the nations who are demanding it in whatever other way other than military intervention, then democracy will be and military intervention, then democracy will be on the retreat, and it will force ours to similarly diminish. See, people with the wrong intentions could take what you just said as their own Trojan horse to then do things that go against what you just said, by the way. But. But that I've never heard it put that way before. And that's the best. I mean, these guys back here were both nodding along, right? When you said that too, I turned and they were both like, whoa, that's probably the best argument I've ever heard for that.

And a lot of people don't want to hear that right now because we are tired from all the wars and what could happen and all that. And I get that. But like, there's a balance there. There's definitely a balance there. And if what you're saying is, there has to be some form of example, and I hear you on not necessarily advocating military intervention.

I wanna make sure people- I'm not advocating for military intervention, period. So I wanna make sure people hear that as well, cause that needs to be said clearly. Because that's where people get the most concern, boots on the ground, that kind of thing. But if there are certain proxy type situations that can happen around the world,

or lead from the front opportunities where we can fill that gap, yeah, I think you make a good argument that we should do that. And that's actually, that's one thing that, from's first term, his second terms obviously knew I need to see how this plays out. But from his first term, I understood where he was coming from with, you know, America first, and we're losing on a lot of deals around the world. I think he was right that we're losing on a lot of things. But the correction to that can be then totally pulling away

from all those things. And to me, there's gotta be a balance there. We'll see how he does this time, but there's gotta be a balance there with, hey, if we're covering 10%, you've been covering one. It needs to be more like five and five, but we're not gonna walk away from the table and let this vacuum be filled with the Bricks Nations

or something like that. There needs to be that balance. I would agree. I agree. I think the best way to think about this, perhaps, isn't through me convincing you or you convincing me or a discussion. It's to think about what are the best decades of contemporary human history?

Like, when we look at the past 100, 200 years. Nineties? I would say after 1950s, you know, we are progressively, things are progressively getting better. Now, if you look to philosophers and intellectuals like Steven Pinker, he keeps saying that, you know... There are a lot of things that don't work, but when you look at the general progress in every way,

we are so much better off now than we have been. But especially in the last 40, 50 years, why? Yes, we've had medical inventions and human health has grown and we have been better at controlling disease and there's technology and all these things that have improved our lives. But among others has been a global coalition

around the idea of democracy, right? We've had Europe- Post-World War II, you're saying, after this effectively. Absolutely, yes, yes. And that gave us this beautiful life where I, as a person who once had a red cover Iranian passport, wherever airport in the world I showed up, I was a persona non grata and couldn't cross a border.

Until my life improved by leaps and bounds as soon as the color of my passport cover went from dark red to dark blue. Thank God. And I had the American passport and I zipped through, you know, all these European borders. Why? Because there was, there was a international global collaboration and coalition and understanding,

and we trusted each other and we supported each other. If that falls apart, we won't have this great lifestyle that we've had for so many decades. You say the 90s, but, you know, it's been a lot longer than that. Oh, yeah. When you said it, I thought you just meant, like, pick a decade. Right, pick a decade.

Nineties were pretty pink. Nineties probably would be, yeah, within those decades. But, you know, after 1950s, we are progressively doing better and better. And part of it is this global, you know, after 1950s, we are progressively doing better and better. And part of it is this global, you know, is NATO, is post-World War II alliance between the United States and Europe. And, you know, we've had the idea of going to Europe and being able to, you know, hold your head high as an American with all of our shortcomings and political errors and historical wrongs still.

And we chance losing all of that if the cause of democracy is abandoned. And, you know, I have said this next quote till I'm blue in the face on so many podcasts. But if you look at the universal law of physics, it's that for every action, there's an equal but opposite reaction, which is supposed to set equilibrium, right? But if I have an action here and an action and a reaction here, that's a lot less violent than an action here and a reaction here, right?

To get to equilibrium. Point being, we've moved since World War II very slowly to where the actions, it's like you were saying earlier, death by a thousand punches or a thousand slits, to where the actions and reactions have now gotten fever pitch way apart, where we're now far enough past such a cataclysmic global event like that, like World War II, that generations have passed, people have lost an understanding of what it means to

be on the brink of survival, not just politically, but literally personally, with everything that happened there. It's on both sides in the sense that the people who represent the good of democracy and who have gotten into the systems, in many cases in which we've voted them in, have slowly grown the bureaucracy, if you will, and taken advantage of that and lost the trust of the people. And I will argue as a person, I will argue with the people and be on their side for that and understand where that comes.

So much so that now there's no trust. And so the people, Main Street, me, us sitting in this room, there is an inclination across the masses to look at anyone in power, including in a democracy, as being elite, out of touch, completely in control of the narrative and therefore anything they say, I must do the opposite. And one of the places We're seeing this now and I feel like this is very relevant to bring up is in historical revisionism So people now suddenly like obviously no history is ever 100% right it is written by the victors There's some things that get deleted for sure

I'm not arguing that but you know It's a pretty easy argument for me to look at World War II and see who the good guys were and who the bad guys were, you would think. But that down is now starting to be a question online and it's not one or two people. It's a it's it's a lot of people and I'm all for asking questions. I'm all for researching things and things not being banned from being looked at and finding the nuance. But like, there's certain places where there's not a lot of nuance on some stuff. And what I feel like has happened is there's been such a international response

to what's going on in Israel and in Gaza, that now that is being commingled with like, their Zionist current government is being commingled with all Jewish people. And now there is this rewriting of, oh, you know what, World War II, you know, it actually never should have happened. Really, Churchill was a warmonger, Hitler was bad.

They still say that, most people, thank God. But, you know, Churchill kind of caused this and we lost 40 million people. And to me, yeah, no one wants to lose 40 million people. But if you don't understand the context of how a guy like Hitler rose, who happened to not only dislike Jewish people, he disliked anyone who wasn't Aryan, he wouldn't have just stopped there, right? Why do you think it is that people now can't hold two thoughts at the same time?

Where they're like, okay, I don't like what's happening in Gaza right now, that's bad. We don't really like the Israeli government. But, you know, also, it's pretty clear that the history we know, even if it's told to us by some people we don't like, sometimes in authority, like, it's mostly right, and we need to make sure we learn from those mistakes, because it seems like we're not doing that anymore.

Mm-hmm. Um... There are too many elements kind of swirling in the same, uh, you know, liquid of disastrous, you know, circumstances right now. But, you know, going back to our earlier conversation, I think part of it is the fact that, you know, when you, if we were to focus on the United States and, you know, the failures of, I don't

want to say the Democratic Party, but American democracy over the past 20, 30 years. It has to find some explanation. You know, people will eventually express frustration and find a scapegoat to blame all their dissatisfaction and disillusionment on. And historically, it oftentimes has been to Jews. You know, it was in Germany in the 30s and the 40s. It's been oftentimes Jews throughout history.

You know, sometimes the escape code changes, but people who have had expectations and have made demands, and those demands have not been met will eventually have to express it. It either becomes a revolution or an uprising, or it takes the deformed shape of these dangerous social movements like Nazism or, you know, radical rightism or radical leftism as we see both expressed in our country right now.

But I see part of it as... And not all of it, because, you know, for one thing, antisemitism has been going up and down throughout history. It hasn't been a... something that we have been able to get rid of, but we, you know, it's gone quiet for a while and then it rises back up and then it goes quiet again and rises back up again. And we may very well be during those moments when it's risen up again as it does. But our democracy has failed in some very major ways. We haven't been able to deliver on so many promises that this government, this whole republic,

was established upon. We had, you know, there has been a lot of... different, vast social gaps. Not just class gaps, but access to opportunities among different groups and swaths of people. We, you know, we are, we believe in, you know, free economic, you know, competition and all those things. But at the same time,

we also need to be committed in providing healthcare to our people. We can't abandon our country to our people in the country where some of the greatest advances in medicine takes place, why should a percentage of our society not have any access to anything, let alone those great advanced medical possibilities and treatments? So we have created a generation, if not a couple of generations of disaffected people who haven't had access

to opportunities. One of the most earth-shattering things that I have seen is the footage of Robert um, campaigning in the Appalachia among the white, poor people of Appalachia in the 60s, in the early 60s. Oh, the father. Okay. The father, not, not the, you know, head of health and human services right now. Um, and he's like, I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that.

I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that.

I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that.

I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. people lined up for the most radical at the time, your Democrat that they knew, hoping, you know, and campaigning with him for all the promises he was making about, you know, campaign against poverty and all the other things that he was talking about. And now a lot of those people are in a complete opposite camp. So what happened?

You know, what happened that those very same people in the very same region with the very same complaint made such a radical political shift? They didn't. They, I think that's the answer. They still want the same thing. They want the same exact thing. They just think that the original Democrats

failed at delivering it. Yes, and politics, and we've seen this with both parties. This is true, politics becomes like a circle or a boomerang, however you want to put it, it's the same type of of result to where the shoe gets on the other foot with these two parties over cycles, right? And you look at the 2015-2016 cycle, the two people who made the most waves in that cycle were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, whose solutions could not have been more opposite other than a couple of things on China, right?

But their identification of boom, there's the problem and let me talk to people about it. They understood that perfectly and they both agreed on what the exact problems were. And so when they went and spoke with these people, it was the first time looking back on it now where it was less at the time about Democrat, Republican versus, you know, like if you want to put a term on it, like more populism. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about with Robert F. Kennedy back in the 60s. He spoke to those people because he spoke to their problems. And now there's, there's other people who are doing that today who actually exist in both parties in a way, but that's what people

are going to gravitate towards. It's fascinating to look at the history of how... I mean, at the end of the day, people are always gonna vote on their main issues for themselves to take care of their family, which is what they should do. Right? I happen to be reading a lot on the topic of, you know, 19th century, both in Iran and in the United States. And I'm just about to finish the Ron Chernow's biography

of President Grant. Is that, you know what, that's on my list to read. Is it good? I am riveted. He's great, Ron Chernow. I'm totally riveted. He's great, but I'm also discovering how little I knew about Grant, and, you know, I have newfound admiration for him.

But the reason I raised this is because the worst moment of American domestic strife and crisis has occurred during the times that we have failed at delivering the promises of our origins, or our original promises, which is, you know... Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for all, right? This is why the Civil War took place.

This is why the Civil Rights Movement took place, you know, in the 60s. And I think we're in another moment of national, domestic, major crisis moment of national domestic major crisis that in my view is another manifestation of us failing at life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. We just- Can you explain that more? We just have to figure out how it is

that we need to once again correct our course and deliver life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I mean, in the Civil War, it's clear. We knew right and wrong. But I bet if you ask somebody in 1863 on the streets of New York, do you know what's going on? They couldn't articulate it with the clarity that you and I can because we're looking at it

from the perspective of so long. 1960s, the same. I'm sure people who were living through those years couldn't see it, or at least some couldn't as clearly as it seems right now with such a just obvious consensus. And I think we're living through a similar period because the current crisis has to be a manifestation of something we have failed to do in upholding life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, whether it's been in delivering

equal opportunity to people. Not, again, not equal outcome. We can't control outcome. But we must provide equal opportunity. And we have failed in many ways at providing equal opportunity. So how can we all have life, liberty, and or pursue happiness if we haven't had access to equal opportunities? So this in some ways, this is another moment of historical American crisis that can be

put in sort of the historical perspective of all the others that came as a result of us failing at that original promise. If there's one good thing about this time around with trying to balance the scales as we are in society, it's that I think, you know, in the past, it's been very clear, as you said, with the Civil War, it's like we literally had people enslaved based on their race. I mean, this is like one plus one equals two. Obviously, that's what we're going to try to fix here. Now to cite Pinker again, who you brought up, the one graph that Pinker talks about,

I think, in Enlightenment Now, his 2018 book, is, you know, to your point, he's talking about how everything is categorically better now than it has been. Like, we have times where we step back for a couple years and then statistically we step forward and I think his data is great and I think his arguments are great and I agree. To his credit, one of the things he points out, and I think I talked about this on the second podcast I ever did, but like he, he talks about how since the 19, especially like the early 1980s, the graph of income inequality has moved in a V, which is not good, right?

And the premise he's coming up with is that we are basically like economizing away the middle class, which includes people of every race. And so you have black people in the hood, you have Mexican people in LA, you have white people in Appalachia. Go down the list of every race who are all affected by the same thing, to where society is moving more and more 1% versus 99.

And if there's one good thing that could come out of this kind of like crisis-ish moment that we're in, I think it would be the fact that there's a unification across people from different backgrounds who have the same desires of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and want to see a system that now creates a more balanced economy like we used to have. I mean that could be a good balanced economy like we used to have. Mm hmm. I mean, that could be a good thing to come out of this. I couldn't agree more. Now I'm getting back to your story in Iran though.

I put a pin in this earlier, but I want to come back to it. The day that they took over or the week that they took over in 1979. How old were you at that time? 12. Okay. So you can process this. Oh, absolutely. It's not like you're four. I haven't processed anything since then. It's sort of an ongoing movie in my head all the time. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments. Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa card. The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Unpoints for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply.

What was that like though? Like the moment they took over and suddenly it's, you know, if you think about it in the cinematic version of life, to me it's almost like you have a bright day and then cloak of darkness. I was reading the Grant biography, as I mentioned, and I came upon these few lines by Oliver Wendell Holmes that said, We shared the incommunicable experience of war. We felt, as we still do, a passion for life.

And in our youths, our hearts were touched with fire. And I think that if you replace war with revolution in that quote by Holmes, you capture the essence of the 1979 experience for the people who lived through it, um, you know, that year. Now, everybody I know who looks back at 1979 and knows how bad that movie went, you know, how terrible was the outcome

of something that so many people had invested so much hope into, looks at it and says, "'To hell with it, it was all wrong.'" so much hope into, looks at it and says, to hell with it, it was all wrong. But at that moment, when we were all feeling, and you know, I as a kid even, that, you know, there's going to be so much more freedom. And I remember, I was, you know, in my memoir, I talk about this one book that I had called The Little Black Fish. And it was the story of this little fish who is somewhere in a little pool of water and keeps asking his mother that he wants to go to the ocean and everybody in that little pool of water tells the little black fish, forget

about it, you know, there is no ocean, don't even think about the ocean, you can't go to the ocean. And finally, as you know and I know, the little blackfish, in fact, goes to the ocean and sees, you know, this universe of being free and all these other creatures. And even though it gets killed at the end of the book, it's still very happy that it got out of the little pool. Now, this was a book my brother had given me and had read to me as a kid.

And in fact, it's part of my... the start of my memoir. And I knew that it was a banned book. And I loved it, but I knew that I couldn't take it out of the house or show it to anyone. Why? Because the little blackfish was the metaphor of all of Iran. We were all trapped in this little pool,

and we wanted to get out of our little pool and go to the ocean, and the ocean was the place of freedom with all the multiplicity and varieties of creatures that lived in it and blah blah, right? I really believed that that's what the revolution was going to be because I'd read that book and I knew that was a banned book and I knew that that's what the nation was trying to do. So in the time that it did take place, there was only excitement. In the same way that I look at, you know, the footage that came out of Syria, out of Damascus within

the first week or two or three after the fall of Assad. And my heart ached because people were flocking. Syrians were flocking from other parts of the world, coming to Damascus. It was absolutely the same for a lot of Iranians who were around the world. And after the 1979 revolution came back thinking that they were going to build the country. And- You saw that, hold on, I'm just asking this

because it's relevant to you. Even as someone who is Jewish in Iran, with now, you know, a radical Islamic leader taking over, you still thought that? Your parents thought that? No, my parents didn't. Okay. My parents were grieving. My parents were like, you know, in...

You know, they were drawing the curtains, shutting the shutters, locking the doors, going, you know, just huddling together. And you're like, what the fuck are you doing? Yeah, exactly. You know? I'm... You know, people have asked me because I give book talks and people say, are you stupid?

I said, no, I wasn't stupid, I was 12. You know, and the only thing I and, you know, people like me had going for them, you know, was our youth. Because if we were older, you know, 20, 30 years older, we would know that this isn't something to be excited about as my parents weren't. But, um, but you know, we were young,

and we had read these books with these metaphors, and it really looked like, um, something much better was gonna come. When did that change for you? Um, I talked about this recently. I began to feel cracks in that belief as early as March 8th of 1979. So not long after they took over. Not long. So what happened on March 8th, 1979? It was International Women's Day. And... Can't have that there. Boom! Exactly! For God's sake!

This is exactly what it was. That, you know, there has been a revolution. Two thousand five hundred years of history has collapsed. Iran is going through the biggest upheaval, not just of its modern history, but perhaps of all of its history. And this guy who was in exile in a turban is returning to the country to replace somebody with this opulent crown and, you know, everything. And so, you know, he comes to the country at the end of January, and by February 11th, the Shah is gone, the regime has changed, he's in power. And you would think that there's so much to do, right?

There is a military to put together, there is a cabinet to put together, there is like foreign policy to think of, there is domestic policy to think of, there is like, you know, the whole country has access to all these guns because they've gone into these, you know, barracks and they have, you know, they have taken over the barracks. So everybody has distributed the weapons and they're all running

around with kleshnikovs everywhere. So you have to make the country safe, reclaim all those weapons. But what does Ayatollah Khomeini begin to talk about? What does Ayatollah Khomeini begin to talk about? Re-instituting the Islamic dress code laws. What? This is your priority? So you know, about two weeks after he's come and he's come to power, he says, I think we need to bring back the mandatory hijab, mandatory Islamic dress code laws. And so on March 8th, 1979, people in Iran take to the streets, women in Iran take to the streets.

And they, you know, they, some of them have their heads covered with the veil and some of them look like me. And by the way, the footage of that is available, March 8th, 1979, Iranian women. And it is one of the most astonishing historical footage of all time. Because there are women with hijab on the street and women without hijab.

And the women with hijab are saying that we are... A 1970s... Yeah, we don't need the volume. Let's keep going. So the women with the hijab are saying, we are here because we want to protect our sisters and our daughters from, you know, another imposition. We are choosing to have the veil, from, you know, another imposition, we are choosing to have the veil,

but we want to defend the rights of them being without. Freedom of choice, yeah. Yeah. And as you see, they're all women, because, you know, with the exception of just some random men among them. And one of the things that they're chanting is, we didn't make a revolution to go backward. And here I am sitting at home. Obviously I wasn't there.

My parents wouldn't let me. And I only knew that it was happening because I was looking at the news. And I'm looking at the footage, the correspondent who's narrating this event is saying these bad women. Oh, state media. Exactly, these bad, corrupt women

have taken to the streets. And I'm looking at them saying, what makes them corrupt? They look like us. That's like your mostly peaceful protest moment right there. Nothing to see. And so these women who somehow are bad or corrupt or not good women, the implication of not good women, as you know, which at the time in that cultural context meant they were prostitutes or they were sexual deviants

and things. And I'm looking at them, they're nurses, they're teachers, and they're there with union banners, like the union of, you know, medical assistants and nurses and teachers. And why are they saying they're bad? And one of the things that the state media guy was saying was look at their bracelets. They, with the jangle of their bracelets,

they are demonstrating. And I'm thinking, what's wrong with bracelets? You know? And so, it was at that moment that I, as young as I was, began to think... I can't buy this. You know, I can't quite buy, first and foremost, that these are bad women because I can't see anything bad about them.

And I like the women. I like what they're doing. They're saying we didn't make a revolution to go backward in time. And so that was the very first time I questioned it. And that's actually the moment that the Iranian anti-Islamist movement in Iran in the form of the class of women who joined together took shape. That from the moment at the inception of the revolution itself,

there was also the birth and the inception of the Iranian feminist movement. They didn't know it, but at the time that they took to the streets, which is like two weeks after the revolution, the revolution was most beloved. The leader of that revolution was either most beloved or most feared. And no one dared to pose a challenge to him. Beloved or feared, not hated.

Interesting. Right? Yeah. And no one, no one dared to cross him, you know, either out of love or out of fear. And yet, there were these women who were demonstrating against him. But they did get sent back to the Dark Ages after this. They did. Not immediately.

Actually, the protests succeeded. And so he later came back and said, oh, well, you know, I was just suggesting it. So he later came back and said, oh, well, you know, I was just suggesting it. Right? But within two years, when he had completely obliterated everybody else, including the Marxists and the communists who had come to a coalition with him, had completely either driven them into exile or executed them or imprisoned them, when he had firmed his grip on power, he brought back the mandatory dress code.

So you were still living there when that happened? Oh yeah. So you had to do that? Yeah. Yeah, my passport picture is... Whoa. And it's really interesting because I've looked at it and people have said to me, especially, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, when I was younger,

people would look at it and say, you look younger now, even when I was 30, than you did in your passport picture, which is from the time that you were 16. Wow. That's how depressing and just so devastating it was to go through that. Now how did you guys get out and what went into that process? Um, after the revolution, the Iranian regime didn't exactly have

an official position on the future of the Jewish community. They didn't know what exactly they were going to do, if they were going to expel the Jews or keep them. They didn't know vis-a-vis the Jewish community, whether they were going to be hostile or accepting. And I think both tenancies existed, coexisted within the regime at the same time. So, you know, in some places they were saying,

you know, these Jews are indigenous Jews, and gosh, if there is any community indigenous to Iran, it's the Jews. There were Jews in Iran before there were Muslims in Iran. Really? Jews went to Iran after the fall of the second temple. In like the 70s, 70s A.B.? Yeah, into Iran after they were driven out

when Persian Empire was a ubiquitous empire in the region and they took refuge in Iran at the time. And who... And so the Persians were there when they went there? Yes. Who are Iranians now, right? Who are Iranians now, but at the time, it was called the Persian Empire. And, you know, Cyrus the Great famously said,

you know, gave them refuge and sheltered them in Persia. And part of, you know, one destination for Jews who had been driven out of Israel, Jerusalem, was, major destination was Persia. And Islam had not yet come into being when Jews were in Iran. We just pulled this up. I want to read this. This is going to ignite the comment section. Jews have lived in what is now Iran for over 2,700 years, predating the arrival of Islam by about a thousand years. I'm just reading this

people. Their presence in the region began with the Babylonian exile in 586 BC when many Jews were exiled to Babylonia, modern-day Iran, after the destruction of the first temple. So this is... Right, right, right. I'm sorry. So first temple, not... I said second temple. Right. When some returned to Judea, while some returned to Judea, many remained and established a Jewish community in Persia. Wow. You weren't kidding. I wasn't. You know, so, you know, it's really, really...

I mean, think about irony. I mean, I... One of the first... I'm going to try not to cry here. One of the first, uh, graffitis that was scrawled on the wall across our, um, you know, our building in Iran was Jews get lost with a swastika.

I talk about that in my memoir. So I wake up one morning, it's December of 1978. The revolution hasn't happened yet, but there's, you know, the country is in a state of turmoil and I see this sign and I don't know what it is. I've never seen it. I've never seen a swastika in my life. So I read Jews get lost, I go back inside, I drag my father to the door, and I open the door,

he reads it, and his face is ashen. He loses all the color. I look at him and I know it's bad. Right? And he shuts the door and he says, let's just go inside. He doesn't say what it is. He doesn't open the door and says, oh, my child, allow me to express this piece of,

you know, explain this history to you. He shuts the door, he is terrified. He takes me back inside and I say, what is that sign? Because I had never seen a swastika. And so it is in that country where the presence of Jews precedes the presence of Muslims by about a thousand years, where we as the Jews are called upon to get lost, are told to leave. And so you have to understand how devastating this has to be, where you're told to get out of this place, then so many of my father's relatives, and about this I write also at length in my memoir and elsewhere, my father's sisters and their businesses, which was fabric. they had a fabric store, was set on fire

in a village in central Iran. And everything burns, including the cash that they used to save in the folds of the fabric in the store, because they, you know, this was a village. They didn't take money to the bank, they kept it, you know, safe at home. Or in their, you know, this was a village. They didn't take money to the bank. They kept it, you know, safe at home. Or in their, you know, under the fabric.

Everything burned. They were completely made penniless. And so I see this aunt with, like, her seven children come to our home in January of 1979, knocking on our door, tears running down her face, saying to my father, brother, brother, everything is burned, everything has turned into ashes. And next week after that, she's on a plane

with her seven children to Israel. And now the rest of the world is saying, you know, go back to wherever you came from. Well, wherever they came from, at least in the case of my paternal side of the family, was the very place where you set things on fire. I mean, I didn't want to go back to all this again after the conversation that we had,

but you pulled this all up and... This is great. Yeah. Because I can see the emotion on your face talking about it all these years later, and how that must feel. So I wanna be careful how I put this, because I damn well do not wanna turn that around on you in any way.

But earlier, you did say, obviously, you never wanted to leave, and your hand was forced, but you've now accepted that like you're here and you don't have, I forget how you put it, but you're like, I don't have the right to a run. I don't have any claims over it anymore. That's so interesting though, that you would have that type of visceral memory, understand the history of your people being there, understand how wrong that is for anyone to be told they can't be somewhere where their father's father were and their father's father was.

But now you can have the perspective of, don't support that that happened, but it did, and so here we are and I accept it. Yeah. My parents didn't reconcile in the same way as I did. You were telling me. But I'm an artist, I'm a writer, you know, I'm a... I'm a thinker, and I put this in sort of civilizational perspective. And I realized that, my God, it took me a decade or two, but

to understand this, but what a great place I came to. I, you know, my last book is called A Beginner's Guide to America for the Immigrant and the Curious. And it was my homage to America. And it was my homage to America when you, I published it in 2021, 2022. I can't remember exactly which, but I, as people were turning xenophobic in our country and we're saying, you know, our country is full and we can't afford any more immigrants. I thought I should speak up on behalf of immigrants and say, if there's anybody who understands the value of this democracy and is willing to die to defend it, it's me. And let me tell you why. And this book was what I did to say that so many of you who were born and raised in this country

are missing the point because you don't understand that so many things that we have here, they're not a part of the decor. They're not, they haven't always been there. They're not, you know, they're not something that just grow here. Right. That if you relent and forsake them for even a second,

they will be lost. And I can tell you that because I lived in a place where they were lost. And I don't see it as being permanently here and perennial part of this landscape. That if you don't defend it and guard it, they can be gone. You also though, like you got to come here.

And I'm biased, I just won the lottery being able to be born in America, right? It's crazy thinking about that sometimes. I could have been born somewhere like current Iran or something like that and have a whole different life that I wouldn't like nearly as much. But this place, for all the problems we have, is such an amazing place. And I'm so lucky to live here,

and it seems like you feel the same way. You were able to get here. There's a lot of people even from Iran from that situation that either never got out or didn't get to land in a country as nice as America. And that's the, that's the unfortunate thing because, you know, whenever you're talking about people who are going to be displaced, where they end up also is, is every bit as, as much of the question. I think that's a lot of what people are concerned about right now in Palestine because you have – I would love to get your thoughts on this.

You have a situation where it's kind of a lose-lose. And what I mean by that is if you have a bunch of people who are in a war zone where everyone's dying and they're going to keep dying when they're there But if you push them out to other countries in the area not America, right? So they won't get to come here They're gonna go to somewhere that frankly is not as good You're gonna ethnically cleanse the area. Even if that's not the intention that is what happens So how like this is the impossible, like, $21 trillion question, but how do you wind down a war like this, in your opinion?

It isn't something that can happen, obviously, overnight, and I know I'm not breaking news to you when I say that. It needs some immediate solutions, but ultimately it needs some long-term solutions. And I am personally interested in the long-term solutions. And those long-term solutions, in part, includes, first and foremost, developing a culture through education that accepts the fact that Israel is there and is going to be there. And it cannot be wiped off the map. It can't be wished away. It can't be river to the sea emptied out of its juice. And that the job is not to grow up, to pick up a gun and kill a Jew. That our job is to build the next Singapore in Gaza, in West Bank, and in all the places we're going to call Palestine. But something, the most important thing

that stands in the way of that in the long term is the fact that generation after generation of Palestinians are being raised within, you know, public school system, uh, and within sort of the mosques, whatever, uh whatever propaganda system that, you know, these revolutionary radical groups in the region have, being brainwashed into aspiring to become martyrs,

as opposed to productive members of a society, of a thriving society that needs to build a future for itself, needs to have dreams of a future that does not include death and killing. And so you need to design a new, you know, whole host of educational books that eliminate Israel from, you know, pictures that are in those books as the enemy that we're going to, you know, if we're teaching math, you know,

you have two guns and three Israelis, how do you kill them all? You know, you know, if we're teaching math, you know, you have two guns and three Israelis, how do you kill them all? You know, all these things that, you know, have become the basic foundation of education. Now, I understand this because when the war between Iran and Iraq was going on, Ayatollah Khomeini kept saying, how lucky we are that this war started,

because now we can all do what we are meant to do, which is to become martyrs. What? We have come into being? To die? Is he gonna be on the front lines with us? Right. Right? So, as he's saying this, as he's like egging everybody on to go get killed,

there is a 13-year-old who straps grenades around his waist and throws himself under the Iraqi tanks in the war front. How he gets there and how he gets hold of grenades, I do not know. But there was this 13-year-old who did that during the early 1980s. And so as soon as the news hit the press, Aytolah Khomeini gives a major speech, and he says, my leader is the 13-year-old who straps grenades to his back and throws himself under the way of Iraqi tanks and becomes a martyr. So what happens? You generate. Generation after

generation of people who think that to be a good citizen is to, you know, blow yourself up. But there are a lot of people who are looking at that going, that's crazy, obviously, and that's why he doesn't have the support in his country and has to rule with an iron fist. But he does have the support, you know, in American universities. Yeah, again, I think they're... Not to defend some of the stuff they're saying at all, I think there's a massive level of cognitive dissonance there, though. I think there's a lot of stupid kids who aren't thinking about...

Right, and I'm being unfair by saying, you know, there are a lot of stupid kids who aren't thinking about... Right. And I'm being unfair by saying, you know, there are a lot of reasonable people who clearly, you know, are looking for a peaceful solution between Israel and Palestine in this war. However, the idea that this ideology that celebrates a future... Right. This ideology that celebrates a future that is only including death has become celebrated, as we have seen in the aftermath of October 7th, throughout Europe and the United States.

A lot of what we have seen in these protests, all the people who came out and said, this is an act of resistance by the terrorists who took us there, they're all in a way, tipping their hats to the notion of martyrdom as an ideology and as something to, something valid, something moral. I agree that that's crazy.

My issue when we generalize all this stuff though is that there are also in the midst of this people who are not supporting Hamas or Hezbollah who just think that Israel has gone too far Which by the way, you've you've written some pieces talking about Netanyahu and disagreements you have with him as well So you're you're balanced on this issue, which is great but like there are people who will talk about things that they think Israel has done wrong and We're literally writing legislation in the United States where we're supposed to represent free speech,

all the opposites of what an Iran represents, by the way, to where it's like, no, no, but you can't talk about that one. And to me, that just makes the problem way worse because it's like a Streisand effect. It makes people go, well, why the fuck can't we talk about shit that they do wrong? I can talk about my own government doing stuff wrong, but I can't talk about Israel?

Like, that's's gotta get fixed. 100%. I'm not gonna sit here to disagree with you on the suppression of freedom of speech that's occurring. Especially in the name of defending Jews, you know, which puts me in the forefront of those who need to vociferously object to this. At the same time, the idea that we have generations of people, whether here or throughout Europe, who think that the Iranian regime has been on the side of the week and is in any way, shape, or form justified,

or October 7th can be defended by any name, you know, by any definition, that's terrifying. It is scary. I agree. It's just like, at some point, you gotta step back and have some common sense on some of this stuff. And I feel like we lose that on a lot of issues now, unfortunately, with the stuff we fight about in society. But I agree with you, it has been lost to a scary degree on this one. But listen, this stuff is difficult to wade through. We're

just a podcast talking about it here. But I feel like if we could turn the volume down and less people could die, and there could be a little more peace in the world, however that happens. If there's a little piece of that that happens, because of shows like this and all the other shows out there that are covering it too, then that's great. But it takes great people coming in here

to talk about it as well. So I really appreciate you doing this, Roya This has been awesome today. Your story is really incredible. Thank you. I really enjoyed it and I really want to meet your guys Do you I'll introduce you to my guys. Don't worry Everybody else you know what it is. Give it a thought get back to me. Peace Thank you guys for watching the episode If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.

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