The Daily Beast Podcast - Iranian Protestors Are Dying ‘Final Destination’ Style

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

The excuses that the oppressive Islamic regime has given to explain the violence (and deaths) against protesters—sparked by the death of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini in morality police custody—are so “appalling” that it’s “laughable,” says British-Iranian-American journalist Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. In this week’s bonus episode, host Andy Levy interviews Modarressy-Tehrani on what’s happening with the protests in Iran, including the violence from the Islamic regime and resistence from citizens who are fighting back, especially among Gen Z. Plus! She shares what Iranians actually want from the United States (hint: not intervention.)  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh, through the tears. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Joining me now is Caroline Madaresi Tarani, an Emmy-nominated British-Iranian American journalist and the host and producer of the award-winning podcast, American Metamorphosis,

currently in its fourth season. Caroline, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Andy. Protests in Iran have been going on for over a month now, just to give us sort of an overview. This all started with the arrest of a young woman named Masa Amini by the government's morality police for, I guess, the improper wearing of a hijab? Yeah, it is as outrageous as you made it sound and ludicrous as you made it sound. Yeah, so Massagina Amini was a Kurdish-Iranian woman. She was 22 years old, and she had been visiting from the Kurdistan region of Iran to Tehran, which is the capital. And there, when she was on this visit to Sim family, she was detained by the so-called morality police.

This is a wing of the Revolutionary Guard. They are mostly volunteers. They are not always men. They are also women. And their job is to police the streets of the capital and around the country in all of the provinces to ensure that the regime's rules and regulations, which are draconian and inherently misogynistic, are being adhered to. And so Massa was detained.

by the morality police. She was taken to a re-education center. Many people visiting Iran will have unfortunately, many women will have unfortunately been taken to a center like this. They're very familiar with these kinds of centers. And they are as abhorrent and as sort of weirdly dystopian as they sound. And in custody, we don't know exactly what happened. Her family have said that she was beaten.

there have been conflicting reports from various coroners, but what we know and what we believe to have happened is that she was beaten so severely that she died in custody, having been detained for what is likely to have been a few errant hairs poking underneath her headscarf or hijab, as you mentioned. And her death has catalyzed weeks of unprecedented levels of protest across the country. Yeah, it's just horrific. And I guess the regime's line is that this 22-year-old, apparently very healthy young woman, died of a heart attack. Yeah, I mean, it's outrageous, Andy. I mean, the lines that we have subsequently seen from the regime in response to the murder and the death of protesters who have been out in the streets in their thousands as a result of mass's unjust killing have been appalling.

I mean, and just like laughable. I mean, people are supposedly throwing themselves off buildings. people throwing themselves in front of buses. And just, I mean, it's just, it's like something from like final destination in its like outrageous egregiousness of the kind of excuses that the regime are palming off on the rest of the world. And of course, most people are taking with a pinch of salt as it should be. Sure. You called these protests unprecedented. And I wanted to ask you, I saw a history professor from the London School of Economics.

I believe his name is Roham Alvandi. He told CNN, this is not a protest. for reform. This is an uprising demanding the end of the Islamic Republic, and that is something completely different to what we've seen before. Do you agree with that? I agree for the most part. Protests are sort of in the blood of Iranians, you know, that the country has seen its share of protests over the last century. Forty-three years ago, when the Islamic regime came into power, there have been protests and there have been attempts to mass congregate in the past. The most recent one that people may be familiar with was the Green Revolution in 2009.

We did see mass protests then. What makes this unprecedented and what makes this different is, firstly, that women and girls, and I use that phrase very deliberately because we've seen school girls, we've seen elementary kids in the streets protesting for freedom. Women and girls have been the catalyst and the engine, that's an expression that Robin Wright from the New Yorker which I think perfectly sums up what we're seeing. Women and girls have been a catalyst in the engine for the protests that we have been witnessing and experiencing.

And also I think that the other element of this is that it has not, the regime's attempts to squash the now five weeks old protests and revolution have not been successful. Yeah, and you wrote an excellent piece for the Daily Beast a few weeks ago called Iran's

women are once again the vanguard of a revolution. And as you say, there is I was going to say there's little doubt, but there is literally no doubt that these protests, this uprising, however you want to frame it, is being driven by Iranian women and girls, as you say. Absolutely. And I think that what we are seeing here are sort of beyond hijab, right? So I think that the protests were sparked by the unlawful killing of Massagina Amini because of her, quote, unquote, improper hijab.

But what women have been protesting for are basic fundamental free. In Iran, if you are a woman, you cannot get divorced without multiple different courts acquiescing, whereas a man can just say I'm divorced and then that's it. Custody is unequal. Participation in the labour market is unequal. In terms of any kind of aspect of a female's life, women and men are yoked differently in the Iranian structure and the Islamic regime structure. And so these protests have been different in the sense that they aren't just merely economic protests. We've seen those recently in the past. You know, right now, inflation in Iran hovers around 40 percent. You think you had it bad here in the US? 40 percent is what it is in Iran.

And so we've seen economic protests in the past. We've seen labor union protests in the past in 2018, 2019, just to name a couple of years. But they have been sort of dealt with relatively swiftly. The regime's sort of backlash to these protests has been swift, aggressive. And for the most part had been successful. What makes these different, Andy, is that they are not successful, and they are trying. They have imprisoned over 12,500 people that we know of in the last five weeks. They have killed over 250 people. They have murdered over 28 children. Again, that we know of. So the level of response that we're seeing from the Islamic regime certainly also should tell you and tell the world that these are very different protests. And I would go so far as,

and I think Iranian diaspora and the Iranians that you're hearing from directly in Iran are saying that this is a revolutionary movement. It is morphed beyond protest. Well, and that leads me to my next question, I think, perfectly. Are there similarities to be drawn here between what's currently going on and the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah? That's a very loaded question. Okay. I was a very loaded question. Well, I apologize for that. No, no, no.

I mean, I think that the, I think that on the one hand, yes, on the one hand in the last week and a half, we saw oil workers, for example, become part of the protest. So if I backtrack a second, we started out with the protest being, as I mentioned, being predominantly women and young girls. In the last few weeks, what we've seen as a coalescence of a substrata of Iranian society, which is also very unique. We have seen this movement transcend class, transcend age. This is not a movement against Islam.

I want to make that clear. This is against the regime. So we have also seen people who are devout Muslims, who wear the hijab, joining up, not as many as people would like. I certainly think that the pious numbers of Iranians are not joining this movement in as ready numbers as I think protesters and the people in the diaspora would hope to see.

not at this current juncture. But certainly we are seen a substrata of different aspects and different components of Iranian society joining this movement. Where it's similar is, like I mentioned, the oil workers have just most recently started joining. They've made their own list of demands. They were an accelerant to the overthrow of the Shah back in 1979. The fire we recently witnessed in Evan, at Evan Prison, which is the most notorious prison inside Iran, That was drawing parallels with the fire at the Rex cinema in Abadam, which killed between 300 and 500 people in 1978. That was also seen as an accelerant to the movement.

But I think that this again, and I use that word at the start of our discussion, these are unprecedented. In part because this now is a dying regime. The people who are at the top of the regime are dinosaurs. And the generational sort of balance in Iran has now tipped distinct. to Gen Z, young people, and they have had a number of years where they've got influence from small D Democratic nations. And I'm not at all trying to big up here, democracies like the US or the UK, because I think that we have our own massive issues at home. But I think that what you're seeing here is that a generation that is emboldened, that is not drinking the Kool-Aid of the

regime, and that is extremely concerning, I think, to the lifespan of the regime. And I'm glad of that Yeah, it's just, it's interesting to me that back in 79, one of the things that the Iranian women were protesting was the banning of the hijab by the Shah. And one of the things now being protested is the compulsory wearing of the hijab. But obviously, either way, it's very much a stop controlling my body. You don't control my body sentiment, isn't it? Totally. Yeah, absolutely. And also just to mention Andy as well, in the in a few weeks after the Islamic Revolution, when one of the first laws that the regime passed was compulsory,

you did see women protesting then immediately after. So there was that sort of an immediate backlash to the compulsory hijab law. But yeah, I think that this is, it is essence, it's a very simple thing that Iranians are asking for. Self-determination. And self-determination can mean in politics, in how you want to express yourself, in who gets to control your body. Self-determination is the phrase I keep using because I also want to make it clear that this is very much an Iranian-led, Iranian-driven movement, and that there isn't some sort of like

nefarious outside country influence here as the regime consistently tries to paint it as and put out statements saying just as much. But I think you're right, Andy. It's like, it's about like, get off my body, get out of my political systems, get out of my, you know, capacity to practice or not practice religion. Let me self-determine. And honestly, I think that we could also use some of that galvanization here in the United States because I think people have been asleep for too long as we've seen in erosion of rights. That's probably for another podcast episode. As I was reading up on this, I saw one of the big chants that the protesters are using is

woman life freedom, which is obviously so powerful. But I also sort of had that thought that you just said, it's like, well, that wouldn't be a bad chant here either. I totally. Yeah, Zanzendigie Ozodi, women life, life, freedom. And it started out as a Kurdish female fighter sort of slogan. It was a move, it was a chart that is very much associated with Kurdish female fighters and freedom fighters. And so, again, there is this sort of unified sense that across different communities, we have seen in the last few decades a rise of authoritarianism, a rise of autocracies. In Iran, obviously, it's a sort of theocracy. but here in the United States, we really should be having a little bit more of a dose of this sense of like, hang on a second, what are happening to our, what's happening to our laws, what are happening to the rollbacks of our fundamental rights,

and who is in control of our bodies and who is in control of our ability to vote or not vote. And I think that we really should be drinking some of that freedom fighter cool aid here. Nothing to argue with there. Along those lines, you wrote in your piece, the unofficial flag of the 2020. movement protesting Amini's murder is arresting in its dangerous simplicity, chopped black hair, hoisted high, dancing in the breeze, wild and natural, which is just a, it's a beautiful sentence. And it's just, it really is, as you say, it's just, it's so simple but so powerful. That's sort of the essence of all movements towards freedom, right?

Like, you know, I was sort of meditating on speeches from MLK today. and just the essence of the words that Dr. King was saying, they were poetic for their simplicity. You know, this fundamental notion of our freedom, freedom in and of itself, it's a beautiful, simple concept. And I think we complicate things and regimes complicate things. And unfortunately, you know, intractable governments complicate things. When at its essence, it should be an extremely simple thing that we all have a, right to practice. And the flag, as you mentioned, that has been waving and hair people have been chopping off in solidarity. There's actually an activist campaign where they're encouraging

people to chop off their split ends because that's the part of your hair that doesn't have the DNA and mail it to the Islamic regime's outpost at the United Nations in New York. I think that it is a beautiful middle finger to a regime that is attempted to exert control. I think that, as you mentioned Annie, quite rightly, that it's just a simple concept, but those are the hardest things to fight for often. One of the things you said earlier that struck me was that, you know, the protesters had hoped for more support from the more devout Muslims or the more conservative Muslims. I don't know how the best way to describe them. I'm thinking, aren't those the people who kind of like things like the morality police? I would use the expression, the pious people.

Pious people living inside Iran because as I mentioned, I think that this isn't a fight. It's not like a Muslim versus non-Muslim fight. Sure. And I'm not saying that you're suggesting that. But I think that the word pious is perhaps the most applicable here. I think that everybody has a disdain for the morality police. I think that what you've seen in protests and what we've seen with older generations now out in the streets. And again, this is video that has been on, you know, thankfully,

being able to get out on social media by virtue of the fact that Iranians are extremely savvy, far more tech savvy than I am, and have been utilising VPNs and signal proxies to be able to get out this content, which of course the Iranian regime does not want the Western world to see. But I think that one of the things to note is that people don't like living under a oppressive regime. There might be some people that feel a kinship. with the religious overtones of the regime. But just look at the sort of the brass hacks. Like the economy has been in the shitter.

I don't know. I'm not an economist, so I don't know if that's the technical term. I believe it is. Right, right? Like it's been in the shitter. For a number of years now, people are fed up with corruption. They are fed up with sort of the Islamic regime

and the apparatus of the Islamic regime, which includes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, getting fat while they are not able to afford protein. As I mentioned, inflation is around 40%. This has been pervasive corruption that I think Iranians across the country have been fed up with. And I would also go as far, Andy, to say, you know, when Putin invaded Ukraine, and I remember in the first few weeks, there were these polls that were coming out of Russia about, you know, how many people support Putin still, and people were, you know, surprised, oh, there seems to be quite a number of people that still support Putin.

And it's like, well, who are the people conducting the surveys? And who is the person in the street that is going to turn around to the survey giver and say, oh, actually, I think he's a bit of a bastard. Of course. So I also think that it's challenging for us to, we certainly that from the protesters we see, we know exactly where they stand, right? Because they're saying it, they're shouting it, hearing it from their own mouths. I don't know about how many Iranians who are not necessarily out in the street. And that could be for a number of reasons. It doesn't necessarily mean they're against the protest.

it could just mean that they're terrified of what might happen if they get caught. But I genuinely wonder how many people are still with the regime at this juncture. And I think that the truth is is that we probably won't know unless there is some shift in who's governing the country. And people feel more comfortable and safe to be able to express themselves. So I want to go back for one minute and then move ahead. But I've heard a theory that the regime maybe made a mistake with regards to Masa Amini because she was Kurdish and they thought given sort of the history of relationships with the Kurds in Iran and in other countries in the Middle East that people wouldn't care. Does that ring true to you or does that sound like nonsense? Look, they made a

mistake in killing her period, right? Yeah, well, of course, yes. I meant politically. Yeah, politically, it is difficult to say. I mean, we have seen reprisals against Kurdish regions extremely strongly on September 30th, and this is two weeks after Massa was killed, there was a horrific upro, there was a protest in San Andage, which is a city about 250 miles west of Tehran, which is a majority Kurdish populated. And there was a horrendous backlash against the Kurds there by the regime. It was a horrendous number of people that were killed. Amnesty International had some dreadful reports and made for really dark reading that came out of there. And I think that there has not been, I'm trying to think of the best way of putting this.

Kurdish people have long been oppressed. And I think that there have certainly been Iranians that don't necessarily identify their own struggle with the Kurdish struggle. And I think that that's by virtue of that poem, which is, you know, like, if they did, I'm sort of inverting the poem, but like if they're not coming for me, I'm not going to do anything. And then eventually, you know, they come for me. So I think that there has been a little bit of that going on, but I think that the political miscalculations that the regime have made really have been in that they thought that they could

continue perverse corruption and it would just go unchecked and the people were so politically checked out that they would just deal with it and they would just sort of like eat it. And the people are now shoving Gourames Sabzi back in the face of the regime and are basically saying, pardon my French, but fuck you. Right. I have two questions. I'm honestly not sure which order to ask them in because they sort of maybe depend on each other. I'll start with one. As an American, you know, I look at this and, you know, my first thought is, we got to help them. But to make the biggest possible understatement in the world, we don't have the best track record of intervening in that region

and specifically in that country. Understatement of the century, Andy. Yes, exactly. Should we be looking to intervene? Should we be just supporting the protesters but not getting involved? Are there things we can do sort of sub-Rosa to help without drawing attention to ourselves for once? Yeah, yeah, for once. We do definitely tend to send up any kind of global uprising to ourselves here in the U.S. So that definitely is something that happens. One of the things that I've been trying to make clear, and I think one of the things that Iranians are making clear is that they're not asking for military intervention. Like, again, that should kind of be a given, but it's just for the people in the back. Yeah, they're not asking for military intervention here. What they are asking for

is more an international condemnation that has teeth against the regime's despicable crimes. You know, the UN commission status of women, for example, Iran is the head of that commission at the moment, which is just really makes a mockery, to be honest, of that wing of the United Nations. So there are certain things that people can do, that listeners can do, you know, write to your representative. There are templates available on Amnesty International and Amnesty Iran's websites and other Iranian human rights organizations. So you can kind of utilize these templates that are asking the United Nations to set up a mechanism to be able to prosecute members of the regime for war crimes and acts of violence and atrocities against protesters. You know, at the moment,

the judiciary in Iran obviously is run by the regime. So there is no independent mechanism. So we're looking, and I think Iran have been asking for independent mechanisms by the United Nations to spring into action, which they absolutely could. The other things that people can do, which, again, we're hearing from the mouths of Iranians inside Iran, is keep talking about it. Now, that sounds very simplistic, and I think that people have been really great at utilizing the hashtags associated with this uprising, the Masa Aminie hashtag, Iran protest 2022, and op Iran. These are just three hashtags people could use when they're posting images in solidarity

and support. It's making their way to the Iranian people. People inside Iran see it. And for nothing else, it's morale boosting. Like they don't feel so alone. They feel a connection and a kinship. And that's huge. I mean, just look at what's happened in Ukraine over the last eight months. The international outreach and outpouring has certainly buoyed, and I know they're speaking directly to Ukrainians in the diaspora, that it certainly buoyed the resolve of Ukrainians on the ground to know that they are being watched and they are being supported. And so I think that those are just two things that people who are listening that really can, you know, I know it can feel powerless when you're watching people fight like this and die for their freedoms. But those are just two ways

that people can get involved and help keep this in the spotlight. You know, it's interesting. You said in your piece that, and you had, this goes to something you said earlier, that this, you know, these protests are being driven by, by young people, by Gen Z, et cetera. And that you mentioned in your piece that this is, unsurprisingly, a more tech savvy generation who know how to use virtual private networks, VPNs, they know how to, they use TikTok. They, they are good at, as you put, it, censor dodging. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a remarkable way. And, you know, Like I say, I've got relatives inside Iran and some of them are, you know, over the age of 60. And they are far more tech savvy than I am, much to the chagrin of my friends.

So, yeah, absolutely. And again, you know, I've been the regime, I mean, again, we have to take a little bit of a pinch of salt, but the deputy commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said earlier this month that the average age of most of the protesters who are being arrested is 15. Wow. So we're talking about young, Genzi kids. Yeah. Kids that are saying, we are not going to live like our parents. And just on that point, Andy, one of the things that I think about sometimes is, you know, my grandfather was arrested under the Shah and imprisoned under the Shah. And then when he was one of the lucky few that got out and wasn't killed a few years later, he was also then censured by the Islamic Republic.

And as a result, my father and his generation and his sister. siblings have been a lot less political for obvious reasons. They were extremely chastened and disillusioned in and after the 1979 revolution, which was in large ways sort of co-opted by the Islamists and then became what was known as the Islamic Republic. Really, you know, the regime against the Shah started as a uprising against what people saw as either an American puppet or as somebody who had oversaw the Savok, which was the secret police, which in and of itself was known for terrorizing brutality, corruption. So, you know, things weren't rosy there either. Certainly women have had it a lot worse under the Islamic Republic. There's no, there's no two bones about

it. But I think that what we're seeing now is a generation that is much more hopeful and more emboldened than my father's generation than even my generation. I'm what Eliza Schlesinger would jokingly call an elder millennial. Sure. You know, while there have been those of us in age out on the streets, absolutely. Young people really are not prepared to be silent and just deal with it. It's a combination of, I mean, that's obviously amazing and fantastic. And as you said, it makes you hopeful. But at the same time, it kind of sucks that a 15 year old can't be just out kicking a ball around instead of having to put their life at risk for, you know, a modicum of freedom. You're totally right. And I sometimes think about this when we're talking about people.

keeping this in the spotlight. And it's like, what are we asking Iranians to do? We're asking them to die. We're asking them to keep dying so that it keeps in the news. And I think that we need to, in the media, just reassess how we and what we give coverage to. And it shouldn't take a 15-year-old kid being shot to death in the stomach with a number of rounds, as has happened this past week. It shouldn't take someone like Nika Shakarami, who was a 17-year-old. She was actually one day away from being 17, being beaten with batons around the head, so much so that she was disfigured when they eventually found her body after it had been hidden,

and then they found me found it 10 days later. It shouldn't take these atrocities for us to be aware and amplifying human rights abuses and oppressions of women around the world. Like, it really behooves our attention spans as well as consumers of media. What is it that we are wanting to see, and how much of a sort of citizen of the world do we want to be where we have the power to sort of shape the content that we consume.

And I think that we in the media have the power to shape the content that we put out there. And so I really would just love us to all sort of stop and think about that because we can't just keep putting people on the front pages just when they've died. Yeah, I mean, look, that's great, but there's a lot of Kardashian news out there. I know, sorry, yeah, I know.

God, and Travis Barker's now in the mix and, like, I'm a 382 fan. So, like, it gets complicated. I get it. It's hard. Caroline, thank you so much for joining us. That was illuminating. And I hope you'll come back and keep us posted on events as they unfold. Thank you so much for having me and for taking space and giving space to this issue, Andy.

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