 All right, let's see, we want to talk about, so I think we've talked about kind of the outline of what's going on in Iran. It's good to remind you the Iranian regime which came to power in 1979 by deposing the Shah of Iran. It is a, it's a theocratic regime. It's a regime that from the beginning has crushed its opposition. It's interesting, again, I don't know how much you know about Iranian history, but when the Atul Khomeini came to power originally, he allied himself with the left. He allied himself with the socialist left, and he promised social reform, he promised a welfare state, he promised to help the poor, and many on the left, including many French intellectuals of the left, supported Khomeini as he came to power, and the left, the secular socialist left, was actually very powerful in Iran, and many of those students who were demonstrating, who were supporting the revolution, who were out there, were not Islamist nuts, they were actually secular leftists. But of course, as soon as Khomeini achieved power, he immediately made sure to eliminate that element of, you called it, his coalition for power, and he basically killed, murdered many of these Iranian leftist leaders who had supported him and had helped the revolution come about in Iran. Khomeini instituted an authoritarian dictatorship, ethiocracy, ethiocracy where he, Khomeini, was the supreme leader who was supreme leader for life. There were nominal elections, but the candidates for the elections had to be approved by a council of clergymen, a council of Islamic imams, this is still true to this day, so only those who were approved by the religious authorities could run for president, they were chosen to election, there was a parliament, again, where all candidates were approved by the theocrats, by this council of clergy, by the council of imams, and for 40, what is it now, 43 years, this has been one of the most brutal, one of the most authoritarian, totalitarian, one of the most oppressive, barbaric regimes on planet earth. They have, you know, tortured, imprisoned thousands and thousands of people, they have murdered, they used to actually have in their budget, in their official budget, they used to have a light item called terrorism, international terrorism, where they would fund international terrorist groups around the world. After they were sued in the United States over terrorist activities, they took that line item off, but they are, they have been the largest fund of terrorism in the world for decades, since really the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. Iran has been, and you know, George Bush called it the axis of evil, it has been the most, I would say, evil regime in the world for the last, over the last 40-something years, I mean, it's a close call with North Korea, I guess. There are no, there's no freedom of speech, there's certainly no freedom of religion, there are no economic freedoms, basically the country is a totalitarian, authoritarian nightmare, and it has been so for 43 years, 43 years in which the West started out by loving, you know, many Western intellectuals, really admired the Islamist ideology partially because of its implicit socialism partially because it was a rejection of the Shah, which was viewed as a right-wing authoritarian, and the Shah of Iran, who was there before the revolution. And then later on, as the West might have condemned some of the so-called excesses of the administration, they continued to negotiate, they continued to trade, they continued to treat Iran as a regular member of the called global community, world community. Iran has often been, I guess, chair of the Human Rights Commission of the UN. The Iranians have been treated just as any other country in the world. In more recent times, there have been sanctions against Iran, sanctions go in and out over time. The sanctions were imposed in Iran primarily because there was evidence that the Iranians were developing nuclear weapons and they were hiding this fact and not allowing the various regulators of nuclear power to come in and check. So sanctions were imposed on Iran, but then there were negotiations, sanctions were lifted somewhat and then were imposed again. And on and off we go with no principle, no guiding principle, no idea of what you're dealing with. And it continues today. Every few years, every few years there is an attempt with Iran to reject the authoritarian regime, to reject the totalitarianism imposed on them, whether it is a student rebellion as there was in the late 2000s, early 20s, particularly during the Obama years, or whether it is economic as it was during the Trump administration where millions and millions of Iranians went out into the street, I think it was 2019. Every few years there is, and of course there was demonstrations early on in the Khomeini administration in the early 1980s, early 1980s. Those were crushed brutally. The grandmothers of the kids that are demonstrating today were killed and brutalized and imprisoned back then. It was already very much a woman-led kind of movement partially because a lot of these religious Islamic dictates affect women more than they do men. And then every time there's been an uprising, the authorities let it go on for a few weeks and then they clamp down, they shut them down, they kill as many people as necessary. They are brutal. In 2019 it is thought that about 1500 Iranians were killed in the streets. And generally the West's attitude towards all of these has been mealy-mouthed, general vague notions of support, and at the same time business as usual, negotiating, buying oil, treating Iran as again a civilized part of the world community, or in an era of sanctions, continuing to deal with them, while Donald Trump in both sanctions in Iran took the U.S. out of the Iranian nuclear deal, which was a good thing, he then spent most of his demonstrations time in terms of dealing with Iran in trying to get them back to the negotiating table because Donald Trump is the great negotiator and he thought he could cut a better deal. So there was no, there was none of this idea of we don't deal with evil, we don't negotiate with evil. Any deal we have with these guys would be a disaster. And indeed when the 2019 demonstrations were happening in Iran, it wasn't like the Trump administration was cheerleading and supporting them and maybe sending them, I don't know, stealth weapons or whatever. You know, the easiest, best thing for America would be an internal revolution in Iran to get rid of a regime, a regime that is not just being hostile to its own people, but a regime that's being hostile to Americans, being hostile to American interests, but more importantly, hostile to American lives. This is a regime that has killed Americans over and over and over and over and over again. And we do nothing about it. We do nothing about it. And then we don't support the demonstrators who could actually save us a war by actually getting rid of this regime and replacing it. But no, we don't want to take too strong of a moral stance on issues like this. Anyway, one of the requirements of Sharia law as interpreted by the Mullahs in Iran is that women should not be seen in public exposing their hair, their, you know, their, their hair, their head, they need to be covered. They don't require the covering of the face necessarily, but they do require the covering of the head and the hair. It turns up, this is, I think, based on scientific evidence that the Mullahs in the sheiks in Iran have a reference, that when men see women's hair, they go nuts. Their sexual appetites go through the roof and they tend to rape those women. And of course, it's not the men's fault. They're just like that. We're, you know, we're just wired to rape and pillage as soon as we see a strand of a woman's hair. So it is the women's responsibility to cover up as to prevent us, animals as we are, from going berserk and raping them. Now you might laugh at all this. You might think this is pretty ridiculous. But this is, this is the way they rationalize this. And by the way, it's the way ultra orthodox Jews rationalize the same thing. You know, you're not supposed to shake hands with a woman. You're not, you can't even sit on a sofa with a woman. And it's not because of anything the woman has done or, I mean, there is some issue about women maybe have a period and therefore they were unclean and you don't want to touch a woman who's quote, unclean. But mostly it's to prevent men from doing something they might regret because they touched a woman or because they saw a strand of a hair or God forgive God, you know, forgive an ankle or knee or something like that. Yeah, ultra orthodox Jews, ultra orthodox. No, orthodox a little better. But even orthodox Jews are pretty crazy about this stuff. It's the ultra orthodox Jews who have their women cover their hair as well. They'll always have a kind of they either wear a wig, when you see ultra orthodox Jewish women not without a hair covering, they're wearing a wig. So they have to have some covering. Anyway, the whole thing is bizarre. But a lot of it has to do with these, this notion of men of women as being fundamentally seductresses and women fundamentally bringing out the sexual in the men, which I guess is true, some men anyway, but women, you know, being the seducer and men being unable, weak to resist the temptation and you know, goes back to the Garden of Eden where, you know, the woman is seduced by the snake to eat the apple Eve. And then she goes to Adam and he just, he can't resist the her charms and eats from the apple and commits this great sin of knowledge. And so it all goes back to Eve. The Garden of Eden is, is after all the founding myth of so much of the judo so-called judo Christian tradition. But yes, so in Iran, women have to cover up. They have to go to school, cover it up. They have to, when they go to work, they have to be covered up. They, when they walk in the streets, they have to be covered up. Now, there's no question that Iran has a pretty modern youthful culture, their parties, they are often held by the heads, you know, by senior people within the state where women are dressed sexually and women dress in all kinds of ways that are not reflective of this. But that's done so-called in secret. That's not official. That's in the underground. That's, and theoretically the punishment for that is severe. So a woman by the name of Masa Amini who was occurred was not clear exactly how much of her she was revealing, but she obviously did not wear the burqa according to the way the authorities would require it. She was arrested, she was beaten, she was murdered by the state authorities. That murder has sparked a whole series of protests around Iran. In the beginning it was primarily around her murder and it was primarily around the idea of a burqa. And it was primarily women, you know, demonstrating against the nature of this regime as oppressing them. But this grew. And women and girls, and you can see stunning videos of girls from Iran demonstrating at schools and universities and in the streets where they're taking off their burqas. And now it's beyond just, let me wear what I want to wear. How dare you murder a young woman? She was 22 for showing a little bit of hair. How dare you? Now it has become death to the tyrant, death to Khamenei, the successor supreme leader to Khamenei, death to the regime. It has now become at least a call for revolution if not a revolution itself. It has become about liberty, about freedom, more than just what women can wear, what women can say. It has become what we as individuals can and cannot do. It has become about individual liberty. And again primarily women are demonstrating, primarily girls are demonstrating. I mean the courage of 15, 16, 17, 18 year old girls in high school taking off their hijab on video, sometimes cutting their hair, yelling and screaming about the need to change a regime. We're talking about a totalitarian regime, a regime that will kill you. And indeed, seeing a number of videos of 15 and 16 year olds who have been killed, who the regime had taken into 15, 16 year old. The story is, I mean it's hard to verify these things, but the story is that she was arrested, raped repeatedly, beaten to death and buried. Her body was never recovered by her family because the regime did not want the family to see the brutality with which she was treated. We're talking about a 15 year old girl. Think about those who you had kids, your daughter. Think about your sister. Think about you yourself. 15 year old children are being raped, brutalized, murdered because what? Because they want liberty, because they want freedom. Girls are disappearing regularly. Hundreds have been killed already. And girls are disappearing regularly. Many girls are protesting, but with their backs to the camera so that the camera doesn't capture their face because the regime takes those photographs, finds them, arrests them. And as I said, treats them with the worst kind of brutality possible. I mean, I know why anybody is surprised here that they would be raping. After all, they're just doing what men do when women tempt them. That's their ideology. That's their belief system. That is the barbarism, the sheer barbarism of dogmatic religious belief, the sheer barbarism of Islam in Iran today. This is a barbaric ideology, a barbaric religion. And these girls are getting killed. These girls are getting raped. These girls are disappearing. And what is the world's attitude? I mean, there's a little bit of condemnation here and there. Some French actresses have gone on video and cut their own hair in solidarity. And I appreciate that. And that is good for them. That brings attention to the issue. But where are the world leaders? Where's Macron? Where's whoever runs Germany these days? Where's Joe Biden? Where's the Republicans? Where are the voices of the political leaders of the world condemning this, telling Iran to go to hell, shutting them down? I think the Biden administration today put sanctions on seven Iranian officials. I mean, what does that even mean when we've had sanctions on Iran for decades? And I don't know. I'm not saying we should go to war over this. But where's the moral outrage? Where's the bully pulpit? Where is the... We won't have anything to do with Iran. We won't have anything to do with the regime that treats its own people this way. Where are the Republican women? Where are the leftists? I mean, I have to say that looking at Twitter, and now this is not scientific, this is me just scrolling down Twitter, I barely see any condemnation from anybody famous. And if I do see condemnation, it's from the left, not from the right. And it's from women, not from men. Where's the outrage? Where is the condemnation? Now, I get it. So Larry Elder in California, he used as an opportunity to slam the leftists, the leftists, the Democratic leftists who are not speaking out. What are they called? Those four congresswomen. What do they call them? Not the gang, the something, you know, and they're not condemning it. So Larry Elder used this to slam them for not condemning it. But okay, fine. But where are the Republicans condemning this? Where's everybody? Where are the voices? The squad. The squad. Where is... I get it that the squad is not going to condemn this because the squad are half of them are Muslim and sympathetic to Islam. But where's everybody? Why isn't Congress outraged? Why are political leaders speaking up? Biden doesn't want to piss off the Iranian regime too much because he's negotiating a treaty with them, a deal around nuclear weapons. Really? Talk about disgusting and offensive. This is a regime in response to what they're doing right now. Any decent half-human political leadership would say, we don't want to have anything to do with you. We're not going to negotiate anything with you. We're not going to negotiate a nuclear deal with you. Go to hell. And by the way, if you start building nuclear weapons, we will bomb them out of existence, whatever the cost. But no. The fact is that we live in a world where if you don't slot it in nicely into left or right issue, nobody cares. Nobody cares. I mean, if this was leftist doing it to conservatives, everybody would be outraged. If this was conservatives doing it to leftists, everybody would be outraged. But it's not clear. It's Islamists. And of course, nobody wants to criticize religion. Everybody's afraid to criticize religion, particularly the religionists, who should be the most outraged people of all, right? Supposedly. They're supposedly moral. They supposedly want to protect women. Evangelicals, Catholics. Where are they? Evangelicals and Catholics. Where are they? Condemning this to hell. I don't see it. I scan Twitter. I scan Twitter every day. I'm looking for it. Where's Elon Musk? Where's anybody? Anybody? A voice. A voice to defend these young girls. 15, 16, 17, 18-year-olds and women. Todd, thank you. Todd, $500. Wow. That's amazing and generous. He says, thank you for my three daughters. I am disgusted. Good for you for being disgusted. We should all be disgusted. And we should all be demanding. Well, on every issue, but better for our political leaders. It is so disheartening. I mean, I get it that nobody did anything about Hong Kong. I kind of get it. It was China. They were super, you know, they've got nukes. They were a powerful country. And we trade with them. And we don't want to piss them off too much. And I don't know. And it was stealth. And they didn't rape and pillage and kill people. They just took away their liberties quietly, quickly, effectively. But Iran, why does anybody care? Why is anybody afraid of them? It truly is one of the most, if not the most barbaric regimes on the planet. And we don't speak up. I encourage you to watch the videos. Go to Twitter. Find the videos of the demonstrations. Like them. Retweet them. Show your support by liking and retweeting and getting them out. I'm liking and retweeting a lot of the videos. And I hope when you see them on my stream, you like and retweet them and keep them going. You know, there are all kinds of videos. I mean, the videos of the morality police, right? In Iran, trying to arrest somebody and a woman kind of stepping in and saving him and him running away and other men come and help him out and fight with the police. And there's some real examples of fantastic acts of courage that are showed in these videos. There's these women who are in the streets, in their schools, taking off their hijabs, cutting their hair, you know, and yelling to end this regime and death to the dictator. It's so inspiring to see young people standing up for their own freedom, for their own liberty. You know, we are so spoiled in a sense in the U.S. We take our liberties. We take our freedoms of granted. We quibble and argue about the smallest of things. I mean, often important, but the smallest of things. And here are women fighting for the real, for actual elementary, elementary, the basic freedoms. We should support them in any way that we can. And one easy way is to like and retweet the videos and the expressions of their courage. It's inspiring. So I encourage you to watch it. I, you know, what you're going to see in the next few days, I expect, is a lot of death. A lot of death. It was already 80 something people were killed in, you know, in, I think, in a province in Iran where the security forces opened fire on a demonstration. I think man are going to join the demonstrations, but people are going to just get killed. And it's going to be really, really, really, it's going to be horrific. And we'll see. The good thing is that in spite of the Iranian regime trying to block the internet in Iran, I did get last time I talked about this and I said, Iran is shut down the internet in Iran. Iran has no access to internet. Somebody sent me an email from Iran. He says, I listened to your show, Iran. And you're usually right, but unless you were wrong, we all have VPNs. We figured out ways around this. We have servers. We have this. We have that. We are getting the internet. We're getting stuff out there. And of course, these videos are testament to the fact that people are using their phones, taking videos, putting them up online, finding ways to put them up online. And it's an amazing thing. And, you know, the courage is amazing. And it's going to get very, very brutal out there. So it would be amazing, amazing if this turned into a real revolution, if this regime was overthrown. I just don't see it. When you go back and you study what happened during the Shah, three things happened with the Shah that made his overthrow inevitable. One, he was weak. He came out and said, I understand the demonstrators. They've got a point. And then he didn't really, you know, push out the security police to brutalize them. So he was weak. Second, oil workers in the oil fields of Iran stopped working in support of the Islamic revolution, right? In a position to the Shah. So the money spigots were shut down. There was no oil produced. Third, the markets, not financial markets, but the markets, the physical markets where trade has happened, the merchants shut their stores. They went on strike in support of the revolution. Today in Iran, the oil fields are controlled by the military, by the National Guard, by the Iranian National Guard, Republican Guard. It's hard to believe that they will go and strike. The consequences to them would be horrific. The marketplace is religious. The merchants are religious. There's no indication that they're going to join this. This is primarily young people. This is the next generation. This is their time. But do they have the capacity, the political leverage? Do they have support within the military, within the police, within somebody in government? Is there support somewhere that can help overthrow the regime? I just don't know. I just don't think so. I think this will be another wasted moment. And of course, given that they're not getting the support, they're not getting the encouragement, they're not getting the moral encouragement from the West, it's hard to see. It's hard to be hopeful for them. It just, it looks pretty futile. It's their future. They'll fight for it. But how long, how much, how many people have to die? Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. 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