 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Is war with Iran coming? Just asking questions. I'm Zach Weismuller, Senior Producer for Reason, joined by my colleague, Reason Associate Editor, Liz Wolfe. Hey, Liz. Hey, Zach. Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel. The government says this is in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Israel reports that with the help of allies like the US and the UK, they intercepted most of the drones and the sole known casualty was a Bedouin girl critically injured by falling missile shrapnel. Israel has not retaliated yet. In the wake of all that, today's guest had something to say about the way some American activists loudly came to the defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran after staying conspicuously silent during the protests and crackdowns that began almost two years ago. Here's a bit of her viral video. We've had to watch over the past 24 hours people clambering onto the Internet to exclaim that Iran has the right to defend itself. In what capacity have you distorted the story to make the Islamic Republic the victim? That's, I think, what we're most curious about. When we were screaming for the past two years that they were lynching us, where were you? When we were screaming that they were killing Iranian women for not wearing a hijab, where were you? When they were lynching Iranian men from cranes for protesting, where were you? When we were explaining that this is a terrorist occupying force, where were you? But all of a sudden, everyone's graduated from Instagram School of Law to say that this is a violation of international law and Iran has the right to defend itself. That was Ellika Laban, a first-generation Iranian immigrant born in the UK and currently living in Los Angeles where she practices law and runs several large social media accounts that bring attention to the plight of the Iranian people. Ellika, thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. Let's reflect on that viral video. What was it you were seeing in reaction to Iran's attack that made you think this message needed to get out there? Well, you know, it wasn't just what I had seen in that moment that made me think the message needed to get out there. It was something that had been building from October 7th and myself as well as other Iranians had been doing a lot of work to kind of counteract the mass disinformation that was being put out there. You know, you have accounts with millions and millions and millions of followers. This is kind of the pitfall of social media and our, you know, contemporary way that we receive information. You know, you have accounts with millions of followers and they literally just say anything. I mean, they really just say anything and people are like, oh, well, if they said it, it must be true. So from October 7th, there was a build-up of this radicalization for supporting terrorist groups and terrorist regimes. Right from October 7th, I was nervous. I was nervous because I could see the way that this was going. I could see this whole freedom fighter rhetoric was going in a really dangerous direction. I could see this growing support for all of the regime's proxies for the Houthis in the Red Sea, for Hamas, for Hezbollah and this kind of spinning of the narrative that, you know, we've been lied to and Iran, aka the Islamic Republic of the Good Guys and China and Russia, the Good Guys and everyone's just fighting Western imperialism. I mean, this is just propaganda that the Iranian people have been debunking for 45 years. So by the time it reached this limit that everyone, you know, was going on the Internet saying Iran has the right to defend itself completely having misunderstood this entire story actually didn't want to put out the message if I'm being honest. I was really tired. I was exhausted. I actually just was like, I'm signing off and everyone was like, no, you can't sign off. We're relying on you. And I spoke to a friend and I just kind of voiced my concerns, everything that I've said in the video. And he was like, just make that a video, post it and I promise it will go viral. And I was like, no. And he was like, you must and then I did and it did. Can you think of like give us a specific concrete example of the type of post you said these high follower posts that were putting out just a dead wrong message. Is there any example that comes to mind of something that you thought, wow, that's really a problem. I mean, I mean, there's many that I can think of. I mean, I've seen so many videos. It like just the craziest things like people with millions of followers saying things like there was peace in the Middle East before 1948, what? But actually just about a week before I made this video where everything happened, there was a tweet from Bassem Yousef on Twitter, obviously a tweet on Twitter, X or whatever you want to call it. And he was quoting somebody else. Explain who that is, please. Explain who Bassem Yousef is. He's an Egyptian comedian. That's who he is. He's on Twitter. He's a very well known. He's a very, he's huge. I've seen him compared to like the John Stuart of the Arab world. So he sort of outlasted his prime. He's passed his prime. Well, he's back. Yeah. Sorry. What did you see from Bassem? Okay. So Bassem has 12 million followers on Twitter. And he had put up some tweet about how he was responding to somebody else and he put up some tweet basically just framing the regime as the victim in the story. Like they were being attacked. And now that you're saying that there's a war, you're saying that, you know, they don't have the right to defend themselves. This is just, you're a sociopathic narcissist, something, just some type of framing of them being, you know, the victims. And the Iranian community came out in droves and we asked him, please take this down, revoke it, correct what you've said. You're completely mistaken. You have no idea what you're talking about. And you're going to cause us massive amount of harm. And then sure enough, everyone on TikTok and Twitter started saying that Iran is the victim. Iran has the right to defend itself. Do you think that this is sort of co-opted by the social justice progressives of the West? I mean, why would this narrative that Iran is the victim here be so persuasive, so compelling to people? Like explain that psychology or that thinking to us. So I think everybody has watched over the last couple of years the progressive movement just really nosedive in an obvious way. It's just the entire philosophy has become so reductive. So they've created this binary, this false dichotomy of oppressed and oppressor where everyone in the oppressed camp is good. And if you're suffering, you're a good person and they glamourize and glorify suffering and oppression. And they want to appropriate it and they want to become those things and they want to wear the costumes. And if you're the oppressor, which is usually anything associated with the West, or bad and you have to die. So in the context of Iran, you'd think that you'd be like, okay, good. So you agree that the Iranian people are the oppressed in this narrative and in your little oppressor, oppressed binary, you want to stand with the people of Iran, correct? No. It's an actual fact. It's the Islamic Republic that are the victims of Western imperialism. But they can't give you any example of Western imperialism in Iran in the past 45 years that the Islamic Republic has been there because it's never happened. Everything that they make up in their heads is just a fantasy. But wouldn't they be pointing to something prior to the last 45 years? I'm not saying that the narrative is correct, but I would imagine they're pointing to something that happened before that, no? Yeah. I mean, they're talking about, they're talking about many things that happened prior to 1945. Yes, they want to bring up Mossadik, the coup, CIA, all of this stuff. It's just completely irrelevant. It's completely irrelevant to anything that's been happening in the last couple of decades. Well, yeah. And we want to talk a little bit about all that deep history later in the conversation with Mossadik. But I did want to bring it back to closer to present day. We, in the introduction, I mentioned that I believe you became really active after the protest movement that started a couple of years ago. Could you just, before we get to the roots of that movement, could you just tell me a little bit about your personal history, like getting involved with this as an activist, specifically, you know, your social media accounts? What inspired you to start speaking out about what you saw as kind of a flawed analysis from Westerners? Yes. So I mean, the revolution kicked off September 2022. That's when a young Kurdish woman, Gina Amini, Massa Gina Amini was killed. And that obviously we know that kind of sparked a revolution both inside Iran and outside Iran. So what was really crucial about our work as Iranian activists was that we had long understood that there was this pattern with the regime where people who were made famous in some way in international media, the regime would not execute them because they didn't want to have more upheaval. So we noticed this pattern even a couple of years before that in 2020, when a couple of young men were put on death row for protesting gas prices, it was kind of during the COVID era. So that got a lot of media attention. Their death sentence was eventually commuted, I think to like 100 years and then reduced to five years finally, maybe even three in the end. So we've long noticed this pattern of the regime doing that. So when this revolution kicked off in 2022, they were arresting a lot of protesters. So what we would do is we would use our social media platforms to highlight who these people were, the fact that they had been detained, even like big singers like Sheriff Ian Hodgipour who actually ended up winning a Grammy recently. And I started this campaign that was called, say their names to save their lives. It's like a hashtag. So I would, and then obviously it wasn't just me, many of us, but I would put up, introduce information about these activists and ask people to just use the hashtags to say their names. And we actually, I mean, it kind of worked. A lot of the time people were either released or they were taken off death row. So we were using social media to kind of bring attention to their accounts. At the same time, what we were working against was a lot of the radical leftists, or what one would pejoratively describe as the tankies, that would say that this is a trustee propaganda. None of this is really happening. It's all a lie. It's just a propaganda to go to war with Iran. So we've been dealing with these people for a long time. Was that surprising to you to encounter that, or have you seen that kind of contingent before? It's just, it's just faceless conspiracy theories. That's the thing. They have this one, they have this one mode, you know, in foreign city we say, yeah Dan there means you have one gear. Their one gear is Noam Chomsky manufactured consent. And they apply it to absolutely everything that they come across. They cannot even fathom the fact that do you not think that maybe inside Iran just want to get rid of the oppressive regime that are lynching them from cranes? Why is that so hard for you to accept? Yeah, there's a real kind of theft of agency there. The idea that the US is always and everywhere pulling the strings that I think that a lot of kind of interventions, military intervention skeptics fall prey to. And I count myself within that group by the way. I think that the US foreign policy needs to be, you know, radically changed. But I have definitely seen people in what I would consider more or less my camp fall prey to that. I'm curious like, you know, you mentioned this say their names campaign. And like the power of the individual in the social media age is really a big change from past revolutions. And this figure who you mentioned kicked off the revolution. Masa Amini is it seems like it was really what happened to her that kicked a lot of this off. Could you just tell us who was Masa Amini and what happened to her and why did the people of Iran respond this way? Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, she was a young, you know, 22 year old Kurdish woman. She was in Tehran visiting. She was she was wearing a headscarf. In fact, she wasn't not she wasn't just going around walking around without a headscarf. But they said that she was inappropriately wearing the headscarf that some of the strands of her hair was showing. They took her in. They detained her. They took her into detention. And while she was in the interrogation room, people said that they started hearing screaming that she and she was knocked over the head. She was knocked unconscious and she was hospitalized and eventually she came to her injuries. I often describe the Masa Amini moment for Iran as the George Floyd moment for America. It wasn't the first time we'd seen this, obviously. It wasn't like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's this? You know, it was the final stick that broke the camel's back. Yeah, so that's exactly what that was. It was just as in the USA where it was like, okay, enough. We've seen enough of this. Now we're done. And then it just kicked off like a domestic and global revolution. What happened with Masa Amini was like, you've killed us so many times for this. This is the final stick that broke the camel's back. And it kicked off the revolution. The Islamic Republic had a very different account of what went down. It seems that almost nobody bought their account. Can you explain just to our audience that might not be familiar with Masa's case what their sort of counter narrative was and whether or not this was persuasive to anybody? I mean, it's just it's so fun. It's so funny to Iranians because they've been doing this to us for our entire lives. They kill our families and come up with every excuse. Everyone fell off of a building. That's the best one. Everyone was just casually walking and fell off a building. Don't know how that happened. A young woman had a heart attack. She had a heart condition from when she was like eight years old or something. And then just in that exact moment it just happened to happen that triggered her heart condition because she got nervous and suddenly died. It's just it's just it's so laughable it's not even worth mentioning. There's also an attitude to investigate that narrative, right? Like it's not as if you can have this like no topsy and any sort of actual evidence that is established that lots of different parties that aren't affiliated with the government kind of access to like in the United States we have a little bit more recourse on that front when it comes to a building narrative and you know allowing coroners to do different reports to see what actually went down and to attempt to get multiple opinions but in Iran you have nothing like that. No and that's that's really what people in the West struggle to understand. And I sometimes refer to it as the privilege of trust. You have this trust that there are some democratic functions that allow you some access to some degree of truth. Obviously we know we have a lot of corruption here too. It's not exactly perfect but you have to just even think of the chain of custody of these types of events. The first even the police report. The police report is going to be not persuasive to the person that's been harmed. Okay, it's obviously in a different direction. The coroner's report, the autopsy and then you even have like when you're in court, right? You don't have your own lawyer. You don't have access to your files. You have a regime appointed lawyer. You don't have to talk about the media. It's all all of Iran's state media is under the control of the supreme leader. And so there's really no point in this chain of custody where you're going to have any access to any type of truth, any type of transparency. And that's why we say when we talk about people in prison as in Iran, everyone for all intents and purposes is innocent because I mean this is the philosophy we have to be innocent until you're proven guilty. And if you actually can never prove somebody guilty because you never have access to the evidence. You never have access to a lawyer. You never have access to you don't have a jury, right? You have one judge who also plays the prosecutor. You don't have a right to present any evidence. You never find out if anybody's guilty. So if you can't prove that anybody's guilty that therefore we have to assume that somebody's guilty. But explain the role of the morality police also to Western audiences who might not understand. I mean walking around Iran, what is that experience like as a woman? Well, the morality police are there to keep an eye on women and how they dress and whether they're wearing the hijab correctly or not. There was one period of time where they had reported that the Islamist media is not going to be able to understand that. That's right. They had turned to more of the technology AI front. It's really funny to me because the western media really just keeps proving how little they understand about these things when they say if the Islamic Republic said it it must be true. If Hamas said it it must be true. There's literally no regulatory oversight. There is nobody checking for what they say. So morality police did not disband. They actually have cameras where they catch women who are wearing, not wearing hijab and they go after them. They find them, they go to their houses and they bring them in to be flogged. Can you talk about living under those police state totals? It sounds like the surveillance has gotten pretty bad with the, you've mentioned implementation, like AI surveillance. The difficulty of kind of speaking out because you're a first-generation immigrant but for people who are lit. We don't have the freedom living in this country to speak out and criticize the Islamic Republic but what is the reality for people there who, like how do we even gauge, if there's this counter narrative that the strings are all being pulled by the CIA or whatever and people like you are just like a dissident in Iran actually speak out if they wanted to criticize the regime. They can't, that's the whole point. They can't speak out and that's what they're trying to do when they were protesting but you can see their actions also as a form of expression of what their situation is, right? When they're taking to the streets and risking their lives and it's not just a risk, they are being killed they're being shot. You're seeing these young... They're being pulled into vans and then nobody really knows what exactly happens. I'll just pull up this one data point from Amnesty International showing that Iran executed 853 people in an eight-year high amid relentless repression and renewed quote war on drugs. A lot of those were supposedly drug-related offenses, many of them were not and this is just like one data point to kind of convey to people the severity of the threats that people there are living under. But they're not even necessarily... They just accuse you of anything. They accuse you of moharabe which means waging war against God. Some people that they've put on death row for being LGBTQ, they don't say... Sometimes they say that because it is actually possible by death under Sharia law. Sometimes for a couple of people like Elham Shubdar there are a few people that they accuse them of being Jawsus which means spy. They just come up with any charges and who's going to tell them that they're wrong. I lost my train of thought because I wanted to go back to... They blind protesters in the eye. So there are many young protesters they've actually... A lot of them have left the country and they've taken out their eyes. You have the oil workers in Iran that were going on strike to sanction themselves. And so when people in the west say like, oh, these sanctions are American propaganda and this, this, this. And why are the Iranian people going on strike when they had three day strikes so many times throughout the protest, the revolution period where every 100% of stores in Tehran were shut down. If they're going on strike to starve out their own economy to take these people out how can you say that this is a CIA operation? Why don't you just look at what they're doing? If that's how they felt they wouldn't be doing all of those things they wouldn't be collapsing their own economy they wouldn't be risking their own lives they wouldn't be risking their eyes being taken out. Doesn't make any sense. You give us more detail about the oil worker strike like when exactly did that happen and what sort of skill are we talking? Either late 2022 or early 2023 this happens several times. No, it was an attempt to get rid of the regime that's what they do all of this stuff for because that's what the regime relies on that's the regime's number one source of income by the way which they embezzle the money from the people and put it into their pockets the supreme leader's worth something like upwards of 100 billion which is ridiculous so they went on strike to try and starve the regime out that way because if they can't have access to these oil exports that's really significantly and that was because Biden was laxing on imposing the sanctions at the time which was following on from the maximum pressure campaign and then because Biden wasn't enforcing those sanctions and the oil exports in Iran had reached a five year high during this revolution period and this is something that it's so frustrating because the Iranian people have to deal with this over and over and over again the same thing happened during the Obama administration when there was a different revolution it was the green movement and they were on the brink of taking the regime out at that time and Obama got into the nuclear deal with the regime unfreezing $150 billion to the regime and they came back strong from that they were empowered from that and so you have the people on the ground paying the price for their freedom with their blood and this is what is so frustrating when the western leftists say oh well Iranian people can free themselves yeah they can if you stop giving the Mullahs money because every time they've been so close to freeing themselves and giving them as much money and that's why I call them the western imperialists because imperialism by definition is interference or extending your own influence in a different country either by military intervention or by diplomacy and you keep doing diplomacy with this terrorist regime that is your own form of western imperialism that you're keeping them in power when the people of Iran are paying the price with their blood now I want to talk more about the role of the US in this kind of near the close to the end of the conversation but I would like to linger for a second on the what started in 2022 and compare it to the green revolution that you just brought up a second ago this in a sense seems more enduring they were able to kind of crush that the factors you brought up but also the fact that they really were able to shut down the internet and communications back then and it's been a little more resilient this time and some aspect of that seems to have to do with the way social media has evolved and the way that these messages spread what role would you say in the endurance of the movement in Iran right now I think it's all of it I think all of it is a strong word but I think social media plays a huge part of it I mean social media plays a huge part in almost every kind of conflict that we're seeing now because people have a lot of exposure it's really difficult for people to be exposed constantly to these tragedies war and this and that and just ignore it and go about their lives and so people become invested so I think social media played a huge role not just in bringing attention to these people's individual cases but to bringing attention to just what even has been happening in Iran these things were things that they were able to control in the past they were able to deal with a lot of collateral damage with the narrative because how would you know unless you had access to social media you're relying really on what your government tells you what the news tells you so there's many ways to deflect attention from that social media just changed the landscape of everything because it's direct it's videos coming from inside Iran which you just mentioned has seemed to change the way that things work in revolutions or in protest movements because something about this short form video being able to be or able to take a snippet and then build on it remix it and then create a meme out of it that spreads all over the place that seems harder to control top down and one example pulled here was this gentleman who is named I guess I don't know if I'm pronouncing this correctly Sadegh Buhi he is a store owner who enjoys dancing and dancing in a way that apparently upsets the regime so I want to play a little bit of that video of Sadegh dancing and then people emulating the dance and maybe you can talk a little bit about what that means in the context of the Iranian regime so let's roll that John so that's catchy I'm looking at something possibly should be a crime but it's really fun and like nice to see like the vibrancy of life there because you can get kind of bogged down in the horror that the regime is imposing on people that seeing the joy is really important and there's some captions there that were provided by a non-profit called the National Union for Democracy in Iran that explains some of the story there but for our audio listeners especially could you just explain the significance of this no everything that we do everything that the Iranian people do it's really a form of protest joy is a form of protest it is illegal to dance and sing in the streets of Iran and so that's how they protest and a lot of people don't realise that that's what they're doing when they do that when they come out and they sing and they dance in the streets that's an act of resistance to them because they won't allow the regime to kill their joy that's exactly why they make it illegal they make it illegal because they want people to be desperate, despondent, depressed sad because when you have people who are for all intents and purposes resigned they're much easier to control and to subjugate so this is empowering and Sadeg was arrested for doing that that's remarkable how do you grapple with this bigger picture question social media is this extraordinary blessing because it allows this wonderful memetic creative form to prosper filming their forms of protest and being able to copy each other and also disseminating information about how brutal life is under the Islamic Republic to people just sitting on their couches or in their beds all over the world so it has that incredible revolutionary, extraordinary potential and it's a great time even your initial viral video that inspired us to reach out to you was a response to just vast what you view as totally false completely wrong information that is also being streamed into people's eyeballs all across the world and shaping public opinion what do you make of this crazy double-edged sword do you have any sort of ruminations on this I'm so scared I'm so scared about it because the way that social media set up not just the actors but it's also the algorithm which really, really favours like extremist rhetoric, unbalanced content so what happens is that you get a bunch of people who are interested because something sparked off in the Middle East and they want to know about it but they don't want to listen to a seven hour complicated discussion about the history which I totally get, they just want like a two minute quick explanation but the problem is there is no two minute quick explanation because this is extremely complicated, extremely long history so what happens is that when they do get those voices that do come out with a two minute summary of just like everything was fine before 1948 this happened everyone was killed like really extremist really reductive voices, people all flock to that content because they're like oh this is where I learn the algorithm favours that content and so what happens is that you have these accounts that are posting this disinformation and they're reaching millions and millions and millions and millions of people and I just fear you know this we've not seen we've not seen what the results of this generation are going to look like because if you think about it what we grew up in where we got our education from everything that we learned was from school now we can go back and forth about whether that's you know but it wasn't this right it wasn't just complete like a masses of just like unbelievably inaccurate dangerous disinformation and when you think about the things that we learned in school that actually were wrong right and the things that we later have learned to unpack right like just take for example systemic racism right how long did it take us to unpack systemic racism in America that was one small thing right I mean it's not a small thing it's a huge thing there's one thing that we had to unpack now you're talking about how long is it going to take to unpack millions of lies and disinformation that have come from social media that the future generation are going to have an entirely warped perspective of everything does that give it too much credit right like on one hand people's consumption habits are such that you know they're downing these two minute videos the way they would down you know each individual chip in a bag of chips it's junk food for the spirit and for the mind sure but doesn't that also mean that it's forgettable it's something where they're actually particularly invested in it and so there's a little bit of going in one ear going out the other how many tiktoks do people get exposed to where it's just kind of this forgettable thing that doesn't actually shape them into deep of a manner are we giving them too much credit for being persuaded and deeply affected by what we are terming misinformation or disinformation well I mean I think you might be giving the audience a bit too much credit you probably just projecting your own critical thinking onto them which I don't think a lot of people have I'm not going to say they're lazy and they don't give a shit so I don't know if that's giving them credit but well I'll say that I'll say that you might be right for certain generations I think that for Gen Z the younger generations I do think it actually shapes the way that they see the world I think it does actually have a permanent effect and you see that by the way that they oh I'm sure there's an effect in aggregate right like to some degree it's like you know how does that do your critical thinking skills atrophy the more that this becomes your default consumption method versus a longer form more invested way of engaging with this material right like that's something I worry about with my own child for example and is there have you noticed a difference between platforms like is there one that's particularly good or bad I mean tiktoks bad why why I think tiktoks bad because I think that's a platform where a lot of radical voices become very go very very viral and so any form of kind of like balance or nuance is very very very offensive in the tiktok world I think that's the place where you see a lot of the extremism go viral I don't know if it's that much the case on Instagram maybe this is all subjective I've had much better experiences on on Instagram Twitter I'd say is the worst place for like bots you know like Russian bots and bots from from the regime it's just that place is just a hot bed for bots like anything that you post you'll just get a stream of responses from like accounts that have like no profile picture on follow and like some crazy accusations like you work for Mossad and whatever what it like you know just it's just like how there's this do you have a sense of how much penetration any of these platforms have within Iran itself because it is worth noting that I just this is a population pyramid of Iran and it skews the population skews younger than the United States the median age here is 31 it's about seven years younger median age than the US so Gen Z is a huge portion of Iran's population is there a lot of social do you have a sense of if there's a lot of social media or if any of these platforms have particularly strong penetration into the country in Iranian terms Zach is a boomer which I kind of like I don't want to live in Iran I think that that would be a little fun I'm definitely on the far end of that curve there you know I I think that the thing is that people Iranian people people inside Iran they cannot use social media the way that we do so there's really no way of knowing but what I can tell you is that I receive messages from them all the time from VPNs and so forth I assume exactly I think that I think that there is a lot of use of Twitter I think there's a lot of use of Twitter for a lot more political activity but obviously that's done with like like you said VPNs very discreet profiles name changes things like that but you know it's really hard to know I always found it pretty perverse that the Ayatollah had a Twitter account when people are not allowed to that I don't know if he still does but I remember a few years ago he does okay I mean there's something there's a lot of things on Twitter like you'll literally just say like we're going to wipe Israel off the map like it's Twitter is just a free for all you know let's bring you let's bring in there's one more clip that we're going to play here which was a recent exchange that you had with Dave Smith who we've had on the show before and we've had both disagreements and agreement with him you personally victimized by David I deeply enjoy Dave yes and we you recently clashed with him on Piers Morgan's show let's play a little bit of that and then talk about the root of that conflict in a little bit more relaxed format where you can explain the point you were trying to get to talk about the Houthis that are fighting for freedom how dare you how dare you acknowledge what the Houthis are doing in Yemen do you listen to Yemenis and their voices and what they have to say they are being terrorized they are being starved they are being killed a young Arabic woman is on death row right now in Yemen I just think we have to have one standard here and this is kind of the point I was getting to with national sovereignty like let's if we're going to talk about things let's have one standard if our concern is over what's been happening to the people in Yemen as you said what the Houthis are doing to them do you know what's been happening to the people of Yemen over the last eight years it's been the number one humanitarian crisis in the world in the war that Saudi Arabia launched on them with full backing from the United States of America okay if you care about horrible things happening to the people of Yemen criticizing Saudi Arabia and the United States of America this war just ended over in the last year the eight years previous to that were devastating no it's not what about what about okay hold on hold on I'm not finished you said you weren't finished no you said you weren't finished before I'm not finished now what about is a word that people yell when you call them out on their hypocrisy I'm saying let's have one standard I can explain to you why it's a what aboutism what do we teenagers what does this word even mean I'm putting this into historical context so that you understand okay what aboutism deflects from the issue that was presented the issue that I presented to you okay it's a logical fallacy what I presented to you was the fact that the Yemeni people do not support the Houthis and you brought up well what about the fact that they don't support this and this I didn't bring that up by the way I didn't know let me explain so you understand let me finish my sentence okay go ahead what I told you is that the Yemeni people have been vocal if you would listen to their voices you don't listen to their voices because they the radical and extremist voices are the ones that are propped up okay by the algorithm by the media and the people on the ground that are telling you they don't support the Houthis okay that's I'm listening I'm not certainly I don't know exactly I'm open to the idea that there are a lot of people in Yemen who do not support the Houthis I'm not defending the way the Houthis treat their people I'm not defending the way the Iranian government treats their people what I'm saying is that if we're going to not be hypocrites here and we're criticizing them because we're concerned about how the people of Yemen are treated where is this criticism for the much bigger disaster that's been caused in that country over the last eight years so I don't think you actually got a chance to reply to his last point there because of the format it's tough being you know remote when everyone else there is in person is there anything else you'd like to add to that argument or expand on your argument about what about ism yeah look and this the Yemeni people I there's certain accounts that I've also kind of shared on my instagram as well those Yemeni people have always been critical of every form of oppression that they've experienced this isn't the first time that they've come out and criticized you know the Houthis and the Houthis only the reason that I explained that that was a deflection is because he had previously said or many people had previously said that the Houthis were heroes and the Houthis were fighting the good fight and the point that I made was that you cannot support the Houthis when they are terrorizing the Yemeni people the same way that you can't support the Islamic Republic when they're terrorizing the Iranian people and his point was to turn around and say well what about the former Yemeni government okay if everything that you say about the former Yemeni government is true blah blah blah blah blah blah does that mean that you now get to support the Houthis no it doesn't and that's why it's a what about ism because nothing that you say changes the fact that you have no right to support them right now was Dave making an argument in favor in support of the Houthis or calling them heroes or is he merely making an argument that says well if we're going to be consistent critics we have to be you know paying attention to the role that Saudi Arabia and the United States have played in destabilizing Yemen no because we are this isn't a conversation about us being critics this isn't a conversation about us being critics of what's going on in Yemen this is a conversation where they are introducing this concept that the that the Houthis are doing something that we should all be supporting actually an attack against their premise to say that no you shouldn't be supporting the Houthis because that is not what the people of Yemen are asking you to do and then so introducing something else is it's a red herring it's a deflection to the fact that you're the person who brought up support for the Houthis this counter argument destroys your premise that we should be supporting the Houthis and your response is to deflect it to something else that's what makes a what about ism I follow the logic of your argument there I am curious though about what you think of Dave's other point which is that sometimes people who you know when you're defending Israel or you're defending or you're criticizing the Houthis that there can be a sort of myopic view of things that there's an unwillingness to look at what contribution has the U.S. which is the government we live under made to this situation that we have to look at the fact that the U.S. backed Saudi Arabia's campaign against Yemen is a real problem that doesn't really seem to get much attention like is does he have a point that we really should be paying more attention to who we're supporting and what kinds of interventions we're making and what the consequence of those interventions are we have to follow the logic we have to follow the logic so as I said the Yemeni people do speak about that you what you're saying would absolutely be correct if let's say for example no one had mentioned the Houthis and I just popped up and was like guys let me tell you about why the Houthis are so bad you'd be absolutely to be like well isn't that interesting that you haven't mentioned XYZ and this is what's so critical because there has to be a proper analysis of what is the argument attacking the initial premise that was brought up is why the Houthis should be supported for this and it was an attack against that now if you start to go into other things that should also be criticized yes they should also be criticized it doesn't respond to the argument so something that doesn't respond to the argument is a deflection right and that's the point that's being made many things can be true at the same time nobody is saying that we shouldn't criticize that it's you who brought up the point of who we have to support and this is exactly what they complain about in the other direction right when people speak about what's going on in Gaza a legitimate a legitimate response is why aren't we talking about the biggest genocide happening in the world right now why aren't we talking about Syria why aren't we talking about what is happening in Iran and they get very upset when you say that but it's a legitimate it's a legitimate point right why aren't we talking about those things and then the pro-israel side is going to say well that's because of anti-Semitism that's because of no Jews no news you know there are multiple things that can be true at the same time but what is important is that you are responding to the premise that has been introduced the premise introduced was support for the Houthis and the response was to attack that premise no bearing on anything else that's ever happened in Yemen and of course those are all things that we can and should be criticizing when they come up on their own I'm just understanding what the precipitating thing on the Piers Morgan show was you're saying that Dave basically brought up something that was sort of tangential no Dave brought up something in support of the Houthis I can't remember exactly it was it was a long conversation it was like 40 minutes I don't know if he actively said something in support of the Houthis I don't know if it was him or somebody else but there was some mention of how the Houthis were doing a good thing as part of this I don't know I don't know it was something along that lines it's criticizing American empire right and you know I think that there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of I mean there's a reason why he does that because the audience is predominantly American and there's a sense of how do we dial back American for an interventionism and I think it's totally fine to engage with that and to say we come to different conclusions as to the necessity of that but I mean I think Dave does a good job of turning people's attention toward the fact that the Houthis didn't just pop up out of nowhere and that if we're speaking to an American audience they should be considering is this do we want our taxpayer dollars eating what Saudi Arabia is doing and when that indirectly does end up introducing this amount of conflict in Yemen and destabilizing an already unstable region what do you make of that sort of Dave's bigger picture the thing that animates him of trying to roll back American for an interventionism well if he said that you know that would have been a good argument that isn't what he said though that was an inappropriate rebuttal to what I said it was a deflection towards what was actually being introduced that bringing up that on its own is a perfectly valid argument I also what concerns me what concerns me which is what a lot of Americans often tend to do because I spent my life as a Middle Eastern woman criticizing the West's role in the Middle East and in different countries but what I find that a lot of American people tend to do is that they hyper focus on criticism of the West to the extent that they almost give a pass to these like terrorist regimes or fundamentalist groups and they say oh well this is all because of Western intervention this is all because the West propped them up yeah the West propped them up but they existed long before the West propped them up and this is not like it's actually to me very racist it's very racist that there's this implication it's so Western centric it's so Western centric that like nothing bad would happen in the world if the most important people in the world aka the West weren't actively making things happen I agree with that critique and I think we touched on that earlier but I think one thing that we need to contend with is what should the US be doing because when I look at the history of what's happened to Iran we talked about Mosadegh earlier in the 50s they had a Democratic Iran had a democratically elected leader who was a nationalist he was accused by the US and UK at the time of being sympathetic to the communists even though he really wasn't but he was trying to nationalize the oil which upset the British oil interests there and it's pretty openly acknowledged now that the British intelligence and the US intelligence work together to overthrow that regime and from my perspective that set in motion a series of events that led to the rise of Islamic radicalism in Iran am I wrong to look at the history that way and if so what am I missing it didn't lead to the rise of radicalism the radicalism was there there's been different instances where these things have helped empower or exaggerate the radicalism and that's the thing that when you even just look at the history of the Middle East and how you go back to even just how the 7th century Muslim conquest all around the Middle East and North Africa region this wasn't you know people didn't go around and say hi please can you just become Muslim or Arabic of course this was all done by it was colonialism it's imperialism we have a long history of our own colonialism and imperialism we had the Arab slave trade that lasted lasted for 1300 years we had many many radical groups Islamist fundamentalist but I think the main issue is the main issue for me that I really struggle with is this overcorrection there was this period of time where there was an acknowledgement of western interference in the west that people openly acknowledged okay this was a bad thing we've been telling you this was a bad thing right and then the overcorrection was okay so what we should be doing instead is a diplomacy with these extremely problematic regimes and so what I say in response to your question of what the west should be doing and this is one of my favourite quotes to respond to things like that is that if I wanted to get there I wouldn't have started here we're in a situation now where the west has empowered first of all help to bring introduce the Ayatollah to Iran bring in this Islamic Republic for the past 45 years they've been engaging in diplomatic relations with this regime to kind of counteract the whole history of okay we're not going to do any of these military interventions anymore what we're going to do instead is do diplomacy with these regimes they've now uplifted the regime and to me this is just western imperialism all over again it's just different permutations different faces of western imperialism but don't we need aren't the options essentially diplomacy or war I mean there is a contingent of politicians here in the US who've wanted war with Iran for a long long time John McCain bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran John Bolton is talking about that we need to strike Iran Trump pulled us out of the Iran deal which I heard you were critical of the Iran deal earlier but like the reality is that I've pulled up a I've pulled up a chart from the Institute for Science and International Security that shows these two red lines when Iran nuclear deal took effect they did stop enriching nuclear materials at the level that they would need to make nuclear weapons and once Trump pulled us out of that deal they started making enriching nuclear material again so isn't backing away from diplomacy just a path to direct confrontation or war with Iran that's Islamic Republic propaganda first of all German intelligence reports actually revealed that they were cheating during the JCPOA they were not adhering the way that Obama had claimed that they were the second thing is that the JCPOA was replete with sunset provisions that ended within like a 10-15 year period so what they had actually done is unleashed $150 billion to the regime and then with a temporary restriction on their nuclear acceleration after that period of time has passed they're now this much richer and they have the opportunity they were just kicking the can down the road and that is so dangerous there's been a lot of claims and counterclaims about whether or not and to what extent they were adhering to that deal and I would think that the proper course of action would be to prove that case and then say okay this deal is no longer valid instead of kind of unilaterally pulling out of the deal because I don't know if Trump didn't like it was a terrible idea I think the Iranian community and everyone has come out and openly acknowledged that this was a terrible idea 45 years of diplomacy with this regime was a terrible idea so when you come to where we are now where you say things like okay well the only option we have now is war that's because of you that's because of you that you've been empowering them for 45 years we the Iranian people have given you options over and over and over and over again of what you could have done stop with these nuclear deals stop with these trade agreements I mean Germany's trade agreements with Iran are just absolutely insane stop with the hostage of diplomacy stop with the trade agreements what do you mean I mean the Europe the UK the US western governments have been doing business they've been empowering the regime in various ways for the past 45 years what should have happened from the beginning is an isolation tactic like an isolation technique where there's no I mean doesn't this end up hurting the willing buyers and sellers on both sides of the deal sanctions tend to fall on the population right sanctions do but if they are not inconsistently this is what hurts the population where you do some sanctions here and you don't really if you're going to do something to take out the regime right you have to go the whole way you've got to go the whole way otherwise what you want to do is you put a little bit sanctions here on the economy it's not quite enough to take out the regime the people are suffering it's an inconsistency do we have examples of that working though I mean it seems like embargoes and sanctions even applied in a very draconian intense manner with coordination from an awful lot of western countries it doesn't result in regimes necessarily ending it results in an incredible amount of suffering it also tends to result in is a kind of precursor to war historically speaking right I mean during the time that they had the maximum pressure campaign the regime was really on its knees it really was on its knees there are many many many points because they cannot deal with internal contradictions and external contradictions at the same time there have been many many times that this regime has been brought to its knees that turning point is the exact time that the US decides to unleash billions of billions more to engage in more diplomatic relations with them it's it's they're not giving the Iranian people a chance this has been like discussed so many times there's so many books there's so many things that report on this okay we could we could go on for probably a while talking about what US foreign policy should be that we need to wrap up the conversation so I want to leave you with the last word Elika what would you say that that Americans westerners especially these folks that you've interacted with on social media people who would seemingly be sensitive to the plight of oppressed people at least that's what their rhetoric would indicate what would you say are some resources or where should they look to better educate themselves and understand what is happening in Iran oh gosh well I mean one account to follow is Nifty the one that you put up a good account that reports on kind of what's happening inside Iran what's happening outside Iran I mean I could come up with many many many accounts but you've put me on the spot I mean maybe a broader question is just if you could you know sit down with one of these misguided activists for an hour or a couple minutes like what would you say to them what would you say about how they should how kind of the typical I don't know progressive activists should change how they think about the situation and I think that's really really what the problem is is that you cannot you cannot do that in a couple of minutes and that's I think exactly why we are where we are because they've built their perception of this over time and deconstructing their perception of this is going to take time it's going to take a lot of re kind of framing reframing their perspective on all of this on the west on the east and that's kind of what we seek a lot of our Iranian activists what we seek to do is we try to do this kind of educational explanation and unfortunately you really aren't going to get it in a few minutes sound bite you really have to rewire and reconstruct the way that you understand this not through the prism of a western lens you know I can't offer it in a few minutes I really can't it's just there's going to have to be an investment on how the Iranian people see it and that's going to take time well I'll offer this as one path towards that which is to follow Elika Laban on all of her social accounts whether you're on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter she's on all of them and we've really appreciated you joining us for the conversation today you certainly enlightened us and it was a lively and I think really fruitful discussion so thank you thank you so much for having me okay we'll be back here same time next week thanks for watching