The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint. Assassinations can take place at a moment’s notice. Revenge killings follow with dashing speed. Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out. Drone strikes of devastating, collective punishment are ordered, all padded by the retarded notion that such killings are morally justified and confined.
In all this viciousness, the conventional armed forces have been held in check, the arsenals contained, the generals busied by plans of contingency rather than reality. The rhetoric may be vengeful and spicily hysterical, but the states in the region keep their armies in reserve, and Armageddon at bay. Till, naturally, they don’t.
To date, Israel is doing much to test the threshold of what might be called the rule of tolerable violence. With Iran, for instance, it has adopted a “campaign between the wars”, primarily in Syria. For over a decade, the Israeli strategy was to prevent the flow of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah, intercepting weapons shipments and targeting storage facilities. “Importantly,” writes Haid Haid, a consulting fellow for Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, “Israel appeared to avoid, whenever feasible, killing Hezbollah or Iranian operatives during these operations.”
But the state of play has changed. The Gaza War, which has become more the Gaza Massacre Project, has moved into its seventh month, packing morgues, destroying families and stimulating the terror of famine. Despite calls from the Israeli military and various officials that Hamas’s capabilities have been irreparably weakened (this claim, like all those battling an idea rather than just a corporeal foe, remains refutable and redundant) the killings and policy of starvation continues against the general Palestinian populace. The International Court of Justice interim orders continue to be ignored, even as the judges deliberate over the issue as to whether genocide is taking place in the Gaza Strip. The restraints, in other words, have been taken off.
The signs are ominous. Spilt blood is becoming hard currency. Daily skirmishes between the IDF and Hezbollah are taking place on the Israeli-Lebanon border. The Houthis are feverishly engaged with blocking and attacking international shipping in the Red Sea, hooting solidarity for the Palestinian cause.
On April 1, a blood crazed strike by Israel suggested that rules of tolerable violence had, if not been pushed, then altogether suspended. The attack on Iran’s consular offices in Damascus by the Israeli Air Force was tantamount to striking Iranian soil. In the process, it killed Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and other commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi. Retaliation was accordingly promised, with Iran’s ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, vowing a response “at the same magnitude and harshness”.
It came on April 13, involving 185 drones, 110 ballistic missiles and 36 cruise missiles, all directed at Israel proper. Superficially, this looks anarchically quixotic, streakily disproportionate. But Tehran went for a spectacular theatrical show to terrify and magnify rather than opt for any broader infliction of damage. Israel’s Iron Dome system, along with allied powers, could be counted upon to aid the shooting down of almost all the offensive devices. A statement had been made and the Iranians have so far drawn a line under any further military action. What was deemed by certain pundits a tactical failure can just as easily be read as a strategic if provocative success. The question then is: what follows?
The Israeli approach varies depending on who is being asked. The IDF Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, stated that “Israel is considering next steps” declaring that “the launch of so many missiles and drones to Israeli territory will be answered with retaliation.”
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was taloned in his hawkishness, demanding that Israel launch a “crushing” counterattack, “go crazy” and abandon “restraint and proportionality”, “concepts that passed away on October 7.” The “response must not be a scarecrow, in the style of the dune bombings we saw in previous years in Gaza.”
Cabinet minister Benny Gantz, who is a voting member of the war cabinet alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, is tilting for a “regional coalition” to “exact the price from Iran, in the way and at the time that suits us. And most importantly, in the face of the desire of our enemies to harm us, we will unite and become stronger.” The immediate issues for resolution from Gantz’s perspective was the return of Israeli hostages “and the removal of the threat against the residents of the north and south.”
Such thinking will also be prompted by the response from the Biden administration that Netanyahu “think very carefully and strategically” about the next measures. “You got a win,” President Joe Biden is reported to have told Netanyahu. “Take the win.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also expressed the view that, “Strength and wisdom must be the two sides of the same coin.”
For decades, Israel has struck targets in sovereign countries with impunity, using expansive doctrines of pre-emption and self-defence. In doing so, the state always hoped that the understanding of tolerable violence would prevail. Any retaliation, if any, would be modest, with “deterrence” assured. With the war in Gaza and the fanning out of conflict, the equation has changed. To some degree, Ben Gvir is right that concepts of restraint and proportionality have been banished to the mortuary. But such banishment, to a preponderant degree, was initiated by Israel. The Israel-Gaza War is now, effectively, a global conflict, waged in regional miniature.
In the wake of a series of retaliatory attacks launched by Iran on Saturday after Israel killed 16 people in a bombing of Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, progressive lawmakers in the U.S. are warning fellow lawmakers against calling for a war against Iran — and instead are calling for an immediate ceasefire “on all sides” as Israel’s aggression in Palestine and beyond is causing…
This story originally appeared in Mondoweiss on Apr. 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Shortly after Iran’s retaliatory strike on Israel concluded seemingly without incident, the full-throated proclamations of Israel’s defensive feats followed. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said that Iran’s retaliation had “failed” after 99% of the launched missiles and drones were intercepted by Israeli air defense systems. U.S. President Biden hailed Israel’s “remarkable capacity” to defend against such “unprecedented attacks,” sending a message to Iran that it “cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel.”
Israeli military analyst Amos Harel added more meat to these statements, regarding the “incredible operational capabilities” of the Israeli Air Force and its allies to have averted an ostensible disaster by preventing the targeting of key military bases. He even goes so far as to say that “one can assume that Tehran is extremely disappointed,” because the intention of the attack, according to Harel, was to showcase its capabilities by hitting military targets like Netavim Air Base:
“It appears that the Iranians planned to destroy the base and the advanced F-35 fighter jets stationed there, which are the crown jewel of American aid to Israel. Iran failed completely.”
Such assessments are mistaken on two counts: first, they confuse (or intentionally obfuscate) Iran’s intentions behind the attack, and second, they incorrectly interpret the attack’s results.
The first point is fairly uncontroversial. Virtually no one but Israeli talking heads believes that Iran launched the attack with the objective of widening the confrontation. Iran’s constant preparation of the international community by vociferously declaring its intentions a week in advance and promising the U.S. that its attack would be “under control” and conducted in a way that “avoids escalation” confirms that Iran was displaying considerable restraint in its strikes. Even Arab detractors of Iran mocked the attacks as an impotent exercise in political and military “theater.”
The second point though has been less talked about because interpreting the attack’s results has been filtered through the various propaganda prisms of different actors. It’s fairly obvious why Israelis like Harel — who for the past six months has inflected his military analysis with journalistic psy-ops directed at his fellow Israelis — would want to inflate Israeli military achievements. After declining confidence in the army’s ability to protect its citizens following October 7, Israel has made a point of projecting an image of impregnability in the face of regional aggressors.
Several activists and military and political analysts have offered a different interpretation of the results.
Avaaz campaign director Fadi Quran posted on X that “the scale of Iran’s attack, the diversity of locations it targeted, and weapons it used, forced Israel to uncover the majority of anti-missile technologies the US and it have across the region.”
“The Iranians did not use any weapons Israel didn’t know it had, it just used a lot of them,” Quran added. “But the Iranians likely now have almost a full map of what Israel’s missile defence system looks like, as well as where in Jordan and the Gulf the US has installations.”
According to Quran, what this means is that Iran can now “reverse engineer” the intelligence it gathered, while Israel and the U.S. “will have to re-design away from their current model,” making the the cost of the “success” in stopping the attack very high.
“Anyone assuming this is just theatrics is missing the context of how militaries assess strategy versus tactics,” Quran elaborated, emphasizing that gathering intelligence is a key component of long wars of attrition, which is a model that Iran prefers to all-out war.
Beirut-based military analyst and Al-Mayadeen contributor Ali Jezzini offered a similar analysis of the Iranian strikes, arguing that they were “very successful” and that more missiles likely hit their target than Israel has been letting on.
This seems to have been corroborated by video evidence recorded by Palestinians in the case of the Netivim military base, showing several missiles apparently hitting their targets, although there has been no confirmation of the extent of the damage
“The cost of this night’s interceptions certainly exceeds a billion dollars between the Americans and the Israelis,” Jezzini added, a claim that seems to be echoed by Israeli sources.
Jezzini said that in the context of a full-scale war, Israel would not be able to keep up this level of air defense for more than a few days before missiles started to overwhelm Israel’s defense capabilities.
Political analyst Sari Orabi echoed this analysis on his Telegram channel, arguing that the “success” of Israel in intercepting Iranian missiles is “conditional upon the presence of regional layers of protection provided by the United States,” which exposes Israel’s reliance on its network of allies and forces it to give away its various defensive positions.
Orabi added that the Iranian intention behind the strike was “extremely cautious” and “sought to create a new deterrence stance that does not evolve into war,” which creates a new precedent for Iranian action that increases the regional cost of continuing belligerent action toward Iran.
The Biden administration has also made this cost clear to Israel, reportedly telling Netanyahu that the U.S. would not back an Israeli counterattack and that Israel should “take the win.”
In this context, Iran has consciously and delicately raised the stakes of a wider confrontation, further straining U.S.-Israeli relations and creating renewed pressure to diffuse regional tensions. Possibly, it might also lead to pressure to end the genocidal war on Gaza.
The Middle East is bracing for the possibility of regional war after Iran responded to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus with a major drone and missile attack Saturday. The attack caused little damage inside Israel, as it intercepted nearly all of the drones and missiles with help from the United States, Britain, France and Jordan. Iran’s government described the attack as a…
Since Iran on Saturday sent hundreds of drones and missiles — which were mostly shot down — toward Israel to retaliate for an Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria, anti-war voices around the world have called for de-escalation efforts. “We are deeply concerned that Iranian retaliatory strikes following Israel’s April 1 attack on its diplomatic compound in Damascus will move the region…
Campaign group Stop the War Coalition (STWC) has issued a damning statement over the escalating situation between Israel and Iran – pointedly blaming the former for the actions of the latter.
Iran: responding to Israel’s illegal actions
As the Canary previously reported, on 1 April Israel bombed an Iranian embassy in Syria – a move which technically counts as a direct attack on Iranian soil. After nearly two weeks of promising a retaliatory strike, Iran launched a drone and missile assault on Israel on 13 April.
Israel, the US, and UK intercepted the majority of Iran’s drone and missiles. However, it put the world on a war footing – with some analysts predicting the situation could throw the entire Middle East into chaos. However, as of Monday 15 April that doesn’t appear to have panned out.
Iran issued a statement on 15 April, with a spokesperson saying:
Instead of making accusations against Iran, (Western) countries should blame themselves and answer to public opinion for the measures they have taken against the… war crimes committed by Israel [in Gaza].
The spokesman added that Western countries “should appreciate Iran’s restraint in recent months”. Interestingly, Iran said it had informed the US and gave a 72-hour warning to neighbouring countries ahead of what it called its “limited” attack on Israel.
The spokesperson said Iran’s action was meant to:
create a deterrent in the aim to prevent the repetition of the actions of the Zionist regime and to defend (Iranian) interests.
Who’s the ‘malign influence’ in the Middle East?
Predictably, further to what the Canary previously reported, Western leaders are still blaming Iran solely for its retaliatory strike on Israel. UK foreign secretary David Cameron said on 15 April – without irony, given it’s Israel that has killed tens of thousands of people in just six months:
We’re very anxious to avoid escalation and to say to our friends in Israel, ‘it’s a time to think with head as well as heart and in many ways this is a double defeat for Iran’… Not only was their attack an almost total failure, but also the rest of the world can now see what a malign influence they are in the region.
If anyone in the region is a malign influence, it’s Israel near the top of the list. However, some people aren’t buying Cameron’s spin – including STWC.
The group issued the following statement:
The Stop the War Coalition has been warning over the last months that Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, on the West Bank, on Lebanon and in Syria and Iraq, risk regional war. In the last few days that war has come closer. We call on all sides to show restraint and to stop this terrifying slide to wider conflict.
The Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel was a response to a series of attacks on Iranian personnel including most seriously the bombing of the Iranian Consulate in Damascus on 1 April, which killed several people including senior military commanders and which, under international law, represented an attack on Iranian territory.
That deliberately provocative attack was not condemned by the US, the UK or the UN Security Council. The Iranian leadership has said, if it had been, they would have felt no need to retaliate.
Israel must stop what it’s doing
It continued:
US, British and French forces have been actively involved in countering the Iranian drone and missile attacks. We demand that Israel does not launch further attacks on Iranian forces and start another cycle of escalation.
We also continue to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to UK arms sales to Israel. The evidence of war crimes carried out during the assault on Gaza is irrefutable. At least an important component of the Israeli leadership is actively seeking a more general war in the Middle East, and they wish to draw the US and its allies in to support it.
Opposing the logic of war and escalation means calling for an end to Western imperialist intervention in the region. There must be an end to Western support for Israel as it carries out genocide against the people of Gaza and tries to widen the conflict and a lasting settlement for a sovereign and free Palestine.
In Gaza, Israel has so far killed nearly 34,000 people – mostly women and children. It begs the question just how far will the West allow Israel to go before it says ‘enough is enough’ – and will that red line ever be reached at all?
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Saturday warned the U.S. about “any support for Israel or involvement in harming Iran’s interests,” according to a statement. U.S. President Joe Biden said he met with his national security team for an update on Iran’s attacks on Israel and the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security against threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad.
Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on April 13, 2024. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead. ** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on April 5, this is the latest figure. *** This figure is released by the Israeli military…
This is clearly a very bad situation fomented by Israel, and one which may drag the UK and other Western nations into a broader conflict. It shouldn’t drag us into it, but when you read the responses of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, it seems there’s cross-party support for turning a blind eye to Israel’s actions:
Britain is actively participating in a war – without any parliamentary or public debate.
With Starmer and Sunak issuing almost identical statements tonight, we appear to have become a one-party state with a foreign policy that has no moral compass or basis in international law. pic.twitter.com/Qxj0dg0abH
Iran launched 300 drones and missiles at Israel, the vast majority of which were intercepted by Israel, the US, the UK, and ‘other forces’. It’s not unexpected that so many would be intercepted given Israel’s ‘iron dome’ defence system which can detect and shoot down drones and missiles.
Following the retaliatory strike, Al Jazeera reported:
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed the attack, saying it launched the drones and missiles under Operation True Promise as part of the punishment for “the Zionist entity’s crime of targeting the Iranian consulate in Syria” on April 1.
The raid in Damascus killed 12 people, including two senior generals in the IRGC’s elite Quds Force.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the consulate attack.
With the missiles and drone attack, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said it now deemed the matter “concluded” and warned Israel of a “considerably more severe” response should the “Israeli regime make another mistake”.
It also warned the US to stay out of the conflict.
Sunak and Starmer respond
Not long after the retaliatory strike began, prime minister Rishi Sunak released the following message:
There is no mention of the embassy attack which started all this.
You can highlight that Sunak says we’re working with our allies “to stabilise the situation and prevent further escalation”, but one of those allies is Israel. If we tolerate Israel striking against Iran but not the reverse, it’s difficult to see how this situation won’t escalate.
It’s also difficult how to see how this response is anything other than a message to Israel that we will back what they do next and blame what happens on Iran.
Keir Starmer’s response is so similar to Sunak’s that he might soon be accused of plagiarism:
Sunak and Starmer are selling a version of reality in which the Iran strike came out of nowhere. It’s a reality in which we and our allies can launch unprovoked attacks and then condemn our targets for retaliating.
It’s a reality which many are unwilling to accept:
I'm not sure how many people considered it in the UK's interest for Israel to bomb the Iranian embassy in Damascus. https://t.co/gFNntADh4n
Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in a sovereign state, which is a direct violation of The Vienna Convention. And as a lawyer you understand this is one of the most foundational documents of international law. Any thoughts on that?
Hopefully Israel doesn’t escalate the conflict further.
But if it does, Sunak and Starmer will find themselves having to explain why British men and women are dying in a needless war started by an undeserving ally.
From what we’ve seen so far, their efforts will not be convincing.
An operation has been carried out against Israeli targets in the Occupied Palestinian territories, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement on Monday night. The drone and missile strike was a response to “numerous crimes” supposedly committed by West Jerusalem, the statement said, among which was an attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, it added.
“In response to the Zionist regime’s numerous crimes … and the martyrdom of a number of our country’s commanders and military advisors in Syria, the IRGC’s Aerospace Division launched tens of missiles and drones against certain targets inside the occupied territories,” the statement said.
The exact targets of the strike remain unknown. It is also unclear if the IRGC was referring to the Occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank or Israeli territory when announcing the strike. Several media outlets earlier reported that multiple drones were targeting Israeli territory. Tehran said it would provide further details about the operation “soon.”
The development came two weeks after an alleged Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in the Syrian capital of Damascus. The attack, which took place on April 1, killed seven officers of the IRGC’s Quds Force, including two generals.
Following the incident, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to deal Israel a “slap in the face.” US officials also warned West Jerusalem on Friday that Tehran could be preparing a massive strike against Israel over the weekend.
The failure of States to pay their membership dues to the United Nations in full and in time, and the practice of conditioning funding on unilateral political goals is causing a financial liquidity crisis for the organisation, the impacts of which are felt by victims and survivors of human rights violations and abuses. … Without the resources needed, the outcomes of this session can’t be implemented. The credibility of HRC is at stake.
We welcome the adoption of three resolutions calling for the implementation of effective accountability measures to ensure justice for atrocity crimes committed in the context of Israel‘s decades long colonial apartheid imposed over the Palestinian people, and for the realisation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. Special Procedures expressed their profound concern about “the support of certain governments for Israel’s strategy of warfare against the besieged population of Gaza, and the failure of the international system to mobilise to prevent genocide” and called on States to implement an “arms embargo on Israel, heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling […] that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza […].” This session, the Special Rapporteur on the OPT concluded that the actions of Israel in Gaza meet the legal qualifications of genocide.
We deplore the double standards in applying international law and the failure of certain States to vote in favor of ending impunity. This undermines the integrity of the UN human rights framework, the legitimacy of this institution, and the credibility of those States. From Palestine, to Ukraine, to Myanmar, to Sudan, to Sri Lanka, resolving grave human rights violations requires States to address root causes, applying human rights norms in a principled and consistent way. The Council has a prevention mandate and UN Member States have a legal and moral duty to prevent and ensure accountability and non-recurrence for atrocity crimes, wherever they occur.
We want to highlight and specifically welcome the adoption of the first ever resolution on combating discrimination, violence and harmful practices intersex persons. The resolution builds on growing support in the Council on this topic and responds to several calls by the global coalition of intersex-led organisations. The resolution takes important steps in recognising that discrimination, violence and harmful practices based on innate variations of sex characteristics, such as medically unnecessary interventions, takes place in all regions of the world. We welcome that the resolution calls for States to take measures to protect the human rights of this population and calls for an OHCHR report and a panel discussion to address challenges and discuss good practices in protecting the human rights of intersex persons.
We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the Independent Expert on the enjoyment of human rights by persons with albinism. As attested by human rights defenders with albinism, the mandate played an invaluable role by shedding light on human rights violations against persons with albinism through ground breaking research, country visits, and human rights training, and ensuring that defenders with albinism are consulted and take part in the decision-making. The organisations also welcomed the inclusion of language reflecting the important role played by “organizations of persons with albinism and their families”, and the reference to the role of States in collaboration with the World Health Organization, “to take effective measures to address the health-related effects of climate change on persons with albinism with a view to realizing their right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, particularly regarding the alarming incidence of skin cancer in this population, and to implement the recommendations of the report of the Independent Expert in this regard”.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. We also welcome the update of the title of the mandate acknowledging the recognition of this right by the Human Rights Council in its resolution 48/13 on 8 October 2021 and the General Assembly resolution 76/300 on 28 July 2022. We also welcome the inclusion of gender-specific language in the text, and we call on the Special Rapporteur to devote a careful attention to the protection of environmental human rights defenders for their strong contribution to the realisation of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, as called for by several States. We also welcome that the Council appointed for the first time a woman from the global south to fulfill this mandate, and we welcome the nomination of another woman as Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change.
We welcome the resolution on countering disinformation, which addresses new issues whilst once again rejecting censorship and reaffirming the ‘essential role’ that the right to freedom of expression plays in countering disinformation. We welcome the specific focus on girls – besides women – as well as risks associated with artificial intelligence, gender-based violence, and electoral processes. We urge States to follow the approach of the resolution and to combat disinformation through holistic, positive measures, including by ensuring a diverse, free and independent media environment, protecting journalists and media workers, and implementing comprehensive right to information laws. Importantly, we also urge States to ensure that they do not conduct their own disinformation campaigns. At the same time, social media companies have an essential role to play and should take heed of the resolution by reforming their business models which allow disinformation to flourish on their platforms. The resolution also mandates the Advisory Committee to produce a new report on disinformation, and it is absolutely essential that this report mirrors and reinforces existing standards on this topic, especially the various reports of the Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression.
Whilst we welcome the technical renewal of the resolution on freedom of religion or belief, we regret that the parallel resolution on combating intolerance (widely known by its original name Resolution 16/18) was not tabled at the session. Since 2011, these duel resolutions have been renewed each year, representing a consensual and universal framework to address the root causes of hate based on religion or belief in law, policy, and practice. We call on the OIC to once again renew Resolution 16/18 in a future session, while ensuring no substantive changes are made to this consensual framework. We also urge all States to reaffirm their commitment to Resolution 16/18 and the Rabat Plan of Action and adopt comprehensive and evidence-based national implementation plans, with the full and effective participation of diverse stakeholders.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on prevention of genocide and its focus on impunity, risks and early warnings, as well as the paragraph reaffirming that starvation of civilians as a method to combat is prohibited under international humanitarian law; however, we regret that the resolution fails to adequately reflect and address serious concerns relating to current political contexts and related risks of genocide.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on the rights of the child: realising the rights of the child and inclusive social protection, strengthening the implementation of child rights-compliant inclusive social protection systems that benefit all children. We also welcome the addition of a new section on child rights mainstreaming, enhancing the capacity of OHCHR to advance child rights mainstreaming, particularly in areas such as meaningful and ethical child participation and child safeguarding. We remain concerned by persisted attempts to weaken the text, especially to shift the focus away from children as individual right-holders, to curtail child participation and remove the inclusion of a gender perspective.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which addresses effective national legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture. We welcome the new paragraph urging States concerned to comply with binding orders of the International Court of Justice related to their obligations under the Convention Against Torture.
We welcome the adoption of a new resolution on the human rights situation in Belarus. The Belarusian authorities continue their widespread and systematic politically-motivated repression, targeting not only dissent inside the country, but also Belarusians outside the country who were forced to flee for fear of persecution. Today, almost 1,500 prisoners jailed following politically-motivated charges in Belarus face discriminatory treatment, severe restriction of their rights, and ill-treatment including torture. The resolution rightly creates a new standalone independent investigative mechanism, that will inherit the work of the OHCHR Examination, to collect and preserve evidence of potential international crimes beyond the 2020 elections period, with a view to advancing accountability. It also ensures the renewal of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur who remains an essential ‘lifeline’ to Belarusian civil society.
We welcome the resolution on technical assistance and capacity building in regard to the human rights situation in Haiti and emphasis on the role civil society plays in the promotion and protection of human rights and the importance of creating and maintaining an enabling environment in which civil society can operate independently and free from insecurity. We similarly welcome the call on the Haitian authorities to step up their efforts to support national human rights institutions and to pursue an inclusive dialogue between all Haitian actors concerned in order to find a lasting solution to the multidimensional crisis, which severely impacts civil society. We welcome the renewal of the mandate of the designated expert and reference to women and children in regard to the monitoring of human rights situation and abuses developments, as well as encouragement of progress on the question of the establishment of an office of the Office of the High Commissioner in Haiti. We nonetheless regret that the resolution does not address the multifaceted challenges civil society faces amidst escalating violence, fails to further address the link between the circulation of firearms and the human rights violations and abuses, and does not identify concrete avenues for the protection of civilians and solidarity action to ensure the safety, dignity and rights of civilians are upheld.
We welcome the adoption of the resolution on Iran, renewing the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran and extending for another year the mandate of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran. The continuation of these two distinct and complementary mandates is essential for the Council to fulfill its mandate of promotion and protection of human rights in Iran. However, given the severity of the human rights crisis in the country, we regret that this important resolution remains purely procedural and fails to reflect the dire situation of human rights in Iran, including the sharp spike in executions, often following grossly unfair trials. It also fails to address the increased levels of police and judicial harassment against women and girls appearing in public without compulsory headscarves, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists and families of victims seeking truth and justice, and the continued pervasive discrimination and violence faced by women and girls, LGBTI+ persons and persons belonging to ethnic and religious minorities in the country.
We welcome the adoption by consensus of the resolution on Myanmar, which is a clear indication of the global concern for the deepening human rights and humanitarian crisis in the country as a result of the military’s over three-year long brutal war against the people resisting its attempted coup. We further welcome the Council’s unreserved support for Myanmar peoples’ aspirations for human rights, democracy, and justice as well as the recognition of serious human rights implications of the continuing sale of arms and jet fuel to Myanmar.
We welcome the resolution on the situation of human rights in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression. The latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI) reveals disturbing evidence of war crimes, including civilian targeting, torture, sexual violence, and the unlawful transfer of children. These findings underscore the conflict’s brutality, particularly highlighted by the siege of Mariupol, where indiscriminate attacks led to massive civilian casualties and infrastructure destruction. The report also details the widespread and systematic torture and sexual violence against both civilians and prisoners of war. Moreover, the illegal deportation of children emerges as a significant issue, as part of a broader strategy of terror and cultural erasure. The COI’s mandate extension is crucial for ongoing investigations and ensuring justice for victims.
By adopting a resolution entitled ‘advancing human rights in South Sudan,’ the Council ensured that international scrutiny of South Sudan’s human rights situation will cover the country’s first-ever national elections, which are set to take place in December 2024. With this resolution, the UN’s top human rights body extended the mandate of its Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan.
We welcome the resolution on the human rights situation in Syria and the extension of the mandate of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry (COI), which will continue to report on violations from all sides of the conflict in an impartial and victim-centered manner. Syria continues to commit systematic and widespread attacks against civilians, in detention centers through torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance and through indiscriminate attacks against the population in Idlib. We welcome that the resolution supports the mandate of the Independent Institution of the Missing People and calls for compliance with the recent order on Provisional Measures by the ICJ – both initiatives can play a significant role in fulfilling victims’ rights to truth and justice and should receive support by all UN Member States. In a context of ongoing normalisation, the CoI’s mandate to investigate and report on human rights abuses occurring in Syria is of paramount importance.
We continue to deplore this Council’s exceptionalism towards serious human rights violations committed by the Chinese government. At a time when double-standards are enabling ongoing atrocity crimes to be committed in Palestine, sustained failure by Council Members, in particular OIC countries, to promote accountability for crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and Muslim peoples in China severely undermines the Council’s integrity, and its ability to prevent and put an end to atrocity crimes globally. Findings by the OHCHR, the UN Treaty Bodies, the ILO and over 100 letters by UN Special Procedures since 2018 have provided overwhelming evidence pointing to systematic and widespread human rights violations across the People’s Republic of China. We reiterate our pressing call for all Council Members to support the adoption of a resolution establishing a UN mandate to monitor and report on the human rights situation in China, as repeatedly urged by UN Special Procedures. We further echo Special Procedures’ call for prompt and impartial investigations into the unlawful death of Cao Shunli, and all cases of reprisals for cooperation with the UN.
We regret the Council’s silence on the situation in India despite the clear and compounding early warning signs of further deterioration that necessitate preventive action by the Council based on the objective criteria. The latest of these early warning signals include the recent notification of rules to implement the highly discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government just weeks before the election, along with recent intercommunal violence in Manipur and ongoing violence against Muslims in various parts of India amid increasing restrictions on civic space, criminalisation of dissent and erosion of the rule of law with political interference.
We further regret that this Council is increasingly failing to protect victims of human rights violations throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. The people of Yemen and Libya continue to endure massive ‘man-made’ humanitarian catastrophes caused in large part by ongoing impunity for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave violations of international law. In Algeria, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and in other MENA countries, citizens are routinely subjected to brutal, wide-spread human rights violations intended to silence dissent, eradicate independent civil society and quash democratic social movements. Countless citizens from the MENA region continue to hope and strive for a more dignified life – often at the cost of their own lives and freedom. We call on this Council and UN member States to rise above narrow political agendas and begin to take steps to address the increasing selectivity that frequently characterises this Council’s approach to human rights protection and promotion.
We regret that once more, civil society representatives faced numerous obstacles to accessing the Palais and engaging in discussions, both in person and remotely, during this session. The UN human rights system in Geneva has always and continues to rely on the smooth and unhindered access of civil society to carry out its mandate. We remind UN Member States, as well as UNOG, that the Council’s mandate, as set out in HRC Res 5/1, requires that arrangements be made, and practices observed to ensure ‘the most effective contribution’ of NGOs. Undermining civil society access and engagement not only undermines the capacities and effectiveness of civil society but also of the UN itself.
Signatories:
All Human Rights for All in Iran
Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
Association Arc pour la defense des droits de l’homme et des revendication democratique/culturelles du peuple Azerbaidjanais Iran -”ArcDH”
Balochistan Human Rights Group
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies
Child Rights Connect (CRCnt)
CIVICUS
Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)
Egyptian initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR)
Ensemble contre la Peine de Mort
Franciscans International
Gulf Center for Human Rights
Impact Iran
International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI)
"This is a grave violation of the UN Charter and international law and a breach of the sovereignty of both Syria and Iran. This attack is of an extremely vicious nature… 25 years ago, China's embassy in Yugoslavia was bombed by a US-led… pic.twitter.com/ipZTgzfKOj
The latest Israeli heightening of violence in an already violent region presents the Biden administration with one of its biggest challenges yet in keeping the United States out of a new Middle East war. Israel’s bombing of an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus, killing a senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and several other Iranian officials in addition to at least four…
Editor’s note: This podcast was recorded on March 19, 2024.
Each day brings fresh horrors from the ground in Gaza as Israel’s brutal genocide continues with the full backing of the US. Yet Israel is not operating with complete impunity.
From the Houthis’ humanitarian blockade of the Red Sea to Hezbollah’s missile strikes against Israel itself, the unofficial alliance of states and armed organizations known as the Resistance Axis is imposing consequences on Israel and the US. The result is a low-grade regional war, that for months has featured Israel and the US conducting increasingly brazen air strikes from Yemen to Lebanon and Syria.
Most recently, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus on April 1, killing seven military advisors, including Brigadier Generals Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy Mohamad Hadi Haji Rahimi. Iran has vowed to retaliate. As the spiral of escalation and deterrence continues, the question arises of just how much longer the two sides can trade blows until a full-blown regional war erupts.
Veteran war journalist Elijah Magnier and Middle East Critique Editor Matteo Capasso join The Real News for a timely discussion on the historical roots of the Resistance Axis, and how the confrontation taking place could reshape regional and global politics. Corporate media has flooded the US public with a one-dimensional narrative of the Resistance Axis, leaving out a crucial detail—how decades of US and Israeli intervention and destruction birthed the Resistance Axis. Drawing on their deep expertise, Magnier and Capasso reframe the current confrontation in light of the region’s history, and its future.
This interview is the second part of a two-part series on the Resistance Axis. Click here to read or listen to the first part of the conversation with Rania Khalek and Nima Shirazi about the media narratives about the Resistance Axis used to justify US intervention in the region.
Find out how to register for Middle East Critique‘s Ramadan course on Palestine and Imperialism.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome, everyone, to this special episode of The Real News podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News.
Ju-Hyun Park:
And I’m Ju-Hyun Park, the engagement editor at The Real News.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Last episode, we spoke with Rania Khalek of BreakThrough News and Nima Shirazi of the Citations Needed podcast about the media narrative surrounding Iran and the resistance axis. An informal alliance between Iran, Syria, and various armed factions across the region that include Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. We did our best in a one-hour span to break down how Western narratives of Iran as this evil, all-powerful puppeteer controlling these other groups denies the real agency and motivations of the resistance axis, but it also dehumanizes people in the region. It obscures the complex historical context and human realities on the ground, and all of that helps justify the United States’ forever wars in the Middle East or West Asia.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Today, in part two of this two-part podcast series, we’re returning to our conversation about the resistance axis. This time, taking a closer look at the history of how these armed resistance groups emerged, and what kinds of prospects there are for Israel’s genocide in Gaza to spiral into an all-out regional confrontation.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Joining us today are Elijah Magnier, a veteran war correspondent with more than 30 years of experience covering conflicts in the region. As well as Matteo Capasso, author of Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, editor of the academic journal, Middle East Critique, and a Marie Curie Global Fellow at Columbia University, New York, and the University of Venice, Italy.
Ju-Hyun Park:
While many Americans may think of organizations like Hezbollah or the Houthis as groups driven by pure religious fanaticism, there’s a real historical context that these organizations emerge from, that informs their motivations and goals, which are, in fact, politically complex. Most notably, decades of US, European, and Israeli aggression in the region have shaped the politics of the resistance axis in important ways. As the likelihood of an all-out regional war increases, we want to take a moment to frame this potential conflict in the long history of US imperialism, and how a direct confrontation between the US and the resistance axis could reshape the politics of the world.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now, before we get started, we want to begin, as always, by thanking you, our listeners, for your continued support of The Real News. None of what we do would be possible without you. That’s why everything we do here at The Real News is guided by a simple question, how does this reporting serve our listeners?
Ju-Hyun Park:
The Real News is totally not-for-profit. We don’t run ads or take corporate funding of any kind. So if you find value in what we do, remember, it’s entirely up to you to help fund our work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Before we get to the episode today, please head on over to The Real News.com/donate to become a monthly sustainer of our work. If you want to stay in touch and get regular updates about the latest and greatest stories from us, then sign up for our free newsletter. Go to The Real News.com/sign-up.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Now without further ado, Elijah, Matteo, welcome to The Real News.
Elijah Magnier:
Thank you for having me.
Matteo Capasso:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you both so much for being here, making time for this. We really, really appreciate it, and we’re really excited to dig into this conversation with y’all, and get into as much as we can over the next 50 minutes or so. Now, in part one of this two-part episode, we focused more on the media narratives surrounding the resistance axis. Today we’re going to have more of a historical and military-based discussion. But by way of bridging part one and part two of this special episode, I want to start by talking about how we’re framing all of this, and I want to get our incredible panelists’ thoughts on that. Because as Ju-Hyun and I mentioned in the introduction, the goal of part one of this deep-dive series was to dissect Western media narratives on Iran, the Middle East, and the resistance axis. And to help our listeners parse through the propaganda that we, especially those of us here in the United States, have been bombarded with for decades.
Honestly, I think we did a really solid job in that regard, and it was a very powerful and necessary conversation. But I do want to stress that by focusing on addressing Western audiences’ propagandized notions about Iran and the resistance axis, we absolutely were not trying to suggest that present-day Iran itself is some uncomplicated, homogenous utopia without its own serious and complex political, social, and economic issues, or anything like that. Of course not.
I would compare it to another story that we’ve been reporting on across on the other side of the world, the recent trial in the United States of ex Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was just convicted of drug trafficking while he was a “narco dictator” in Honduras. He was convicted in a United States court. But if you read The New York Times’ report on that news, it does not mention anywhere that the United States was the primary backer of the 2009 coup. It was the primary backer of the sham elections that put Hernandez in power a few years later. If you don’t have that context, if you’re not talking about that side, you are literally going to misunderstand the whole story.
That is why we felt, in part one of this episode, we had to address that side of the issue, and the role that the US has played in shaping the realities that Western media tries to narrate, while pretending that the US has not played a role in shaping that reality from the beginning. I want to kick things off by quickly asking our panelists if we could address that question of framing here. For the rest of what we’re going to talk about today, what do you most want listeners, especially listeners here in the West, to understand about the conversation we’re going to have, and the conversation that we’re not having here? Because we can’t cover everything, of course.
Matteo Capasso:
Elijah, out of seniority and experience, so first.
Elijah Magnier:
Thank you. That’s very kind of you. For many years, I thought that the US media is somehow offering a good information and an insightful strategy to the US policy around the world. It took me some time to understand that it was not the case. Actually, there is an elite in the US that is thinking on behalf of the entire population, and trying to dictate to the US administration what is the best to rule the world. Not what is the best for the world, and what is the best for the American people, and what is in the interest for the American population. It is what is the interest of the elite, to continue dominating the world, and make sure that no competition can come and disturb this ruling and this unilateral hegemony.
That became very obvious from the war in Afghanistan that I covered on the ground, the war in Iraq that I also covered for 10 years, since 2003, the war in Syria, in Libya, in Lebanon, the war between Israel and then Lebanon, and now the war on Gaza. But for more than 35 years covering the wars on the ground, mainly there were wars triggered by the Americans, thinking that it is in the name of democracy and in the name of human rights. And suddenly, all that crumbles in the eyes of the entire world with double standard and hypocrisy, when there is a selective determination used with the enemy and with the friends.
That came out with an article in Politico in 2019, when Rex Tillerson was the secretary of state, and he received a memo that was published saying, “Well, we use human rights against our enemy, but not against our friends.” And then we have Donald Trump coming out saying, “I love dictators and this is what I’m doing.” Bullying the world, bullying Europe, particularly here, when all of a sudden, Europe doesn’t exist anymore in terms of foreign policy. Because it’s totally in the hand of the American benefit, and American interest, where in Europe today, the leaders carry the flag of America first, but not Europe first.
All that is becoming more clear to the world population, in particular with the war on Gaza that exposed everybody. Your topic about the Axis of the Resistance and Iran’s support is very much integrated in the US hegemony attempt to rule the world. Because the strength of Iran and the power that Iran has in the Middle East, it is all thanks to the American mistakes. Where Iran had only to go behind America, and collect all the benefit for Iran to become a regional hegemony behind all the American mistakes. That needs to be developed, and we need to talk about it in length, but now I’ll leave the ground to Matteo.
Matteo Capasso:
Thanks, Eliaj, and thanks, Max, for your question of framing. I mean, I think this is very important. Speaking as an historian, as an academic, I think that when we approach the question of framing, we indeed need to talk about something that nobody wants to talk about. Which is the fact that we’ve been living, since the aftermath of World War II, under a project of Western and American dominance. If we do not understand why the so-called media, which basically functions as an arm of the ruling class, because it needs to create a narrative to protect their interest. If we do not understand what are the material interests at stake, then I think we’re missing a huge part of this framing, and of reality. When it comes to the Middle East and the Arab region, West Asia, this region has been central to the consolidation of the project of American dominance after World War II.
It had, let’s say that the project of American dominance, which is also called as imperialism, required to achieve two main political goals. One was the access and political control of oil, which sustained the supremacy of the US dollar at the financial level, creating what we know as the recycling of petrol dollars. And second, and related to that, in order to make sure that the control of the region was in place, the US clobbered and crushed anything from within the region challenging such project.
And here, where we see the functional and reactionary role of Israel on the one hand, the Zionist entity, and the Gulf monarchies on the other. Because Israel has had a function, which is the one to wage war, and undermine any sociopolitical formation that dare to pursue a path of national liberation and regional solidarity away from the project of American dominance.
This leads me to the second point that I want to highlight in terms of framing. Because once we have this history, once we are able to understand that we live in reality, and reality as the totality of social relations. Meaning we cannot pick and choose what we want, but there are unequal structures that dominate, hierarchical structure that control the way in which our reality is structured, then we come to understand the second point, which is there has always been an Axis of Resistance inside the region. Back in the days of decolonization, this Axis of Resistance, which was really endogenous to the region, and used to go under the name of the Pan-Arab Project. Which eventually saw its defeat with the liquidation of the revolutionary spirit of Egypt, the destruction of Iraq, the more recent wars, NATO-led wars on the national sovereignty of Libya, and Syria, and Afghanistan as well. The ones that Elijah was talking about.
But the moment one axis was losing, another one rose. Again, we talk about exactly what Elijah was mentioning, the fact that this axis rose out not just the mistakes, but also how these mistakes led to the decline of the US. So a regional force, in other words, is inevitable. Because all these political actors in the region understand very well that the pursuit of a national liberation, of national independence, whether it’s in Iran, in Lebanon, or in Yemen, or in Palestine, requires a strategy of regional solidarity. The question of Palestinian liberation becomes the most fundamental issue, because Israel is an outpost of imperialism, of this American project of dominance in the region. So Palestine must be liberated. The sanctity of Palestine is crucial, because once you liberate Palestine, you free the region from the existence of a nuclear-armed and Western-supported jungle that is a threat to everyone.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thank you for those really thoughtful explanations, helping us frame the approach that we’re taking here, and why it’s necessary to do this in light of the fact that we live under American dominance, American imperialism as a fact. And not only as a fact, but one that is so often made invisible, and therefore absent from the conversation when it comes to this region in particular. But also more broadly when it comes to discussing the geopolitics of the world, the way that history is moving through our current era. I want us to dig a little bit more into talking concretely about the actors in the resistance axis, where they come from. Of course, understanding that this is a really expansive topic and we have limited time, so we’re not able to offer more than some very tight summaries.
But as you both said, the US has been in the Arab region for many decades, way before the so-called war on terror even began. But let’s dig into that a little bit more. Help us understand what American intervention in the region has to do with the formation of the resistance axis. How have wars and US proxy wars led to the rise of groups like Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, and incentivized them to form alliances with Iran and Syria?
Elijah Magnier:
First of all, it is important for the American people to understand that the presence of America in West Asia, or what is known by the British, the Middle East, has nothing to do with the interest of the American people. For many decades, the Americans have been present in West Asia or the Middle East, and they have failed to earn the heart and the mind of the population. Not in one country, they have managed to have real friend, real supporters of America. They have supporters of the American population, between people there is no… ever a problem. The problem is always with the US administration that is talking in the name of the nation that is America, and guiding the nation that is less interested in foreign policy.
So what the Americans have done, I will go very fast to where Hillary Clinton said in front of the Senate, she said, “The same enemies we are fighting today are the one we have funded.” That takes us back to Afghanistan. What she meant, is she meant Al-Qaeda, and the ramification of Al-Qaeda, that is ISIS. And then all the other members of the resistance, again to US hegemony and presence in the Middle East, but also another group that is the Axis of the Resistance that Matteo spoke about. That comes out of the main core and essential central problem that is Palestine.
For Al-Qaeda, it is when the Americans went to Afghanistan to defeat the Soviet Union, they have created what all the newspaper called the warrior on the path of peace. They meant Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda at that time, that they have used to kick out the Soviets from Afghanistan. But then what they have done, that they armed these people, and these people understand that the Americans are even worse than any other occupation force, and these people don’t want the Americans to rule the country.
This is why they turned against the Americans with one objective, “Leave our land.” The Americans insisted, and they brought out the war on terror that General Wesley Clark spoke about, saying that in 2001, the Americans planned already to occupy five or seven countries in five years. So that plan had nothing to do with the war on terror, but it had to do with the total hegemony of the US over the Middle East. I mean, you can go and do business with the Middle East, you don’t need to occupy them. You don’t need to destroy them, and this is what the Americans have done.
Going away from Afghanistan to Iraq, and this is where the resistance, the Axis of the Resistance started. Not only from the side of Al-Qaeda that’s represented by the Sunni, that later on became ISIS, or ISIL, or Daesh, but also the Shia resistance with one objective. They want good relationship with the Americans, business relationship with the Americans, but they want them out of Iraq. And then I remember, also, when General Mike Flynn said that he informed his boss, direct boss, Barack Obama, that ISIS was growing in Iraq, and had the intention to go to Syria, and America did nothing because of one objective.
The sectarian issue in the Middle East dates back to more than 1,500 years, and it has a lot of fertile ground to be developed. This is where the Americans went on the evil side of the history to inflame the sectarian feeling, and create a kind of sectarian war that is not really a sectarian war, at the end of the day. It was a war that served the benefit of the permanent presence of the Americans in the region. This is what they thought, at least, until they start being harassed, and attacked, and they understood that they need to change their policy. And they have changed their policy into worse, by creating local forces to fight on their behalf like they’ve done in Syria, for example. They have occupied 23% of northeast Syria and saying, “We are here to protect the Kurds.” Donald Trump said, “I want the oil.” At the end of the day, they are fulfilling the Israeli policy, because in the Middle East, the Americans follow Israel’s policy and what is convenient for the Israelis.
Now, the first Axis of the Resistance that was created, for example, in Lebanon, that was after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This is when Hezbollah was created. The objective of Hezbollah is to recover all the land occupied by Israel. Israel, because they’re not very clever, continue occupying part of the land after their withdrawal of most of the land in the year 2000. But they continue occupying part of the Lebanese land, so they give reason for Hezbollah to exist.
In Syria, exactly the same. The Americans came to change the regime in Syria, but they have failed. They used ISIS and Al-Qaeda, saying that this is a sectarian war. It is wrong. 70% of the Syrian army are Sunni, and the Hezbollah Shia, Iran Shias, and, well, the majority is Shia, but there are Sunni, too, and many Iranian ambassadors are Sunni, they went to support the Syrian government to the request of the Syrian government. So what the Americans and the Israeli thought, it is very easy to get rid of ISIS, but it’s important to turn Syria into failed state to disrupt the supply of weapons from Iran, to Lebanon, to the Axis of the Resistance. One of the main element of the Axis of the Resistance, that is Hezbollah.
In Yemen, the war, the Saudi war against Ansar Allah Houthis started in 2015, thinking that there was a promenade for the Saudi army supported by the Americans, the British, and the whole NATO members. It turned out, after seven years, that this is an impossible task. And again, the birth of another member of the Axis of the Resistance. This Axis of the Resistance represented by Yemen, the Ansar Allah Houthis, it’s turned out to be one of the main pillar in the war today on Gaza, by blocking the Red Sea, and now today expanding even to the Indian Ocean.
In Iraq, the American invasion created the resistance that became part of Hashd al-Shaabi, and why is that? It because in 2014, I was in Baghdad when ISIS moved from… Well, it wasn’t really ISIS, it was a different Sunni group supported by Turkey, by the Saudis, by the Emiratis, and by everybody in the region that wanted to change the regime in Iraq. At the end of the day, ISIS hijacked all the effort of all these tribes and groups, and then advanced toward Baghdad. The prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki at that time, asked for the American support to give him back all the weapons that he paid for, and Barack Obama waited four months to do so, allowing ISIS to expand. This is where Iran moved in and helped to form the Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi and the resistance.
So you see, when I said all the mistakes committed by the Americans allowed the fertile ground for Iran to create the Axis of the Resistance made by the people, by the will of the people to fight the occupier, that is the result of the creation of this Axis of the Resistance.
Matteo Capasso:
Absolutely. I mean, Elijah has already provided a very comprehensive and holistic picture of the rise of this axis out of America’s endless wars in the region in West Asia. But we also need to understand, I think here, that what I can add is that we need to understand that this is a material war, it’s a military war, but it’s also an intellectual war. I’ll pick up exactly on what he was talking about. Because you see, every time that we approach the question of the Axis of Resistance, the issue discussed around the Axis of Resistance, the Western media immediately goes into each and every actor being Iran puppets. The idea is that they work, and only according to what Iran says, Iran does. So they do not have, basically, a capacity to act in concert, or independently, or by gaining the strategic independence in relations also with their allies.
Basically, they are in Palestine. What they’re doing in Palestine, it’s not about because they’re interested in the question of Palestine, it’s simply because there is hatred of the US and the Jewish people. We have seen this over and over, when in the description, also, of Iranian presidents. Think about Ahmadinejad, think about even if we go back to other leaders, that they were not part of this Axis of Resistance. The demonization that takes place always is aligned through specific framings that they use, the idea that they are dictators. So in this way, what you’re presenting is a picture of a government that is not legitimate vis-a-vis their own people. The idea that they are repressive, so that they’re just ruling with force, and again, there is no legitimacy. Then all these countries, what do they have? Iran, it’s oil. Oil allows them, basically, to pursue these very radical activities that are only interested in disrupting the international liberal order.
What I’m saying here is, basically, that the material war that it’s taking place in the region is also… It aligns. It takes place through an ideological war, and we are part of this war as well. As Fidel Castro used to say, “Guns follow ideas and vice versa, ideas follow guns.” In the sense that every time that we try to flip the picture, and to understand what it’s happening in the way Elijah just did, we are faced with an amount of propaganda that does not allow us to really to go through the fog. In fact, as he rightly pointed out, if instead of looking at all these actors of the Axis of Resistance, we just look at one element that all these sociopolitical forces have in common. Immediately, you’ll start looking at history, and at the present, and eventually at the future in a very different way.
Look at Iran. Iran has been under sanctions since the early days of the revolution, 1979. US sanctions first, UN multilateral sanctions after. Who invaded Iraq and put sanctions on it? The US or the Western world as a whole. Who invaded Lebanon, as Elijah was saying? It was the Israeli under US clout. Who unleashed a war since at least… since the war on terror, which then escalated in 2015 through their proxies, Saudi Arabia and Yemen? The US. Who destroyed Syria progressively as a revolution, and eventually in 2011, much more violently? Again, it was NATO, it was the US, and their allies. Who did not allow Hamas to go into power when they actually democratically won the reelection in 2006? It was the US and Israel.
What we are seeing is that all these actors, what they have in common is the rejection of the project of American domination and the consequences, because this is very important. The consequences paid by the people of these countries for having dared to imagine a future. One where national liberation, regional solidarity was possible, yet not under the terms of US control. Imagine now, if all these pundits and experts that are constantly being brought to mainstream television, they start talking in this way. They start talking about the centrality of the American project. They start talking about the consequences that the people of each of these countries had to pay, in order to find their dignity and their freedom. It will make immediately sense, and it will immediately become so easy for people, even in the US, to understand that the American project of dominance is a problem. Is a problem for the region as much as is a problem for the American people.
This is why there is a centrality, again, to the Palestinian question, which is far away from all this nonsense about the annihilation of Jews, or Muslims against Jews and Christians, and so on, and so forth. The problem is one, the problem is that actually the most reactionary and religious project in that region is actually the Zionist project. The reason why these forces ended up using Islam as a tool to launch a political struggle, it’s also related to the fate of the same forces, like the secular ones, that were undermined by US wars in the region back in the ’70s and the ’80s, by turning secularism into a bourgeois attitude or a tool of the US. One needs to look no further than the Palestinian Authority or Egypt to understand that.
The same US and its reactionary allies weaponized Islam, as Elijah was saying, into a force needed to undermine progressive projects in the region. So it seems to any intellect or mind that is willing to question US State Department propaganda, it seems natural that these actors owned up to their own history and tradition. They showed that there is an Islam that is progressive, it is for the masses, and for everyone who stands for justice. Something that Christianity and Judaism will have to do at some point, I hope.
But again, you see, we go back to the intellectual war. Why? That’s exactly what Elijah was talking about, the sectarianism here. Because instead of presenting the progressive side of the axis and the weaponization of Islam, what the pundits come back to us and say, “Oh, this is Shiism. It’s a sectarian version of the region.” There’s always an ideological twist used to undermine these progressive forces. But this is why we always have to get… to remind ourselves that this is, again, a material as much as an ideological struggle in which we have to counter on all levels.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right, and again, I stress for folks listening, that that’s a really important, necessary, and urgent, but intense project. To undo decades worth of propaganda that has convinced so many Westerners, especially Americans, including many like my own family. We were conservative in the post 9/11 era. We bought into all this crap, right? I mean, we believe that the region, the people were so uncomplicated that we would buy into the narrative that… It was like everything we’ve been unpacking here, gives people the context that we did not have 20 years ago. To tell us that, “No, it’s not just because they hate us because of who we are, right? They hate us because of Islam, right? They hate us because of our way of life, and it’s something embedded in the DNA of brown people living on the other side of the world wearing balaclavas. They’re somehow less than human than we are, and they just have this hate written into their DNA, their culture.”
That’s a very different story than the one we are trying to unpack here. But again, there still are a lot of folks who have been given that impression because of the propaganda we’re trying to unpack here. And again, I say it to listeners, that doesn’t mean that the situation is not complicated. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t nuances here, but we got to start with that basic fact. I want to ask you both if we could address that as well, right? Because what we’re really trying to do here, as we try to do with all of our work at The Real News Network, is to show people the human side of all of this. To really bring our attention to the ground and to the human beings that we’re talking about here. Giving that sort of texture to the story, instead of again, presenting this as an uncomplicated story of human-shaped cardboard cutouts in another part of the world.
Elijah, you’ve been on the… I mean, you’ve written extensively about, say, the situation in Israel’s northern front with Lebanon and the situation with Hezbollah. I want to turn this into a question to ask you both if… given the work that you’ve done, the research, the reporting that you’ve done, what would you most want to stress to folks about the human beings who make up the resistance? Who are they? What are they fighting for? What does that look like for them on a day-to-day basis? Or Elijah, what have folks been telling you as you’ve been reporting on US intervention in the region, about where their feelings are coming from? And how is that impacting the military logic that is driving the activities of the resistance axis, especially in the wake of the war on Gaza?
Elijah Magnier:
That’s a very good question. But before that, if I may, I really liked very much what Matteo said, and that gave me an idea to address the audience in a different way, and ask a question. How the American people have benefited from all the American wars, what that brought to America as benefit for the individual. If you look at the American debts, it went in 2001 from $4 trillion to $34 trillion today. In Afghanistan, the Americans occupy Afghanistan because they want to get rid of the Taliban. After 20 years, they gave back the power, handed over to the Taliban, and they confiscated $9 billion of the poorest country in Asia. They held it, because they thought they can achieve something in term of political gain, what they have failed to achieve in the military.
In Iraq, I lived there for 10 years, the country is destroyed. They have destroyed the electricity, the water supply, everything. It’s one of the richest country in the Middle East. Nothing was given to the Iraqi in terms of education, culture, hospitals, communication, transport, nothing. In Syria, occupying Syria and still occupying Syria, only to cripple the Syrian economy. How that can benefit any American individual, to see the Syrians, and the Iraqis, and the Afghani suffering out of the American wars, and nothing an American individual is benefiting from individually, or the society. You have inflation as we have an inflation. Everybody is suffering the increase of prices, and we have problems to survive these days.
Now, to go back to your question, the members of Hezbollah are members of the society. When the American envoy, Amos Hochstein, went to Lebanon to negotiate on behalf of Israel, the removal of Hezbollah to 20 kilometers off the Lebanese borders so the Israelis can feel secure, it was an impossible demand for a simple reason. These members that the Americans are asking to remove them are people who live in the south of Lebanon. They are part of the society. They love life. They love their family, their children. They think of the future, but they’re ready for sacrifices to protect, at least, not only their homes, but to prepare a better future for their children if they can.
Now, where is the benefit of Israel to continue occupying part of south of Lebanon? Are we talking about Israel as a state? Now, let’s see. Israel doesn’t recognize the border, its own borders. It says its borders is from the river to the sea. That’s a Likud Party charter in 1977. It says they don’t have a constitution. They don’t recognize any right of anyone to live, including the Palestinians, because that is considered a threat to the State of Israel. In their charter, they say they are democratic, but then they say they are Jewish state. How you can be democratic in a state only for the Jew? They call anyone who attack them as antisemite, when they are living in an ocean of Semite. That Lebanese are Semite, the Syrian, all the countries in the area. Most of the Jew in Israel are not Semite, because they come from non-Semitic background and origin.
So the people in Lebanon, the people in the south of Lebanon, the people who are member of the Axis of the Resistance that formed Hezbollah, they have one objective, is to free their land. But they also align themselves with the Iranian objective, that to support all the oppressed, at least not around the world, but in the Middle East. So they support the Iraqis when they need them. They support the Yemeni when they need them. They support the Palestinian when they need them. Iran and its Constitution Article 151 or 152 said that it is the duty of the state to support all the oppressed people around the world. This is why Iran support the Sunni in Gaza and in Palestine. They support the Sunni and the Shia in Syria. They support the Kurds, and the Sunni, and the Shia in Iraq. They support Venezuela, that had nothing to do with Islam.
So exactly the same, in Lebanon, people want to live in peace with all their neighbors. They want their right, and they want the right of the Palestinian to return to the Palestinians. That is the only objective. During the daylight when there is no war, they go to their job. There are doctors, there are engineer, there are farmers, there are people from all walks of life. There are ordinary people that people cannot distinguish them, because they form part of the society.
One last point, no non-state actor can survive in any environment if the society doesn’t support it. In Lebanon, the reason why Hezbollah is growing, and becoming very powerful without taking the control of the government, even if it has the potentiality and the strength, the military strength to take over Lebanon, but that doesn’t fit with its objective. Its objective is not to control the country. Its objective is to free the country, because the Lebanese army is not allowed to have weapons enough to deter Israel. And Israel believe that it’s an obligation to continue holding the air superiority, and to continue violating the Lebanese space, airspace, and land, and sea, because under the title of the right to defend itself and the right to protect itself. Well, stay within your borders. At least don’t go into other borders. Don’t occupy other land. No, because again, as Matteo said, the essence is Palestine, and Palestine occupied by the Israelis, who do not have borders, and who think they have the right to cross the borders.
So people in Lebanon who formed the Axis of the Resistance said to the Israelis, “No, we are equipping ourself to stop you from crossing the borders.” And with this war on Gaza from the 7th of October, the Hezbollah have been attacking only the area that is occupied by Israel. It’s bombarding beyond that limit only when Israel bombards inland beyond the seven, eight kilometers that was more or less created as a rule of engagement for both side. To answer your question, they are Lebanese part of the society, like any member of the society. They are people who want to live with dignity, not to be occupied by a foreign force.
Matteo Capasso:
I am just going to follow up briefly on what Elijah said, because that’s every single word that’s been saying, I second. You need to look at history. When you look at history, and you understand beyond the fog of the propaganda that all these countries have been invaded, sanctioned, bombed, destroyed by the project of American dominance. You understand these are people who have suffered greatly because of these wars, and yet, yet, these are the only ones acting according to some sort of international principle of moral law. Because faced by a carnage, faced by a genocide that it’s taking place, that is being allowed to take place by the West in Gaza, on the face of this, the world rationally must stop to these crimes. But the Western world hasn’t stopped, it has actually lavishly showered Israel with all the weapons needed to perpetrate these crimes. It is instead these actors that they decided to institute a naval blockade, for example, on Israel, and block the entire Red Sea, because they want to see this genocide to be stopped.
So I mean, when you ask me, how is this human side go into effect, the military strategy, in a way, the military logic? Well, I would say that this is where the third element of what I think of the battle which is taking place, which is the material, the intellectual, but it’s also the spiritual battle that it’s taking place. It has nothing to do with religion here. What I’m trying to say is that the axis has put into place a humanitarian-military intervention, which is very different from the [inaudible 00:44:05] weaponized by NATO to destroyed Libya in 2011. Faced by a real massacre, which the Western-funded colonial, I call it jungle, is perpetrating in Gaza, the axis has intervened. In doing so, though, the axis is not fighting a war on the same pace of killing and violence that the system of imperialism and American domination is based on.
I think the key word are here, which Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah has used many times, are the word patience and steadfastness. Which are not just virtues, they are really necessities in this historical moment. I don’t mean patience in a way of resignation, like just let’s accept, be with the flow, or something like this. I mean holding a belief for justice and humanity that does not replicate the dimension in which Western imperialism and genocidal capitalism are perpetrating in Gaza.
You cannot, basically, counter such system by destroying and clobbering people at the same pace. You need to start also building a different structure here, different spiritual, moral, and material principles that guide you in this struggle. I think these principles are the ones of based on a long-term development. A strategy that cannot be tied to the next quarter, to the how much profit I’m going to be able to get in the next quarter, which is really the mentality of predatory capitalism. This is an idea of mutual prosperity. This is why I see, in the way I look at the war happening in Gaza, that this is not just the Axis of Resistance that is facing imperialism. It is the entire south that in different ways, and through different strategies like China, a long march out of humiliation with patient, is now facing and is now trying to build a different world.
Ju-Hyun Park:
I think you’ve both raised some incredibly salient points here. And as we’re coming to the end of this discussion, I want to pivot us more towards talking about the possibility of not just a regional war, which is already occurring in a low-grade scale, but really a regional conflagration. A kind of huge confrontation that we could see, that could pull in the forces of all of the resistance-axis actors in a more direct confrontation against the United States and Israel, as well as the various proxies and allies that are also present in and have interests at the region.
You’ve raised a lot of particularly important points, Matteo. I want to highlight, in particular, the things that you’re saying about the actions that various parts of the resistance axis are taking to essentially uphold international law. I would point out that Ansar Allah, better known to most of our audience as the Houthis in Yemen, have explicitly cited the Genocide Convention in this sort of counter blockade that they’re enforcing in the Red Sea. They’re saying, “Look, we signed this international document along with most of the world so many years ago, saying that we not only have a responsibility to not engage in genocide, but also to prevent it. So we are now fulfilling our international obligations to do so.”
That’s really the way that they are framing this and the logic that is driving them. I think the point that you’ve made about the comparison in the scale of brutality, the kinds of war tactics that we’re seeing play out between these two camps is very different, right? There is nothing comparable to the kind of decimation and destruction that Israel and the United States have rained down on Gaza, on the part of any of the resistance actors in this most-recent conflict.
But we are seeing something that has been simmering for months, in a situation that really is a lot hotter than most mainstream media will let on. It’s been months of attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria. It’s been months of this counterblockade in the Red Sea. It’s been months of Hezbollah rockets raining down on parts of Israel, slowly encroaching closer and closer to Tel Aviv, increasing in scale, increasing in sophistication. We’re now starting to approach six months, half a year into this genocide, into this war. How much room for further escalation is left before we reach that tipping point where we can’t put… My English idioms are failing me, but where everything will just be unleashed and we can’t put everything back into the box, so to speak? What do Israel and the US, in your view, stand to gain or lose from that kind of scenario? And do you think this sort of all-out regional confrontation, this sort of brawl is an outcome that they want?
As a final addendum to that, I would add, you’ve both made references to the US occupations and dominance in the Arab region not really benefiting the people of the US. So the question I would pose to you as part of that is, what can those of us living in the United States, those of us living in the West in general, what are our responsibilities in this historical moment, morally, politically, et cetera?
Elijah Magnier:
I’m going to start with the end. I think people in America have the responsibility when they cast the vote, and how to choose their leaders, and how to make their leaders responsible for their acts. The problem today, we’re facing an unlimited support to Israel by the Democrat and the Republicans. And today we’re facing a reality that there is nobody round the world is not talking about the dire situation in Gaza, and the violation of all the international laws that exist in all the books, every single paragraph, United Nation, the Geneva Convention, The Hague, the Rome accord, everything had been violated.
Now, the problem is the system itself is not allowing to choose another person or counting the blank votes. [inaudible 00:50:27] there is a person that is in power today, Joe Biden, who is saying, “What Israel is doing is unacceptable, but I will continue supplying weapons to Israel.” So you can’t really combine the violation of humanitarian laws in killing the civilians, acknowledging that, saying that there are 30,000 civilians killed, and mainly children and women, and saying, “I’m going to support the weapons that is killing the civilians.”
These two are incompatible, and this hypocrisy needs to end by the American people. Nobody can do it but the American people. When they can address all their leaders when they vote for them and say, “No, your foreign policy, it bringing hate. Why they hate us? It’s because what you are doing in their homes, not because what you bring. You did not bring any civilization. You killed a million people in Iraq, 250,000 Afghani, several tens of thousand of Syrian. Exactly the same in Libya. Where is the democracy and the freedom that you are bringing to these people? Keep at home and bring democracy to yourself, if this is what kind of democracy you want to bring to West Asia.”
Now, you spoke about Ansar Allah. I would like to highlight something to your audience that is very important. Ansar Allah are executing exactly what the European Union, the 27 countries are saying. What America is saying is to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinian population. The only thing between the Americans, the Europeans, and the Yemeni, is the first two are not acting. On the contrary, they’re sending their navy to bombard those who want to support the people in Gaza. The Ansar Allah are saying, “Allow people in Gaza to eat. Stop this war of starvation. Lift the siege, and all the boats can cross. All the ships can cross, including the Israelis.” But the Americans are bombarding positions in Yemen, to prevent the Yemeni from putting in practice exactly the same thing that the Americans and Europeans are saying they wish Israel not to do.
So here is, again, the double standard. People in the Middle East don’t really understand what is this double language that the Americans are using, and the Europeans. When European Parliament comes out and accuse Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity that for the first time, are published live on social media. And the Israelis are saying, “Don’t lecture us.” The Israelis are saying, “Every child we do not kill today is a child that’s going to fight us tomorrow. Every woman we do not kill is the woman that’s going to bear a child that going to fight us tomorrow.” They’re saying that. They’re not afraid, because there is an impunity.
Now, if this is going to go an all-out war, I don’t think so. The way the Axis of the Resistance works is different from a classical army. The Axis of the Resistance works gradually. We’ve seen at the first beginning, the Iraqis sending messages to the Americans, saying, “If you do not stop the Israelis, and you have the power, and the power is stop sending weapons. You don’t need to dictate your policy on the Israeli. Don’t cover their back at the United Nations. Don’t stop the ceasefire resolution. The only thing that you need to do is that. And if you do not do that, you are responsible, and the Israeli, we’re going to hit you.”
But they started gradually. In Lebanon, they started only to bomb the Israeli position in the area occupied by Israel along the borders. They did not go inland. They started with light weapons, laser-guided weapons, by saying to the Israelis, “Look, we know if we increase the attacks here, you’re not going to stop the war in Gaza, but it’s going to cost you anyway. Stop this war.” And the Israeli continue, because they have the full support of the Americans at the United Nation and weapon supply. Why that weapon supply? Because in my experience, no country in the world can conduct a war without a continuous nonstop supply of ammunition.
Now, the Lebanese, the Iraqis, and the Yemenis are all not moving on the larger scale. Only in the last 24 hours, the Yemenis said, “Now, we started with the Red Sea. We started with the ship only going to Israel. Then because of the war by the Americans and the British, we start to hit American and British Navy, and now we’re going to enlarge to the Indian Ocean.” That is the gradual steps, by saying, “If you want to insist on a war that you are condemning, that you’re condemning the killing of the civilians, you’re condemning the starvation of the civilians, and you’re not doing anything, we’re going to enlarge the hitting of the ship going to Israel.”
But not to the level of going to an all-out war, because the presence of such a far-right-wing Israeli government, where Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is a prisoner of a coalition that is threatening him. Either they resign or he continue the war. He doesn’t want to resign, because he will be facing the failure of the 7th of October, and three corruption accusation, then Benjamin Netanyahu is conducting a personal war. Dragging everybody to burn Israel and the area around him, careless about the consequences, because he doesn’t want to fall.
This is where we are at, and this is why the head of the Democrat at the Congress came out and criticized Netanyahu overtly for his behaving in this government, and for continuing the war, and refusing to negotiate. So bottom line, I think the Axis of the Resistance are much more wise than Israel, and will not extend. Even if it is really in the Israeli benefit to extend the war, and to drag by force the Americans into war. Where the Americans are very much aware, due to their numerous experience in wars in the Middle East, that they can start a war, but they can’t finish it, and they can’t control the consequences. This is why there is no appetite for the Americans to be involved, even if the Israeli would love to.
Matteo Capasso:
Yeah, Elijah is right, in the sense that we’re seeing a regional war that is already happening, as Ju-Hyun, you said as well. At the same time, Israel does not act according to military science, hasn’t done ever, because it always acts according to impunity. Even if you look currently at the military deployment in southern Lebanon, the northern part of historic Palestine, you see that the Israeli army does not have enough forces to launch a large-scale military offensive. I mean, there are 15, 16 weak Reserve brigades, 40 to 50,000 troops, and I think the core three mobile brigades. So even if they have been reshuffled from Gaza to the north, they’ve suffered also serious losses to various degrees. And let’s not forget, as Elijah was saying, that the Israeli army bomb inventory, with their pace of genocide, can only last seven days. This is why, again, we’re seeing the near and strict connection between Israel and the project of American dominance. You can only go for such a protracted war with such a scale of massacre, only if you have the support of the Western powers in this case.
On the other hand, though, Hezbollah has hardly shown its capacity so far, and it could inflict some very serious damage to Israel. But again, despite… Because I mean, you have to think that Hezbollah has 150,000… at least the estimates of what the experts are telling us… rockets of all kinds. It has special elite forces, the Radwan Forces that they were not used in 2006 when Israel was actually defeated. So Israel, it’s facing a major problem here. But at the same time, as we said, it’s not following the principle of military science right now, either. It’s actually using genocide to try to twist, in its favor, a political and military situation that is not to its advantage. We’re seeing this.
Because what has been compromised with October 7, but not just with October 7, we have to go back to 2006, and to the cumulatively efforts of the Axis of Resistance, of the actors within the axis, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and so on and so forth. What has been compromised is the idea of deterrence of Israel. When you compromise the idea of deterrence of Israel, you are compromising. Starting with the frame we discussed at the start, you’re compromising the idea and the power of the American project in the region. Israel is an unsustainable project, and I believe that the Axis of Resistance knows that Israel is weak right now. Because the meat of being militarily invincible has been shattered already, so they know that the liberation can happen. They know Israel is weak, because this military deterrence has been compromised, fundamentally compromised.
At the same time, though, the weakness of Israel, I argue that it’s not unique to Israel. Again, it needs to be located into a long historical trajectory, that has seen the transformation of US imperialism from the high times of unipolarity to what we’re seeing now, which is a complete decline. The American people can see this in the choice that they’re faced with their own elections, really. They have a senile leader on the one hand, and a complete clown on the other. When your ruling class is producing these type of leaders, it means that your country has a major problem. You don’t produce people that are taking care of your country, who have a vision in the long-term. You’re producing puppets, comedians, and this is what the American people is being faced with.
And this is, I’m going to reply to the other part of the question, what should the American people do? What kind of choices are they facing? As European as well, I’m seeing the same thing happening here. Somebody like Zelensky, who is a comedian, is held as a champion of freedom right now. We’re pumping money, and weapons, and taxpayer money. We’re suffering on our everyday lives to see a war happening in Ukraine for no reason, and the same is happening now in Gaza.
So I think what the American people and the Western people as a whole are facing is a choice, between either continuing to enjoy what I call the imperialist… not privileges, but crumbles. And to keep looking at the south as a barbaric space where there is nothing to learn from, nothing to share with. But just with arrogance, just looking at them and their struggles with complete arrogance. Or we can actually join the struggle and say, “No, we are not going to be complicit in this genocide. We want to have better life conditions. We don’t want to send our kids to the next wars that you, ruling elites, are pursuing. We want a world in which mutual prosperity is not just for you, but for the majority of the people of the world.”
Palestine offers us, really, a unique political and moral clarity, which must really be picked up right now in this historical moment. Because if we don’t do so now, well, then we might be seeing, really, a situation that could get even darker. Not just for the south, because I think the south, actually, has realized a long time ago how dangerous and violent Western history is. I think this is coming to us very soon. We might need to wake up quicker than the Palestinians have done.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put by both of you. We could genuinely talk to you both for three more hours, but we want to be respectful of your time, and we know we got to wrap up. But I just want to… a quick comment on that last point, because Real News viewers and listeners, you are hearing us try to dig into this, and show you what that resistance looks like here in the United States as well. Because don’t hear what we’re not saying. Literally no one believes that Donald Trump is going to be any better than Joe Biden in this regard. That is why regular citizens are trying to signal to the Democrats in states like Michigan and around the country with their uncommitted votes, “You are headed into a world of hurt in November if you don’t change course. Because we are in these communities, and we are seeing people lose faith in your party, and they don’t have faith in the other party. So it’s going to be a real shit show for everybody.”
But that is why we emphasize that the point is not political resignation, it’s understanding that the solution has to come from us. It has to come through collective power, like we are seeing on the streets through collective, strategic action. To pressure elected officials, and hold them accountable to their campaign promises, and to their responsibilities to their constituencies. But the constituencies need to drive that conversation, right? So not resignation, but fight, strategize, make power bend to the people’s will, because the people’s will is saying, “No more genocide.” Right? So that’s what I really want to leave folks with. I want you to take away the real important lessons from part one and part two of this conversation.
I know there’s so much more that we didn’t get to get into, and we want to hear your thoughts on these conversations. If they helped you, what else you would like us to address, what other sorts of issues you think we should dig into, and who we should have on. But Matteo, Elijah, I genuinely can’t thank you both enough for giving us so much of your time, attention, and experience, and sharing your thoughts and insights so generously with us over the past hour. I know we got to let you go. I just wanted to ask really quick by way of rounding out, where can folks go to stay up-to-date with your work? Where can they find you, or anything that you want to plug before we wrap up?
Elijah Magnier:
I have a blog, so just type my name. You’ll find me on X, Twitter, and my blog. You can subscribe to all my articles, and that would be good enough. Thank you for the opportunity.
Matteo Capasso:
Thank you, guys, for having me. I would just say that you can find me on Twitter, @capassomat. But I also want to point out that I am the editor of Middle East Critique, an academic journal, and just the other day, we launched a free online course titled the Ramadan Course on Palestine and Imperialism. This is an open pedagogical initiative in support of the Palestinian people, and part of a global action where people from all spheres of life dedicate their time and abilities to end the genocide in Gaza.
Our first speaker this week, this Sunday is going to be Dr. Ali Kadri. There’s going to be like 12 lectures so far, so I really… Go on Middle East Critique Twitter account and sign up on the… every week for the different lecture, if you want to know more from scholars that really are trying to provide their knowledge for free, to make sense of what it’s happening, if that’s of your interest. Thank you again for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you both, seriously. We will be sure to include links for those in the show notes for this episode when it comes out. Elijah, Matteo, again, thank you both so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. We really appreciate it. And to all of you out there listening, thank you for listening. Thank you for caring. Please, before you go, also head on over to therealnews.com/donate. Become a supporter of our work, so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. For The Real News Network, I’m Maximillian Alvarez, editor in chief.
Ju-Hyun Park:
I’m Ju-Hyun Park, engagement editor.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we’re signing off for today. Thank you so much again. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Iran’s murderous “war on drugs” and its violent repression of ethnic minorities has turned its prisons into sites of “mass killing”. This was the conclusion of a new Amnesty International report on 4 April documenting the “horrifying surge in executions” Iran carried out in 2023.
Iran’s executions – upholding state patriarchal violence
Amnesty’s report titledDon’t Let Them Kill Us: Iran’s Relentless Execution Crisis since 2022 Uprising detailed how Iranian authorities executed at least 853 people in 2023. Notably, this was up 48% on the previous year.
Significantly, it said that its report reveals:
how the Iranian authorities have intensified their use of the death penalty to instil fear among the population and tighten their grip on power in the aftermath of the “Woman Life Freedom” uprising of September-December 2022.
This refers to protests in 2022, when women in Iran took to the streets after the Iranian authorities allegedly murdered 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish Mahsa Amini. The Iranian Morality Police had purportedly arrested Amini because she dressed in skinny jeans and was not wearing her headscarf correctly, which breached dress codes under the state’s sharia law.
It triggered country-wide protests against patriarchal and state violence, which particularly impacts Kurdish women. Since then, Iranian authorities have violently suppressed multiple protests rising up under the anti-government “Women Life Freedom” banner.
Crucially, Amnesty’s report highlighted that since the 2022 uprising, the Iranian authorities have executed nine people in connection to the protests. In particular, it said that:
Of the six executions that took place in 2023, five protesters were executed for the vague and broadly worded charges of “enmity against God” (moharebeh) or “corruption on earth” (efsad-e fel arz).
Iran’s “war on drugs”
On top of this, Amnesty’s report underscored how Iran has weaponised its brutal “war on drugs” type policies against marginalised groups.
It stated that:
The briefing also raises the alarm over the disproportionate impact of the authorities’ lethal anti-narcotics policies on poor and marginalized communities.
Specifically, over half of the executions – 56% – were for drug-related charges. Iran modified it anti-narcotics legislation in 2017 and executions for drug offences declined in 2018 and 2020. However, they dramatically rebounded last year.
Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa Diana Eltahawy said that:
The death penalty is abhorrent in all circumstances but deploying it on a mass scale for drug-related offences after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts is a grotesque abuse of power.
The Islamic Republic’s deadly anti-narcotics policies are contributing to a cycle of poverty and systemic injustice, and further entrenching discrimination against marginalized communities, in particular Iran’s oppressed Baluchi minority.
Murdering minorities and children
Amnesty said the Iranian authorities have been targeting the Sunni Baluch minority concentrated in the southeast disproportionately. Significantly, the report noted that the the minority:
constitutes only about 5 percent of Iran’s population but accounted for 20 percent of all executions in 2023
Meanwhile, it also drew attention to Iran’s execution of those arrested as children. It noted that:
Iran is one of the last countries in the world that continues to use the death penalty against individuals aged under 18 at the time of the crime in a violation of international law. The authorities persist in their refusal to amend Article 91 of the Islamic Penal Code to abolish the death penalty for crimes committed by children in all circumstances.
Among those Iran executed was 17-year-old Hamidreza Azari. Authorities in Razavi Khorasan province hung Azari in November after convicting him over a deadly 2023 stabbing when he was 16.
Amnesty said that it had reviewed his birth certificate and that his age “was misrepresented” as 18 by state media to “evade accountability”.
‘Grotesque abuse of power’
Given its findings, Amnesty said that the Iranian authorities have:
persisted with their state-sanctioned killing spree which has turned prisons into killing fields
Two other NGOs, Iran Human Rights (IHR) and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM), published a report last month giving the slightly lower figure of 834 people executed in 2023.
However, Amnesty emphasised that its numbers were “minimum figures” and the real death toll would be higher.
Moreover, it said that Iran’s behaviour has not changed this year. Already, rights groups have recorded at least 95 executions up to 20 March.
In its report, Amnesty said that:
Without a robust global response, Amnesty International fears that the Iranian authorities will continue using the death penalty as a tool of oppression to execute thousands more people in the coming years
Without stronger international action to halt the rise in executions, Amnesty said “thousands” risked being hanged in the coming years.
Iran has vowed to retaliate after Israel bombed the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing at least seven people, including three senior Iranian commanders and at least four other Iranian officers. Among the dead is senior commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the highest-ranking Iranian military officer to be killed since the U.S. assassinated General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020.
Iran has vowed to retaliate after Israel bombed the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing at least seven people, including three senior Iranian commanders and at least four other Iranian officers. Among the dead is senior commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the highest-ranking Iranian military officer to be killed since the U.S. assassinated General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020. While Israel sees strikes on foreign soil as “part of their self-defense strategy,” Iran feels it must respond to this “breaching serious diplomatic norms,” says Akbar Shahid Ahmed, senior diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, who reports the pace and audacity of Israel’s international attacks have escalated since October. “While Israel is receiving huge amounts of American support, while Gaza is suffering and Israel is pummeling that Strip, we now see them risking a two-front war, maybe a three-front war.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Haroon Siddiqui’s 2023 memoir, My Name is Not Harry, is a dazzling journey through Indian Sufism, pre-partition Muslim-Hindu harmony, the horrors of partition, a leap across the ocean to the middle of nowhere (sorry, Brandon Manitoba), finally finding his home at the Toronto Star, from whence, back to central Asia (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India during the tumultuous 1979+), hobnobbing with media and political stars, stopping for heart surgery, all the time building and defending his new multicultural faith, adding his own distinct, Muslim flavour to what it means to be a Canadian. A whirlwind tour of the 20th-21st centuries, as if by a latter day Muslim Christopher Columbus, one meant to try to undo the five centuries of imperialist horror that Columbus unleashed.
He relishes slaying the dragons of bigotry he encounters, starting with
*Winston Churchill, the racist. He who had labelled Indians ‘a barbarous people’, ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’, ‘the beastliest people in the world next to Germans’. Who exacerbated the 1943 Bengal famine that had killed millions by insisting that Indian rice exports for the allied war effort not be interrupted. He who had called Gandhi ‘a naked fakir’ whom he wanted ‘bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled by an enormous elephant with a new viceroy seated on its back.’
*Even the Toronto Star‘s iconic Gordon Sinclair, who won fame in the 1930s with his dispatches form India – ‘the pagan peninsula’ with its ‘wild and woolly Hindus’, Brahmins, the supreme high hooper-doopers of this impossible land’, ‘scrawny, underfed untouchables’, impossible-looking beggars’ and ‘yowling idiots’. In tune with those times, [the Star] still going ga-ga over Sinclair well into my own time.
*On Iran, the only Muslim ‘experts’ and commentators on TV and in print were anti-revolution or anti-Khomeini, authenticating the worst of western prejudices. Anything different, such as mine, must have been a welcome novelty, brought to them by Canada’s largest newspaper.
*On 9//11, Rushdie see below.
One of those should-haves of his life as dragonslayer was at the annual press gallery dinner in Ottawa, where he hosted Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. When they were walking to dinner, Kaplan started waxing eloquently about his love for India and yoga but his dislike of Muslims! He assumed that being from India I could only be a Hindu. What a testament to power the Zionist Jewish mindset had/has over even a proud Muslim like Siddiqui. But bravo, Harry (sorry, Haroon) for owning up. That’s the great thing about him. He lives his multiculturalism, which means meeting the other on his/her grounds, looking for the middle ground, not stoking enmity.
Iranian Ayatollahs, Afghan communists
He shines on the thorniest issue, one of which confronted him soon after arriving at the Star, when he was sent off to Iran in 1979. Speaking Urdu (close to Persian) and fully versed in Sunni and Shia Islam, he was able to make sense of the chaos, making his way to Qom to visit Ayatollah Madari, Khomeini’s rival, who lived just down the maze of alleys from Khomeini, who was already commanding the revolution from his modest home there, rather than Tehran.
He was told it was impossible to meet with Madari, even for a Canadian Muslim, but when he revealed that he’d just come from Tabriz, where Madari’s People’s Republican Party followers had risen up against Khomeini, rejecting the Islamic state constitution, Madari relented. Madari wanted a secular state and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ not a person. He answered every question patiently for nearly two hours. That was his only interview in the wake of the revolt. It would be his last. He was placed under house arrest until his death six years later.
He also met with Morteza Pasandideh, 82, Khomeini’s older brother, who was quite jovial. Siddiqui admired them all for their stress-free lives, their inner peace all, living productive lives into their 80s or 90s. Qom is famous for sohan halwa (sweet sweet) made with pistachios, almonds and butter. Back in Toronto, he asked John Ralston Saul to taste and guess which enemy country it was from. Whatever it is, it could only have been made by a great civilization.
He toured the now-occupied US embassy and chatted amiably (sympathetically?) with the students about how they had pulled off the siege, overpowering the bulky Marines. They said their resolve got strengthened after seeing a large-size picture of Khomeini on a dartboard and several crude cartoons of Khomeini from American and British newspapers in the embassy. At Christmas they made cookies for their captives. An American priest who had come to perform the Christmas Mass said: We should be grateful that we are in a Muslim country and there are not drunk guards. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor told him: There are no anti-Canadian feelings here. No one has indicated any inclination to leave Tehran. There’s no panic. When he met Taylor later, he said: Mr Taylor, you’re a great liar. Taylor: That’s what I got paid for.
After an exhausting year in Tehran, the Soviets invaded (came to the assistance of) secular revolutionary Kabul and he was ordered to get there asap. But first he flew to the Iranian border and crossed into Afghanistan to meet a local tribal chieftain, who told him, ‘We’ll kick the bastards out.’ How to get there legitimately? Pakistan? Better India, which had good relations with the communists in Moscow and Kabul, so off to New Delhi and the Afghan embassy. Indira Gandhi never condemned the Soviet invasion. (How wise in retrospect.) In Kabul he was told not to go anywhere and only communicate through an official guide. Ha, ha! He snuck out the back door of his hotel, spoke to a soldier in Urdu, said ‘Canada’ and quickly found a local driver.
He credits Canada’s reputation for peaceful relations, a well-known eye clinic in Kabul. Off to (Shia) Herat where he heard Long live Islam, Long live Iran! He bought a Russian fur cap but was told never to wear it in public or he might be shot. He left via Pushtunistan to Jalalabad, Pakistan, where he met the legendary 91-year-old frontier Gandhi Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who like the Siddiquis had protested the division of India. He was ailing but contemptuous of Soviet attempts to appease religious Afghans. Everything in Afghanistan is done in the name of religion. But this is a political religion, not the religion of Islam and Allah and Muhammad. Communism has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the stomach. The Russians knew this and tried to convince the Afghans that they could keep their religion, but it was too little, too late. The Russians refused to try to treat their Gandhi, fearing if he died, they would be accused of killing him.
He pressed on to the Khyber Pass, the route for a stream of invaders – Cyrus, Darius, Genghis Khan, Alexander, the Mughals. Tribal chief Mohammed Gul told him: if the Iranians can knock off the Shah and the Americans, we certainly can kick out the Russians. He saw that resistance was beginning to jell within weeks of the Soviet occupation. It took a decade for the Soviets to depart, the US and allies, including Canada, taking double the time to conclude that Afghans have both the courage and patience to bleed any occupier dry.
This being the days before internet, getting copy out required ingenuity. Siddiqui would go to the airport on the days Indian Airlines came to Kabul, meet the crew and cajole/tip them into taking copy and dropping it off at the Reuters news agency in Delhi for forwarding to Toronto. He also went on the day Pakistan International Airlines came just in case. Later he was told everything came, sometimes twice. He met Brzezinski in Peshawar (!) but he wouldn’t give Siddiqui the time of day.
Following the Iraq-Iran war, he was disgusted that western media ignored the poison gas supplied to Iraq by American, German, French, Dutch, Swiss and Belgian companies. On the Iranian front line he hid from Iraqi snipers and marveled at how soldiers dying from gassing were rushed from the front to Tehran hospitals. He was appalled by Khomeini’s hitman, a sadistic prosecutor Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the hanging judge. Later in Paris, he met Bani Sadr, the first president, who had been impeached and fled the country disguised as a woman in a chador, in an Iran Air Force jet piloted by a sympathizer. He laments that US hostility prompted Khomeini to restart the nuclear program begun under the Shah, after ending it as unIslamic.
Siddiqui’s credo
I must admit, I’ve become jaded about multiculturalism. Toronto is now mostly first or second generation immigrants. Our culture feels shallow and American now. I find the turban-wearing Uber electric scooters grazing me unawares on bike paths frightening, and pointless, as they ferry onion rings to lazy people with too much money. I bemoan the lack of interest in Canadian history, our struggle to define an identity that’s not American. Most immigrants really would prefer big, rich, warm America to Canada and would have no problem if the US decided to invade. What has happened to Canadian culture?
But then I’ve become equally jaded about our heroic history. We are all immigrants, in the case of the paleface, mostly riff-raff, having decimated our poor brown natives. The post-WWII immigrants from brown countries like Siddiqui’s India/ Pakistan are mostly university-educated, the elites of their countries, so they really are a step up from my Irish-English-Swedish peasant ancestors.
But then, I find that equally disturbing. We stole the land from the real Canadians. Now we steal the intellectual wealth from poor countries. Sure we’re richer; the imperialist ‘centre’ is always richer. Our Canadianism was and is still a fraud. So, white flag, hello multiculturalism, for better or worse. But one that should give first place to our natives as the real owners, spiritually, of the land. And no more stealing, whether it be minds from ‘over there’, or land here or ‘over there’. That means Israel, our ‘best friend’, according to PM Harper in 2013 and PM Trudeau in 2015.
Siddiqui is unapologetically for mass immigration and has no time for the ecological problems that mass migration entails. He boasts having visited India 50 times in 40 years, not to mention his other peregrinations. That grates. Yes, brown/black is just as good as white, but what’s holding us together anymore? I don’t know, but I’m happy for Siddiqui, who at least has helped Canada transform from a country of bigotry and chauvinism to … a nice, tame, bland cosmopolis.
His journey through the swinging ’60s into the terrible ’20s is an upbeat panorama of not only Canada at its peak of popularity and feel-goodness, but, reading between the lines, also the decline of Canada, its loss of feel-good innocence transformation into an unapologetic toady of US empire. He took pride in being Canadian when Ambassador Taylor helped US hostages escape Tehran in 1980, when Chretien refused to go along with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it’s been downhill since then, with Harper’s disastrous commitment of Canadian troops to Afghanistan, his open Islamo- and Russophobia, his worship of Israel. While Trudeau has welcomed Syrian refugees (and now Afghans, fall out from Harper’s war), he did not fulfill his pledge to renew relations with Iran, despite the Iranian exile community’s pleas. His Russophobia is pathetic. Multiculturalism is looking mighty threadbare.
Yes, following Trudeau senior, Siddiqui’s credo is that all cultural communities have ‘the right to preserve and develop their own cultures within Canadian society’, which he notes is the ethos of India, best articulated by Indian novelist Shivaram Karanth: There’s no such thing as Indian culture. Indian culture is so varied as to be called cultures. But what has happened to India’s multiculturalism under arch-Hindu nationalist Modi?
Star Foreign Editor Jimmy Atkins (R) with Star chair John Honderich, South African President Nelson Mandela & first lady Graca Machel, Star editorial board editor Haroon Siddiqui.
Free trade, Sikhs, Laïcité
Siddiqui gets along with everyone, doesn’t drink or smoke (anymore), a model Muslim in the House of War.1 He traces his ancestors to the first caliph Abu-bakr Siddiq, and second caliph Umar al-Khattab al-Faruq. A worthy disciple of the Prophet Muhammad, the multiculturalist par excellence.2 The fearsome Bee (Star editor-in-chief Beland Honderich) famously got along with Haroon. Siddiqui started from scratch in Brandon (no halal, no yogurt in 1968), then the Star, rising quickly through the ranks to foreign correspondent, front page editor, editorial page editor, and finally columnist, all the time the only Muslim in mainstream Canadian media.
He and the Star were against Mulroney’s ‘free’ trade pact with the yankee devil, realizing it was only good for fat cats. He has acted as a public spokesman explaining the problems of all immigrants and BIPOC,3 an acronym he promotes. He highlights the racism which feeds on the changing demographics from white to nonwhite, recountiing a Tanzanian immigrant pushed onto Toronto’s subway tracks, crippling him, and the existence of a KKK chapter operating openly in Toronto.
The case of Sikhs is thorny. Sikh Canadians were mostly quietist, but when Sikh separatists were ejected from the Golden Temple by Indira Gandhi in 1984, she was assassinated, and Sikh separatists blew up an Indian Airlines plane full of Hindu Canadians in 1985. This still ranks as Canada’s worst such tragedy, but was downplayed by the Canadian government with the investigation bungled by the RCMP, as anti-Sikh/ Hindu racism grew. And it continues, the latest being a hit job on a (Sikh separatist) Canadian, openly, by India’s militant Hindu nationalist government. Multiculturalism is easily abused and hard to defend.
To their credit, the Sikhs in Canada have bounced back, entering politics (Justin Trudeau boasted more Sikhs in his cabinet than Modi), joining the RCMP, police, army, working hard, being good citizens. The bad apples didn’t spoil the whole barrel, though Sikhs have no use for India, and they really did capture the lackluster leadership convention of the NDP out of nowhere in 2017. The unlikely NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has been earnest, if not inspiring.
How does this multiculturalism pan out? Quebec separatists don’t like immigrants much, as they are not interested in living in a parochial, xenophobic province, and have enough trouble learning passable English, let alone Quebecois. They voted en masse against independence, and the pesky Muslim women want to wear hijab or worse, niqab. Vive la laïcité. Quebec has chosen to copy France’s punitive banning hijab and other restrictions. Still, English and French get along.
Tribalism, French vs English, Sikhs vs Hindus, Buddhists remains strong. That contrasts with Muslims, who quickly drop their ethnic identity for universal Islam and Canadianism (84% cite being Muslim and 81% cite being Canadian as their primary identity),4 as I’ve noticed at Muslim conferences, where a truly united nations reigns. That brings us to Jewish Canadians vs Muslim Canadians, the most tragic stand-off of the past century. Siddiqui doesn’t go to this forbidding territory. On the contrary, (wisely) he has spoken to Bnai Brith and Canadian Jewish Congress gatherings and kept a low profile as a Muslim Canadian. As the sole prominent Muslim journalist here, he was operating in enemy territory, as his encounter with Kaplan confirmed.
Enlightening Canadians on things Islamic
More important, he wrote engagingly about Muslims in Toronto, which hosts the largest Iranian emigre community after the US, mostly in ‘Tehronto’, a mix of pro- and anti-Khomeini, but able to live peacefully, all agreeing that the Canadian government nonrecognition of Iran and boycott is bad politics for everyone. His appreciation for this ‘great civilization’ contrasts with the negative press that Iran uniformly gets here.
Siddiqui realized quickly that Canadian media coverage and commentary ‘smelled of American propaganda’ and the US and allies were inflicting too many horrors on Muslims and Muslims lands. In 1988, the US warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner killing 290, prompting Bush I to boast: I will never apologize for the US. I don’t care what the facts are. Instead, Washington awarded medals to the captain and crew of the Vincennes. Did any other mainstream journalist note this then or now? He refused to blacken Islam after 9/11. Now a columnist he wrote his third post-9/11 column ‘It’s the US foreign policy, stupid,’ causing a storm of letters to the editor, a majority ‘thank you for saying it’.
Ismailis came in 1972, expelled by Idi Amin of Uganda, joined later by Ismailis from Kenya and Tanzania. Self-reliant, educated, entrepreneurial, they inspired the Aga Khan to build a museum of Islamic culture in Toronto in 2014, the only such museum in the West. Ironically it was officially opened by arch-Islamophobe PM Harper. We celebrate today not only the harmonious meeting of green gardens and glass galleries. We rejoice above all in the special spirit which fills this place and gives it its soul. But then, to Islamophobe Harper, Ismailis are Islam-lite, not considered real Muslims by most.
There are two chapters dealing with the ummah: Cultural Warfare on Muslims, and Harper and Muslims (In his ugliness, he was well ahead of Trump – and more effective). Some particularly painful episodes he covered:
*Harper invited (till then terrorist) Modi to Canada in 2014 when first elected, accompanying him to Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver,
*He established an office of religious freedom, which he unveiled at a Mississauga Coptic church. He announced the position of a new ambassador of religious freedom at the Ahmadiyya mosque in Vaughan, defending Christian and other minorities in Muslim nations, doing nothing for Uighurs, Rohingyas, Shia in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
I could go on – I haven’t even got to the Rushdie circus – but I urge all Muslim Canadians, no, all Canadians, to read for yourselves. Siddiqui provides an excellent survey of all the post-9/11 Islamophobic nonsense, especially in Euroland.
The West has discredited democracy by allowing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim discourse to be one of our last acceptable forms of racism and bigotry. It’s in this milieu that Rushdie and the Rushdie affair have thrived. Has Rushdie been exploiting western prejudices or has the West been using him as a shield for its own prejudices? Or is this a case of mutual convenience?
Having rid ourselves of Harper, how quickly we forget the pain when it stops. As it has under Trudeau Jr. For all his silliness and US-Israel fawning, Justin Trudeau is true to his father’s legacy, and undid much of Harper’s bigotry, especially relating to Muslims.
We should be wary of letting the unrepentant Conservatives take back Parliament Hill. However, I don’t think it’s possible to relaunch the Harper take-no-hostages Crusade. 9/11 (whoever did it) is what motivated me and many more to become a Muslim, and October 7 is now rapidly expanding the Muslim ummah, especially in the West, the heart of the beast. The trouble for the Harpers is that the more Islam and Muslims are reviled, the more Muslims (re)turn to their religion. But then that’s the way of imperialism, creating its enemies, stoking them, as Israel did with Hamas, thinking they can then pick off the ‘terrorists’, ‘mow the grass’.
Siddiqui draws from his experience surviving partition in India, adhering to Shaykh Madani’s view that ‘there is too much diversity within Islam for democracy to work, that an Islamic state would inevitably be authoritarian.’ Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran are the leading examples. The best protection for peoples of faith was a democratic state that stayed neutral between faiths and advanced mutual respect.5
The Harpers accuse Muslims of being unwilling to integrate. Canada, Britain and the US are shining examples of the opposite.
*In the 2021 federal election 12 Muslims won seats. Two hold senior Cabinet portfolios: Omar Alghabra and Ahmed Hussen.
*In Britain, in 2019, 19 were elected. Sadiq Khan has been mayor of London since 2016.
*Humza Yousaf became first minister in Scotland in 2023, the first Muslim to lead a western nation. When Khan was sworn in as a member of the Privy Council at Bukhingham Palace in 2009, it was discovered there was no Quran in the palace, so he brought his own and left it as a present to the Queen.
*In the US 57 Muslims were elected in 2020. Keith Ellison, the first member of the House was sworn in on a copy of the Quran owned by President Jefferson, who had bought an English translation out of the ‘desire to understand Islam on its own terms.’
*Arab and Muslim entertainers, stand-up comedians, writers, actors, Little Mosque on the Prairie …
*To welcome Syrian refugees arriving in Canada, Ottawa French public schools joined to sing Talaʽ al-Badru ʽAlaynā,6 which went viral on YouTube.
Siddiqui’s openmindedness and lack of prejudice are his not-so-secret weapon, able to find common humanity where western propaganda serves up bile. To no small degree, thanks to Haroon and other new (brown) Canadians, Marshall McLuhan’s global village is a reality at home, the most successful heterogeneous experiment in human history.
1 Dar al-harb vs Dar al-Salam, House of Peace, referring to the Muslim world.
2 Quran16:13 And all the [beauty of] many hues-which He has created for you on earth: in this, behold, there is a message for people who [are willing to] take it to heart.
3 Black, indigenous, people of colour.
4 Half of Muslim Canadians consider their ethnic identity as very important. Statistics Canada, ‘The Canadian Census: A rich portrait of the country’s religious and ethnocultural diversity,’ 2022.
5 Siddiqui, My name is not Harry: A memoir, 392.
6 (طلع البدر) nasheed that the Ansar sang for the Islamic prophet Muhammad upon his arrival at Medina from the (non)battle of Tabuk.
Information fed to the general public is deliberately spun to sell the imperial project. In contrast, intelligence assessments for elite policy makers are designed to sustain the endeavor. That the president’s pronouncements diverge from the conclusions reached by his own intelligence community highlights the chasm between what is foisted on the public compared to what is understood within the bowels of the state.
Unlike Biden’s bullish and bellicose pronouncements about “our leadership in the world,” the Assessment’s view was less triumphal. It states: “The United States faces an increasingly fragile global order.”
The fraying US-imposed “rules based order” and its discredited neoliberal economic system are more and more being challenged by “states engaging in competitive behavior,” according to the Assessment. The report adds, fallout from the Gaza crisis, in particular, serves to “undermine” the US.
Both pronouncements, however, have similar biases. Biden’s address to the nation was overtly political, accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Putin. But the supposedly neutral and objective “collective insights of the Intelligence Community” were likewise predisposed in favor of Democratic Party memes. Both blame Russian electoral interference for Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office in 2016. As proof, the so-called intelligence community again offered nothing more than its own assessment, lacking better evidence.
“Ambitious” China
Biden bragged in this address: “For years, all I’ve heard from my Republican friends…is China’s on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backward!” Contrary to his bravado about “we’re in a stronger position to win the competition for the 21st Century against China,” the World Bank predicts 4.5% GDP growth in China compared to 1.6% for the US in 2024.
China has surpassed the US as the largest world economy by purchasing power parity. The Assessment forecasts slowed – but still greater than for the US – economic growth in what it labels as an “ambitious” China.
The Assessment reports that China “now rivals” the US in DNA-sequencing and is the “world leader” in voice and image recognition and video analytics. Biden’s claim that, “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” is contradicted by the Assessment’s finding that China is “making progress” in producing advanced chips on its own.
The Assessment notes: “China views Washington’s competitive measures against Beijing as part of a broader US…effort to contain its rise.” In this context, the Chinese perceive an increased likelihood of a US first-strike nuclear attack, according to the Assessment. Nevertheless, China has shown growing “confidence” in its nuclear deterrent capabilities against US aggression, also according to the Assessment.
China is disadvantaged militarily, according to the Assessment, because it “lacks recent warfighting experience,” something the US has in excess. US intelligence estimates that China will only “fully modernize” its national defense by 2035 and will not become a “world-class military” until 2049.
The Assessment anticipates increased Chinese push-back over Taiwan. Although Biden claimed that the US is “standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the US has done the opposite by continuing to destabilize and militarize the region. To wit, Biden said in his address, “I’ve revitalized our partnerships and alliances in the Pacific.”
“Confrontational” Russia
The Assessment labels Russia “confrontational,” projecting Washington’s own posture. In a fit of made-for-popular-consumption Russophobia, Biden warned in his address: “Putin of Russia is on the march…If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not!”
While the Assessment warns of many threats, Russian expansionism – as Biden fear mongered – is not one of them. In fact, the Assessment notes that Russia stepped down from intervening in neighboring Azerbaijan regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. The Assessment assures us: “Russia almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with US and NATO forces.”
The Assessment notes that Russia “maintains the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile.” But it adds that Russia sees its stockpile as “necessary for maintaining deterrence” (presumably from a US first strike). The Assessment, while describing Russia as a “capable and resilient adversary,” takes the contrary view to Biden’s, seeing Russia’s posture as mainly “defensive.”
As the US proxy war against Russia drags on, Biden continues to campaign for expanding the US funding for Ukraine with no hint of a peace. For its part, the Assessment does not contest what it describes as Putin’s belief that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine.
Rather, the Assessment sees no victory in sight for the US: “This deadlock plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.” Not surprisingly, this huge admission of the futility of the US war effort in Ukraine coming from its own intelligence institutions has not been prominently reported by the follow-the-flag corporate press.
The Assessment describes how Russia is strengthening and leveraging ties with China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia is mitigating the impacts of US-led sanctions, while “rebuild[ing] its credibility as a great power.” Russia’s deepening ties with China in particular have afforded it significant “protection from future sanctions.”
Despite US-led coercive economic measures, the Assessment projects “modest” Russian GDP growth. Moscow has “successfully diverted” its oil exports and largely evaded the US/G7 price caps, retaining “significant energy leverage” as the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to Europe. In short, Russia is “offsetting its decline in relations with the West” with a pivot to the Global South.
Other global flashpoints
Biden’s policy of “containing the threat posed by Iran” is elaborated in the Assessment. US-led sanctions are credited with putting “brakes on” Iran’s economy. In response, the Assessment reports, Tehran has “expanded its diplomatic influence” by improving ties with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
The Assessment correctly notes that Iran uses its nuclear program “to build negotiating leverage and respond to perceived international pressure,” pointing out that Iran would “restore JCPOA limits if the United States fulfilled itsJCPOA commitments [emphasis added].”
On the one hand, the Assessment preposterously accuses Iran of seeking to “block a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.” On the other, Iran is absolved of orchestrating or having any foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on Israel. This is a notable admission.
The Gaza conflict, according to the Assessment, poses the “risk of escalation” into regional interstate war. Uncle Sam’s “key Arab partners,” the Assessment laments, face hostile domestic sentiment because their citizens (correctly) see the US and Israel as responsible for “the death and destruction.” Although the US is recognized as the “power broker” that could “end the conflict,” the Assessment (also correctly) implies that the US has not played that role.
The Assessment foresees Israel needing to confront “armed resistance from Hamas for years to come.” While acknowledging that Hamas enjoys “broad support,” the Assessment questions Israeli President Netanyahu’s “viability” and “ability of rule.”
Similar to the case of Iran, the Assessment explains, North Korea’s nuclear program is pursued as a “guarantor of regime security” and to “deter outside intervention.” North Korea’s missile launches, the Assessment admits, are responses to counter hostile US-South Korea military exercises. North Korea’s development of nuclear capabilities, the Assessment further acknowledges, are defensive to “enhance second-strike capabilities” in the contingency of a first strike by the US and its allies.
In regard to immigration, Biden touts his “comprehensive plan to fix” our system. Given the current dysfunction on the US border, claiming credit there sounds more like a Republican talking point than one favoring the incumbent. Largely ignored in Biden’s address, the Assessment is concerned with global warming and its potentially destabilizing effect on the US-imposed global order by generating climate refugees.
“Poor socioeconomic conditions and insecurity” further drive cross-border migration, warns the Assessment. While admitting that “lack of economic opportunities” are among the factors that drive Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan emigration, the Assessment incredulously rejects blaming US sanctions for driving people away from their homelands.
Conclusion
Unlike the upbeat “greatest comeback story never told” of the State of the Union address, the Assessment cautions:
“Strains in US alliances and challenges to international norms have made it more difficult…to tackle global issues…. The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever… [is] most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people, and by the powers…that are most able and willing to act on solutions to transnational issues and regional crises.”
Meanwhile, the Assessment reports that Putin’s “Russia has increased social spending…and increased corporate taxes.” Also reported, Xi’s China is prioritizing “a more equitable distribution of wealth – replacing the focus on maximizing GDP growth.” Back home, Biden promised in his address “to end cancer as we know it” and prophesized that he will “save the planet from the climate crisis.” (For starters, I would settle for just stopping the genocide in Palestine and a negotiated peace in Ukraine.)
The Iranian government “bears responsibility” for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.
The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police.”
It said the mission found the “physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death…. On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”
Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.
Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.
The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law.”
“Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of “crimes against humanity.”
“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.
“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.
The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.
“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.
Amini’s death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.
The UN report said “violations and crimes” under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.
“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity,” the report said.
The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.
The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini’s death.
The Iranian government “bears responsibility” for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.
The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police.”
It said the mission found the “physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death…. On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”
Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.
Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.
The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law.”
“Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of “crimes against humanity.”
“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.
“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.
The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.
“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.
Amini’s death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.
The UN report said “violations and crimes” under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.
“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity,” the report said.
The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.
The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini’s death.
The Iranian government “bears responsibility” for the physical violence that led to the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman who died in police custody in 2022, and for the brutal crackdown on largely peaceful street protests that followed, a report by a United Nations fact-finding mission says.
The report, issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, said the mission “has established the existence of evidence of trauma to Ms. Amini’s body, inflicted while in the custody of the morality police.”
It said the mission found the “physical violence in custody led to Ms. Amini’s unlawful death…. On that basis, the state bears responsibility for her unlawful death.”
Amini was arrested in Tehran on September 13, 2022, while visiting the Iranian capital with her family. She was detained by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for allegedly improperly wearing her hijab, or hair-covering head scarf. Within hours of her detention, she was hospitalized in a coma and died on September 16.
Her family has denied that Amini suffered from a preexisting health condition that may have contributed to her death, as claimed by the Iranian authorities, and her father has cited eyewitnesses as saying she was beaten while en route to a detention facility.
The fact-finding report said the action “emphasizes the arbitrary character of Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, which were based on laws and policies governing the mandatory hijab, which fundamentally discriminate against women and girls and are not permissible under international human rights law.”
“Those laws and policies violate the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief, and the autonomy of women and girls. Ms. Amini’s arrest and detention, preceding her death in custody, constituted a violation of her right to liberty of person,” it said.
The New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran hailed the findings and said they represented clear signs of “crimes against humanity.”
“The Islamic republic’s violent repression of peaceful dissent and severe discrimination against women and girls in Iran has been confirmed as constituting nothing short of crimes against humanity,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the center.
“The government’s brutal crackdown on the Women, Life, Freedom protests has seen a litany of atrocities that include extrajudicial killings, torture, and rape. These violations disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, women, children, and minority groups,” he added.
The report also said the Iranian government failed to “comply with its duty” to investigate the woman’s death promptly.
“Most notably, judicial harassment and intimidation were aimed at her family in order to silence them and preempt them from seeking legal redress. Some family members faced arbitrary arrest, while the family’s lawyer, Saleh Nikbaht, and three journalists, Niloofar Hamedi, Elahe Mohammadi, and Nazila Maroufian, who reported on Ms. Amini’s death were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to imprisonment,” it added.
Amini’s death sparked mass protests, beginning in her home town of Saghez, then spreading around the country, and ultimately posed one of the biggest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment since the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. At least 500 people were reported killed in the government’s crackdown on demonstrators.
The UN report said “violations and crimes” under international law committed in the context of the Women, Life, Freedom protests include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution.
“The violent repression of peaceful protests and pervasive institutional discrimination against women and girls has led to serious human rights violations by the government of Iran, many amounting to crimes against humanity,” the report said.
The UN mission acknowledged that some state security forces were killed and injured during the demonstrations, but said it found that the majority of protests were peaceful.
The mission stems from the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran on November 24, 2022, to investigate alleged human rights violations in Iran related to the protests that followed Amini’s death.
Iran’s parliamentary elections on March 1 witnessed a historically low turnout, in a blow to the legitimacy of the clerical establishment.
The official turnout of 41 percent was the lowest for legislative elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Critics claim the real turnout was likely even lower.
Hard-liners dominated the elections for the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, a body that picks the country’s supreme leader, consolidating their grip on power. Many reformists and moderates were barred from contesting the polls.
Experts said the declining turnout signifies the growing chasm between the ruling clerics and Iran’s young population, many of whom are demanding greater social and political freedoms in the Middle Eastern nation of some 88 million.
“These elections proved that the overriding imperative for the Islamic republic is strengthening ideological conformity at the top, even at the cost of losing even more of its legitimacy from below,” said Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.
‘Widening Divide’
Observers said disillusionment with the state has been building up for years and is reflected in the declining voter turnout in recent elections.
Turnout in presidential and parliamentary elections were consistently above 50 percent for decades. But the numbers have declined since 2020, when around 42 percent of voters cast ballots in the parliamentary elections that year. In the 2021 presidential vote, turnout was below 49 percent.
Ali Ansari, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, puts that down to growing “despondency” in the country.
This is “the clearest indication of the widening divide between state and society, which has been growing over the years,” said Ansari.
“It is quite clear that the despondency is extending even to those who are generally sympathetic to the regime,” he added, referring to reformist former President Mohammad Khatami choosing not to vote in the March 1 elections.
Voter apathy was particularly evident in the capital, Tehran, which has the most representatives in the 290-seat parliament. In Tehran, only 1.8 million of the 7.7 million eligible voters — or some 24 percent — cast their votes on March 1, according to official figures.
Up to 400,000 invalid ballots — many believed to be blank — were cast in Tehran alone, a sign of voter discontent.
Ahead of the elections, nearly 300 activists in Iran had called on the public to boycott the “engineered” elections.
Beyond Boycott
The March 1 elections were the first since the unprecedented anti-establishment protests that rocked the country in 2022.
The monthslong demonstrations, triggered by the death in custody of a young woman arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, snowballed into one of the most sustained demonstrations against Iran’s theocracy. At least 500 protesters were killed and thousands were detained in the state’s brutal crackdown on the protests.
Iran has been the scene of several bursts of deadly anti-establishment protests since the disputed presidential election in 2009. Many of the demonstrations have been over state repression and economic mismanagement.
Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police in September 2022. Experts say declining voter turnout highlights society’s growing disenchantment with the state.
But experts said that the 2022 protests alone did not result in the record-low turnout in the recent elections.
“This is a reflection of a deeper malaise that extends back to 2009 and traverses through 2017, 2019, and 2022,” Ansari said. “It has been building for some time.”
Despite the historically low turnout, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the “epic” participation of the public. State-run media, meanwhile, spun the elections as a victory over those who called for a boycott.
By claiming victory, the clerical establishment “overlooks the growing absence of support from 60 percent of its population,” said Vaez.
“Such self-approbation [mirrors] the regime’s previous dismissal of the 2022 protests as the result of foreign intrigue rather than reflection of deep discontent,” he said, adding that it represents the Islamic republic’s “continuation of ignoring simmering public discontent.”
Hard-Line Dominance
Around 40 moderates won seats in the new parliament. But the legislature will remain dominated by hard-liners.
The elections were largely seen as a contest between conservatives and ultraconservatives.
“We can say that a more hotheaded and previously marginal wing of the hard-liners scored a victory against more established conservatives,” said Arash Azizi, a senior lecturer in history and political science at Clemson University in South Carolina.
“This is because the former had a more fired-up base and in the absence of popular participation were able to shape the results,” he added.
A more hard-line parliament could have more bark but “certainly” not more bite than its predecessors, according to Vaez.
“The parliament is subservient to the supreme leader and rubber stamps the deep state’s strategic decisions, even if grudgingly,” he added.
Since the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi, a close ally of Khamenei, was elected as president in 2021, Iran’s hard-liners have dominated all three branches of the government, including the parliament and judiciary.
Other key institutions like the Assembly of Experts and the powerful Guardians Council, which vets all election candidates, are also dominated by hard-liners.
“There is not much left of the system’s republican features,” Vaez said. “The Islamic republic is now a minority-ruled unconstitutional theocracy.”
Iran’s parliamentary elections on March 1 witnessed a historically low turnout, in a blow to the legitimacy of the clerical establishment.
The official turnout of 41 percent was the lowest for legislative elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Critics claim the real turnout was likely even lower.
Hard-liners dominated the elections for the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, a body that picks the country’s supreme leader, consolidating their grip on power. Many reformists and moderates were barred from contesting the polls.
Experts said the declining turnout signifies the growing chasm between the ruling clerics and Iran’s young population, many of whom are demanding greater social and political freedoms in the Middle Eastern nation of some 88 million.
“These elections proved that the overriding imperative for the Islamic republic is strengthening ideological conformity at the top, even at the cost of losing even more of its legitimacy from below,” said Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.
‘Widening Divide’
Observers said disillusionment with the state has been building up for years and is reflected in the declining voter turnout in recent elections.
Turnout in presidential and parliamentary elections were consistently above 50 percent for decades. But the numbers have declined since 2020, when around 42 percent of voters cast ballots in the parliamentary elections that year. In the 2021 presidential vote, turnout was below 49 percent.
Ali Ansari, a history professor at the University of St. Andrews, puts that down to growing “despondency” in the country.
This is “the clearest indication of the widening divide between state and society, which has been growing over the years,” said Ansari.
“It is quite clear that the despondency is extending even to those who are generally sympathetic to the regime,” he added, referring to reformist former President Mohammad Khatami choosing not to vote in the March 1 elections.
Voter apathy was particularly evident in the capital, Tehran, which has the most representatives in the 290-seat parliament. In Tehran, only 1.8 million of the 7.7 million eligible voters — or some 24 percent — cast their votes on March 1, according to official figures.
Up to 400,000 invalid ballots — many believed to be blank — were cast in Tehran alone, a sign of voter discontent.
Ahead of the elections, nearly 300 activists in Iran had called on the public to boycott the “engineered” elections.
Beyond Boycott
The March 1 elections were the first since the unprecedented anti-establishment protests that rocked the country in 2022.
The monthslong demonstrations, triggered by the death in custody of a young woman arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, snowballed into one of the most sustained demonstrations against Iran’s theocracy. At least 500 protesters were killed and thousands were detained in the state’s brutal crackdown on the protests.
Iran has been the scene of several bursts of deadly anti-establishment protests since the disputed presidential election in 2009. Many of the demonstrations have been over state repression and economic mismanagement.
Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police in September 2022. Experts say declining voter turnout highlights society’s growing disenchantment with the state.
But experts said that the 2022 protests alone did not result in the record-low turnout in the recent elections.
“This is a reflection of a deeper malaise that extends back to 2009 and traverses through 2017, 2019, and 2022,” Ansari said. “It has been building for some time.”
Despite the historically low turnout, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised the “epic” participation of the public. State-run media, meanwhile, spun the elections as a victory over those who called for a boycott.
By claiming victory, the clerical establishment “overlooks the growing absence of support from 60 percent of its population,” said Vaez.
“Such self-approbation [mirrors] the regime’s previous dismissal of the 2022 protests as the result of foreign intrigue rather than reflection of deep discontent,” he said, adding that it represents the Islamic republic’s “continuation of ignoring simmering public discontent.”
Hard-Line Dominance
Around 40 moderates won seats in the new parliament. But the legislature will remain dominated by hard-liners.
The elections were largely seen as a contest between conservatives and ultraconservatives.
“We can say that a more hotheaded and previously marginal wing of the hard-liners scored a victory against more established conservatives,” said Arash Azizi, a senior lecturer in history and political science at Clemson University in South Carolina.
“This is because the former had a more fired-up base and in the absence of popular participation were able to shape the results,” he added.
A more hard-line parliament could have more bark but “certainly” not more bite than its predecessors, according to Vaez.
“The parliament is subservient to the supreme leader and rubber stamps the deep state’s strategic decisions, even if grudgingly,” he added.
Since the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi, a close ally of Khamenei, was elected as president in 2021, Iran’s hard-liners have dominated all three branches of the government, including the parliament and judiciary.
Other key institutions like the Assembly of Experts and the powerful Guardians Council, which vets all election candidates, are also dominated by hard-liners.
“There is not much left of the system’s republican features,” Vaez said. “The Islamic republic is now a minority-ruled unconstitutional theocracy.”
