Friday Call:
Since I recorded the video, I’ve made a last-minute change.
Our call this Friday won’t be with Joshua Leifer. It will be with the Iranian-American scholar and commentator, Reza Aslan, author of the new book, An American Martyr in Persia. We’ll talk about the extraordinary protests taking place in Iran and how the United States should respond. I want to host Josh soon to talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Kahanist who seems poised to win as many as a dozen seats in the Israeli elections. But given the magnitude of what’s happening in Iran I felt we needed to discuss that this week instead.
Sources Cited in this Video:
Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar on the protests in Iran.
The academic research that suggests that sanctions that target ordinary people (as opposed to sanctions that target the officials of tyrannical regimes like Iran's, which I strongly support) tend to undermine human rights and democracy.
The Iranian dissidents—from imprisoned Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian to Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi to Akbar Ganji, who has been called Iran’s best-known political prisoner—who have warned that sanctions against ordinary people strengthen the Iranian regime. If it becomes clear that the Iranians leading the current protests have adopted a different view—and want broad-based economic sanctions despite the economic suffering they cause—then the US should defer to their wishes. But that hasn’t been the case in the past.
The Republican Party’s love affair with Egyptian tyrant Abdel Fattah El-Sisi.
The Washington Institute for Near East Peace’s 2021 award to Mohammed bin Zayed, the dictatorial ruler of the United Arab Emirates.
The New York Times documents the Bush administration’s role in the 2004 coup against Haiti’s democratic president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
John Bolton insists the US did nothing wrong in overthrowing Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953.
Other Stuff:
In Jewish Currents (subscribe), Alex Kane exposes a rift among establishment Jewish groups over the controversy over Zionist speakers at Berkeley Law School.
On our Friday call, Rula Jebreal talked about the Afro-Palestinian community in Jerusalem in which she grew up. Here’s a book that documents their lives.
Two critical and witty takes on the Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I wanted to start by saying that our call this Friday is going to be with my former Jewish Currents colleague, Josh Leifer, who if you don’t know his work is a really brilliant commentator on American and Israeli politics. And he wrote a terrific piece about Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Kahanist leader who may win ten or more seats in the Israeli Knesset. Benjamin Netanyahu is now essentially running in a kind of political coalition with him. And so Josh wrote this piece about the kind of mainstreaming of Kahanist politics and Israel. It’s a really excellent, excellent piece, and we’re gonna talk about it next Friday. So please, please sign up and become a subscriber and join us.
I wanted to talk for a minute about these incredible uprisings in Iran, which has just filled me with so much admiration and just awe at the courage of the people struggling for freedom in Iran. And I think, to their credit, virtually all of the kind of prominent, progressive figures in the United States that I follow—Bernie Sanders, you know, Ilhan Omar, many others—have been also unambiguous in their overwhelming support for this movement, which isn’t really surprising at all if you think about what these people want. I mean, it’s not just a movement for freedom. It’s also a movement by women who want bodily autonomy and who want equality. So, as Ilhan Omar actually said, it’s entirely consistent with Americans who are struggling for those same things in the United States—obviously not being as brutally repressed as in Iran. But still, given the end of abortion rights, we have very, very significant struggles that are kind of parallel you could say. And yet, you see in the media, if you follow this claim by people on the right, that progressives don’t really support the Iranians. In fact, there’s been this recurrent claim that an Iranian American organization called NIAC—some kind of people on the Israeli right have claimed that they’re an apologist for Iran—and that the implication is that the people who are critical of American policy in the Middle East are apologists for Iran and it’s only really the American hawks, the hawks in the United States and in Israel on the right that are real champions of the Iranian people. I think that argument is really nonsense, and I wanted to just spend a couple of minutes explaining why I think it’s nonsense.
So, one of the arguments that you find that people on the right make, that hawks make, about why they’re the real champions of the people of Iran is because they have been the most supportive of the harshest sanctions and, therefore, the idea is that supporting sanctions against this brutal Iranian regime makes you someone who’s in solidarity with the people overall. The problem with this argument is that the academic research—and I put this in a couple of these links in the email that I sent out—but the academic research makes it pretty clear that broad-based sanctions against an entire population do not foster human rights and democracy. They actually strengthen authoritarian rule. Countries that are suffering crippling economic sanctions actually tend to recede in terms of human rights and are less likely to make democratic progress because sanctions actually often become a mechanism by which authoritarian regimes can maintain power. There’s quite a bit of research on this. And it’s perhaps partly for that reason that generally the most prominent Iranian dissidents have been quite critical of American sanctions against Iran—broad-based sanctions that that hit the entire population. I’m not talking about targeted sanctions against certain elements of the regime itself. I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that—I wouldn’t. But, in 2013, a long list of anti-government activists in Iran wrote a letter to Barack Obama warning him against broad-based sanctions. The Iranian American journalist, Jason Rezaian, who was imprisoned for two years in Iran, wrote a column talking about how sanctions would actually undermine the democratic movement in Iran. Shirin Ebadi, who won the Peace Prize in 2003, the prominent Iranian human rights activist also condemned broad-based US sanctions. Akbar Ganji, who is known as one of if not Iran’s best-known political prisoners. So, to claim that the best way of testing how much you support the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom is how much you’re willing to support broad-based sanctions that actually deny them basic access to medicine, life-saving drugs, these kinds of things, I think has it exactly backwards. It’s amazing that the Iranian people are actually able to bring out this level of rebellion. But the academic evidence, and the testimony for many Iranian dissidents, suggest that actually sanctions have probably been an impediment to the kind of mass uprising we’re seeing, not a catalyst for it.
And the last point, I think, is worth thinking about. When one asks the question: do hawks in the United States on the American right—people who’ve been pushing for harsher and harsher broad-based sanctions, people who’ve been calling even for military action—do they really support freedom for the Iranian people? Is that really their priority? Or do they simply want an Iran that does the bidding of the United States, that is essentially an American client state, and that they don’t really care whether it’s democratic or not? I think it’s worth asking oneself this theoretical question: if Iranians toppled the Islamic Republic, which I deeply hope they do, and they created a secular government—let’s say a secular leftist government that supported Palestinian rights, that was opposed to the US policies in its cold wars with China and Russia, for instance—how would hawks in the United States, the very people who are now claiming to be the greatest champions of democracy in Iran, how would they respond then? My suspicion is that they would actually be very, very hostile to such a government, and they would prefer an authoritarian pro-American government in Iran to a democratic, freely elected government that took a negative view towards the United States and American foreign policy. Essentially, they would prefer another Shah to a democratically elected government that had anti-American policies.
Now why would I say that? Well, partly, I think we have the evident example of what happened in Egypt, right? If you remember, there was a democratic election in Egypt in the wake of the of the Arab Spring. It elected Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim brotherhood candidate. Far from a perfect candidate, but he did have a democratic mandate. And overwhelmingly, prominent Republicans have endorsed the coup that overthrew him that brought in Field Marshall Sisi to power. Trump called Sisi, ‘my favorite dictator.’ So, in fact, you see that in another Arab government, what became clear, is that when a democratic movement was not going to express itself in terms of pro-American policies, overwhelmingly, prominent American Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Trump, many others, essentially endorsed an authoritarian regime that would be more pro-American. And it’s not just in Egypt. What you’ve seen is pretty widespread support in conservative political circles in the United States for regimes like the United Arab Emirates that have been really at the forefront of a fomenting anti-democratic coups across the Middle East, whether it’s in Egypt or Sudan or Tunisia. The kind of hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Affairs actually gave its most prominent award in 2010 to Mohammed bin Zayed, the head of the UAE.
So, if one wants to ask the question, how do conservatives tend to respond when democratically elected governments don’t do America’s bidding, one tends to find that actually then they turn out not to be such great fans of democracy after all. Now, in these cases, it’s true it was the Muslim Brotherhood. So, I think it’s pretty unlikely that Iranians would freely vote for the Muslim Brotherhood. But, again, imagine that Iranians elected someone like Mohammed Mossadegh. I’m sure many of you know he was the democratically elected, secular left-leaning leader of Iran in the early 1950s who was overthrown in an American and British-backed coup. How would people on the right in the United States likely respond to that kind of government? Well, we know that John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, one of the most prominent venerable kind of hawks in the American foreign policy firmament, has publicly said that the US has nothing to apologize for its coup against Mossadegh. The Bush administration, as the New York Times reported earlier this year, was involved in a coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti—a kind of secular, left-wing figure who was pursuing anti-American policies, and the Bush administration helped to remove him from power.
So, I think that the record suggests that despite the American right’s claim to be the true champions of the Iranian people as they struggle against this despotic, savage regime that they’re that they’re responding to, that in fact the record suggests that in general American hawks are less interested in supporting democracy than they are in producing client states for the United States. And when those two things diverge, they tend to prefer authoritarian governments that are allies of America, that do America’s bidding, to democratically elected governments that take a policy path that the US opposes. It’s for that reason that I think ultimately the true supporters of the movement for freedom in Iran are much more likely to be people who genuinely support democracy and human rights across the world, who tend to be American progressives like Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and others, than those folks on the on the American right are claiming to be the real champions of the Iranian people. I hope to see you on Friday with Josh Leifer and have a great week.
Who Should We Trust to Support Freedom in Iran?