Expert analysis on Iran

I’ve had Iranian colleagues throughout my faculty career. Unsurprisingly, none were anti-American. 

Here’s an interview with Juan Cole and Mojtaba Mahdavi, two Middle East experts, on the current events in Iran. They discuss the politics in Iran and among the Iranian diaspora. Both Cole and Mahdavi point to the Netanyahu ambition of hegemony in the Middle East as a major driver of current events.

I encourage you to listen to the whole thing, but as a teaser, Prof. Cole compares the likelihood that the late Shah’s son will come to power after the current war to the rumors that the Tsar’s daughter Anastasia had somehow escaped Bolshevik Russia and would reclaim the throne there.

Mahdavi and Cole cut through the bothsidesisms of the MSM and the propaganda of the US and Israeli administrations to articulate the nuance and diversity of Iranian public opinion, the impact of Islamophobia as a driver of war propaganda and Western orientalist discourse and the retreat into colonialism and mercantilist capitalism. Not to mention the utility of the war to promote AI and war technologies and distraction from Israeli atrocities in Gaza and annexations in the West Bank.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dXDKpxibsE&t=2s

 

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