Professor DEBUNKS Trump’s Iran Nuke Lie, Ceasefire, & Israel-US Propaganda

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The US-Israel-Iran conflict is changing fast with civilian strikes, ceasefire talks, sneak attacks, and coverups. And Western media is as war-mongering and dishonest as they have been since the beginning of the genocide and were during the Iraq War. Narges Bajoghli, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, helps sheds light on the reality in Iran and parse through the propaganda.

Useful Idiots: The big debate right now in Washington is the Trump administration claiming, ‘Yeah, we basically obliterated Iran's nuclear program.’ And the media saying, ‘No, you didn't.’ And that's the debate, not whether the U.S. had the right to do that, or whether it was right for Trump to pretend to engage in diplomacy just to help Israel kill a bunch of people in Iran, including many civilians. As you're watching all this unfold in Washington, what is your sense of what is missing from the public discussion?

Narges Bajoghli: First of all, this was an unprovoked war that Israel launched inside of Iran. And as much as the framing around it by mainstream media was that Israel was just targeting military infrastructure, military officials, and nuclear facilities, from day one they were targeting civilian infrastructure. Lots of civilians ended up losing their lives in this twelve day war that we had. So the erasure of that and the focus on the civilian infrastructure in Israel, that is important to pay attention to.

The other is that we still talk about nuclear energy as if nuclear energy can only be used to create a bomb. Not only did the IAEA and all US intel agencies say that they had no evidence that Iran was going for a bomb. But what we were not discussing is that nuclear energy is actually used for medical research, it's used for cancer research, it's used for electricity, it's civilian infrastructure. And so targeting civilian infrastructure in this way actually violates international law.

Useful Idiots: There's a lot of talk right now about a ceasefire. Is there a ceasefire?

Narges Bajoghli: So far, there's a ceasefire in the sense that both sides have ceased firing at one another. Trump’s base turned against him so publicly, so loudly that he could not risk starting another war or else he would have to risk losing his base. So it seems like he's put some pressure on the Israelis as well. But Israel is not known for abiding by and honoring ceasefires. I think to date with the ceasefire in Lebanon, it's already violated it over a thousand times. So I know that there's a lot of trepidation about how long this will actually hold. But for the moment, this is where we are.

Subscribe to hear the full interview with Narges Bajoghli on the impact of US sanctions on working people in Iran, whether sanctions should be considered a war crime, what we can predict about Iran by analyzing the regime change operation in Syria, and a weird CNN propaganda video fear-mongering about Iranian sleeper cells in the US.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Trump Thinks He’s Hotter Than Zohran Mamdani

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