Iran vs. Empire: Burning Questions for the Resistance--Philadelphia Panel

Adnan Husain: بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم. سلام، هلا، سلام عليكم جميعاً. مرحباً بكم في حلقة أخرى من برنامجنا الحسين. السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته. السلام، هلا، سلام عليكم جميعاً. مرحباً بكم في حلقة أخرى من برنامجنا الحسين. أنا عدنان حسين، تاريخي للمدينة المediterranean والاسلامي كات ورلدز. This is an interesting recording, really, of a live event that took place. Some of you may know that on March 25th in Philadelphia, I helped organize and participate on a panel, Iran Versus Empire: Burning Questions for the Resistance, along with co-panelists and chair— Ted Koppel. Dr. Gabriel Rockhill, who's well known to this channel, and 2 other co-panelists, Nazia Qazi, Dr. Nazia Qazi, and Dr. Adeem Suhail. And it was a really wonderful event that took place at the Philadelphia Liberation Center, which is a Party for Socialism and Liberation venue for their organizing in Philadelphia. It was a packed house. Maybe about 100 people came. There was an overflow room where it streamed live. It was a lively discussion and really a wonderful atmosphere of engagement, of political commitment and dedication to an anti-imperialist approach. And it was recorded, video and audio, and so I'm making them available thanks to the organizers, whom I really appreciate. Thank you. Timur and Stephen principally, but all the people at the Philly Liberation Center for their work in making this happen and also in the recording and making it available. So I will put in the notes a little bit more information about it and thank everyone and note the people who are involved with the production just because they deserve to be highlighted as well. And I hope I hope you enjoy this. It's a really interesting and good discussion, and I found the remarks of my co-panelists just really interesting, insightful. So I hope you enjoy this, and we continue to, you know, do the political education in the community, you know, wherever, whenever we can, online and on this platform, but also live in person when we can. We have to just keep—

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah.

Adnan Husain: talking about ending this terrible war and transforming the world. So enjoy.

Nazia Kazi: So without further ado, I'm going to pass it off to Dr. Gabriel Rockhill to introduce our panelists. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thank you, Taliyah. Thank you all for coming out. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here with so many comrades and so many people interested In what's currently going on. I'm going to turn the floor over in a moment to the 3 panelists, who I'll briefly introduce. But before doing that, I would like to just address one big-picture issue that I think is one of the themes that brings us all together, and that is that there's currently a conflagration in West Asia that is of the proportion that many people are asking the very important question, well, is this World War III? Are we headed to a nuclear apocalypse or some type of major reconfiguration of geopolitics? And I think, with these questions in mind, it's very important to remind ourselves that the chronology of wars is dictated, itself, by the ruling class. And so, it's the bourgeoisie that tells us that World War II started in, say, 1939 and ended in, say, 1945, when that's not the case. The war started in the East with the Japanese invasion of China, at least in the early 1930s. And in 1945, when the Nazis finally surrendered, the Algerians and many others across Africa rose up in an anti-colonial struggle that saw itself in continuity with the struggle against fascism, meaning World War II didn't end; it was simply redeployed as a war on the Third World and a war against those who were trying to liberate themselves from the forms of fascism in the Third World. I say all of this because it's important for us to recognize that when people raise the question of whether or not World War III is happening or about ready to happen, I think the real response is, it is already happening. We cannot allow the ruling class to demarcate history for us and say when it begins and when it ends. The Third World War or world war is already happening, because the imperialists are not making one, two, three, many world wars. They are constantly at war.

Adnan Husain: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: And what imperialism is, is a war on the world. And so, what we're recognizing here, in this particular moment, is a level of resistance that is capable of transforming human history, not only of the last few decades, but arguably of the last few centuries. And so, it's with this in mind that we've brought together a panel of very astute intellectuals and organizers, who I'm going to briefly introduce. And the run of show is going to be the following. Each has prepared 7 to 8 minutes of comments. We'll begin with each of those, and then we'll moderate a conversation between the 4 of us, and, of course, then open up for a broader discussion concerning the imperialist war on humanity and on the planet. So, I'm joined by Dr. Naseer Qadhi, who is a professor of anthropology and author of Islamophobia, Race and Global Politics. As well as by Adeem Suhail, who's an assistant professor of social anthropology and is currently completing a book called Machines of Violent Desire, and Dr. Adnan Husain, at the end, who's the director of the School of Religion and associate professor of medieval, Mediterranean and Islamicate world history. Many of us likely already know his work from his popular education through the podcasts Guerrilla History, as well as The Adnan Husain Show. If you don't know them yet, then look them up on your phone. I'll start by turning the floor over to Nazia Qazi to get us started.

Nazia Kazi: Thanks. I hope everyone's having a good imperial collapse.

Adnan Husain: I don't know.

Nazia Kazi: It's easy these days for one's mood to fluctuate as much as Donald Trump's report as to whether or not we're in negotiations with Iran right now. So, over 2 decades ago, The U.S. empire took a sledgehammer to West Asia, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and with many other nearby states also under assault. But while it did this, it did something else here at home. It gathered the more privileged of U.S. Muslims— you know, the brown people, the Arabs, the model minorities— whose counterparts on the other side of the world had been excluded from the realm of political self-determination. Right. And it assured us, the privileged subset, that we belonged here. Even as hate crimes were unleashed and indefinite detention and deportation swept immigrant Muslim communities, we were invited to explain our hijabs and our Ramadans. We were asked to publish op-eds and books about Islamophobia. George W. Bush visited a masjid. He gave speeches urging white people to go shopping with their scared Muslim neighbors. Our Islamic schools received gift baskets from church groups, and corny-ass shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie came out. Those days are done. I don't know if you've noticed, but no one is talking about Islamophobia anymore, not on that level. There are only flimsy remnants of those hijab solidarity days and Islam awareness events. I don't think there was a White House iftar last month. Go figure. And it's OK, because astute observers always knew that these were facile, fraudulent, outright deceptive gestures here at the heart of empire. The Western discourse on Islamophobia, in other words, was always a psyop. This redemption of Muslims while U.S. empire expanded its tentacles in the Muslim world was always meant to give the racist realities of empire-building A facelift. And those days are gone. Today, one looks at Gaza and the West Bank and Iran and Lebanon and doesn't have to squint too hard to see the racist foundations upon which empire rests. It's naked. It's obvious. And it will be impossible for empire to go on appointing a White House liaison for Muslim affairs or to do a special episode of The View or to have museum exhibits about Islamic contributions to science, to engage in any of these tactics that are meant to paper over the glaring facts of imperialism. So, for the longest time, the U.S. has been manufacturing consent for war with Iran. In 2015, John Bolton wrote a New York Times op-ed, To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran. In 2007, Senator John McCain jokingly saying, Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran. And, of course, the prime tool to manufacture consent— or perhaps we should say invent reality, RIP Michael Parenti— has been the use of imperialist feminism, the burning urge to liberate Iranian girls. And how quickly that was revealed to be a lie, what with the opening salvo of this war, the double or perhaps triple-tap strike of a girls' elementary school. The same can be said about the racial logics that underlie empire's rules about nuclear weapons. By now, it's clear to everyone that Israel, not Iran, has nuclear weapons and is not a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Adeem Suhail: Right.

Nazia Kazi: But of course, it's Iran getting bombed under precisely that allegation. And it's clear that Islamophobia, if we must use this flawed term, does not indicate a primordial hatred for Islam by the West, a claim that circulates through Islamophobia studies and mainstream discussions of U.S. racism. Instead, what we actually must contend with is the instrumentalization of the world's Muslims by empire. We have to radically rethink the assumptions that have led us to interfaith programming, which, by the way, has always been a Trojan horse for liberal Zionism, That's right. Just ask my students, who last year were invited to an iftar in South Jersey that was hosted by the ADL. The dangers of this flat understanding of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism become abundantly clear, for instance, with the U.S.-backed regime change operation in Syria, a move that effectively split Palestine organizing in the U.S. Claims that the HTS government were motivated by right-wing religious ideologies were quickly dismissed as Islamophobic. And of course, if one didn't center the Syrian Muslim voices that angled for regime change, one was likewise accused of Islamophobia. In other words, the language of anti-Muslim racism has been used to push through geopolitical goals that serve empire. And the same can be said of the hand-wringing we remember 4, 5, 6 years ago about China's minority Muslim population. A discourse that proliferated precisely at that time that the U.S. used the language of human rights to designate China a foe. So in 2003, when lies about weapons of mass destruction were used to invade Iraq, American streets filled with conscientious objectors. And today's antiwar movement feels hollow by comparison. And in part, it's because so many people just a few Weeks ago, were hand-wringing about the evil Iranian regime, citing statistics from The Guardian, from empire's favorite human rights organizations, recycling State Department lines verbatim about Iranian protesters squaring off against an authoritarian regime. Today, when those same voices say the bombs need to stop or hands off Iran, it rings utterly hollow. Their prior rhetoric was fodder for the bombing of Iranian oil and gas fields, and it hangs in the toxic rain that falls from Tehran's skies. For those who saw through those ploys, it was actually never hands off Iran, but arms around it, protecting one of the remaining bastions of national sovereignty in the face of U.S. imperial aggression. How the narrative has shifted. For too long, the image of the Middle East has been a region under bombs, of an abject people covered in dust, wailing for their slain child, mocked by U.S. soldiers, suffering cholera, suffering drought. In other words, for the longest time, the sympathetic view of Muslims was of a bombed-out people. That was just quite simply our fate. Today, Iran makes clear that this image of victimhood is done. Even as its buildings crumble under multimillion-dollar U.S. bombs. Today, Iran releases AI music videos mocking U.S. strategy. Every Iranian spokesperson speaks not of the U.S., but of the Epstein empire. Today, Iran refuses the language of the region's victimhood, of rubble, of hunger, of loss, and instead demonstrates its power. in the skies, on the waterways, and in the minds of 22-year-old TikTok fangirls of Abbasa Rakshi. Thanks.

Gabriel Rockhill: Thank you so much, Nazia. Adeem?

Adnan Husain: Yeah.

Adeem Suhail: Why do I have to follow you? It's unfair. Elder in our tradition who once asked us to make 2, 3, many Vietnams, right? That's happening now, right? We're— just as Gabriel was saying, we're already in this war, right, the war on life.

Adnan Husain: Right?

Adeem Suhail: Today, we are in the midst of a process of accumulation by waste, in which the massive destruction of life is not an ancillary effect, but the organizing principle of value production on a world scale. In this war on life itself, right, one front was opened in October 2023. Right. The Ramadan War opens an additional front in that same war between imperialist accumulation by destruction and the ineluctable desire by the global majorities to build institutions for life. We have seen the partisans of life doing that by mobilizing an immense and intense capacity for sacrifice. Such is the way we can read the role our Iranian comrades are playing in history today. They are demonstrating to us, at both the tactical but also strategic level, the kinds of material and ideological capacities we must cultivate, right? Human communities across the world must cultivate to build institutions for life.

Adnan Husain: Right.

Adeem Suhail: I want to briefly talk about what this might look like from the perspective of where I situate myself, which is from the perspective of South Asia. That was also the role I was assigned for this panel. Things look complicated from the South Asian subcontinent, right? I want us to consider the fact that the fascist Hindutva government in India is not nonpartisan in this conflict, right? In aiding and abetting the murder of unarmed guests, the Iranian sailors, the Hindutva regime in India has declared itself a co-belligerent in the crimes of the empire and the regime in Tel Aviv. However, as this conflict prolongs and the Iranian anti-imperialist war, right, countersanction— its countersanction regime that it's imposing in the Straits of Hormuz, right, when that takes its toll, there may be opportunities, new fronts possible to open for progressive forces on the ground, comrades, for comrades in India to claim a resurgence and undo the large-scale effects of this alliance between Zionists Hindutva and whatever this thing is in Washington. India, we must remember, has historically played a pivotal role in the project of sovereign development in the Global South. And it is important that our comrades in India find the capacity to build institutions for life and take India back into that Trajectory, where it answers the call for history.

Gabriel Rockhill: Mm-hmm.

Adeem Suhail: Pakistan, on the other hand, stands in a weirdly pivotal, if precarious, position. Last May, it used Chinese military technology, coupled with the prowess of its own air force, to thwart the Hindutva regime's attack on Pakistan's sovereign territories. This was— this is now sort of— this was an attempt by the Hindutva regime to take— to avail of the opportunity that the Gaza genocide had opened up for all fascist regimes all over the world, which is sort of the undoing of the very possibility or the promise of whatever international law used to mean, right? But I want to say that despite that, Materially, sort of, we know that Pakistan cannot survive, right, without some kind of a regional development plan with its neighbors in China. On the other hand, the Pakistani elite have been historically lapdogs of empire. It is their Pavlovian conditioning. As Samir Amin would argue, this is the classic curse of rent-seeking and eccentrically oriented production mechanisms.

Nazia Kazi: Right.

Adeem Suhail: That were forced onto the peripheral bourgeoisie in the global south. A sweetener of this habitual parasitism is Saudi and Emirati coffers. So Pakistan is in the midst of a very difficult transition, right? The its Pavlovian conditioning and the call of history. Here is what gives me faith: the people of Pakistan. Have always acted in anti-imperialist ways, right? They have shown it in successive movements against U.S.-backed military dictatorships, by the ballot, and by taking on bullets. When the war on Iran began, Pakistani people in my home city of Karachi stormed the imperial bastion in Karachi, the consulate, and U.S. Marines gunned down. 20 of my compatriots. The people are with Iran. They have spoken in blood and martyrdom. They're also with the Palestinian struggle, right? But we are still in the lurch. We are in the midst of making history. And we must force the Pakistani regime's hands. And that is a task for us. The challenges I see before us are certain intensifications of infantile disorders on the so-called left in South Asia. You see, one of the problems of being trained in the academia in the West is that one is taught to hate oneself, as Fanon reminds us, right? And one is taught to fetishize heroic defeats. and be suspicious of power, suspicious of wielding power, but also of taking power. This is a culture of drunk impotence. That is also the culture of the Pakistani left. The part of us, the part of the people of the region that this infantile left hates the most is the part that is Islam, right? This is also a part of their Pavlovian conditioning, which is why so many of the people in the South Asian left— right? This is not just Pakistan— are equivocating on the question of Iran, right, and its recognition as an important front, perhaps the most pivotal front in the anti-imperialist struggle of our times. Right. They're also equivocating on the need to defeat Hindutva, right, for regional peace and mutual development, right? And they're very confused on the question of the Taliban, right? This confusion is produced in them as subjects of the mechanisms of control that are unveiled at that great factory of impotence called the American university. They would rather see a regional— they would rather see regional projects for sovereign development get destroyed, de-developed and fragmented, in the name of a quixotic subnationalist utopianism, for which there is no concrete social base in the actual people on the ground. And these are 2.5 billion people. There's a lot of us. What is therefore clear to me, at least, is that the anti-imperialists in both India and Pakistan must get over themselves and at once put intense pressure on both the undemocratic regimes in the countries to assist in the project of dismantling of empire, right? Which is to say that they need to be partisans for life and join Iran in this struggle of our times.

Nazia Kazi: Thank you.

Adeem Suhail: The question today, as ever, is between barbarism and civilization. And we are fortunate, in our region, that we have a great model for how to move towards regional mutual development, which is also the path that is laid out for us by the People's Republic. Thank you.

Adnan Husain: Thank you. Thank you, Adnan.

Gabriel Rockhill: Adnan, go ahead.

Adnan Husain: Salaam alaikum, everyone. Peace be to you all. And Eid Mubarak. I'm still celebrating, because the Ramadan War is ending, I think, the way it needs to and must. And that is a cause for celebration. Iran The Hamas leadership has been very firm in establishing and insisting that they will determine the end of this war. And even in today's announcement that they have rejected the latest U.S. so-called peace proposals that have been offered, they've rejected it by insisting on key conditions. And that's something that we need to pay attention to.

Nazia Kazi: Right.

Adnan Husain: Is what are the strategic objectives? What is this Ramadan war going to be about? And my first point that I'd like to emphasize, after, of course, thanking everyone for coming, Timur and Steve for the organizing, PLC for hosting, the Liberation Center, for all of you for coming to be part of this discussion, I'm really very optimistic. Yeah. Because of this, because I think we are on the cusp of potentially very big changes in reorienting the imperial world system. And the first point that I would want to make about that is, my first thought was that this was an effort at decolonizing West Asia.

Nazia Kazi: Mm-hmm.

Adnan Husain: Completing the anti-colonial work that was never really completed and finished. You know, we talk about these as postcolonial nations in West Asia, but in fact, actually, it's been the continuation and perpetuation in different forms. We could call it neocolonialism. You know, there are a lot of vassal states of the empire. Iran alone, because of their revolution in 1979, is the only sovereign country in the entire region. And what have they done with their sovereignty, gained at a high price of 47 years of sanctions, of subversion, 8 years of war sponsored by their neighbors and Western empire, including— that encouraged Iraq to invade, hundreds of thousands of casualties, including chemical weapons attacks? They have paid a very high price for that sovereignty. And they have also continued to pay a very high price, because they have refused to abandon the people of Palestine. And so, one of—

Nazia Kazi: Indeed.

Adnan Husain: Indeed, it's worth celebrating that, because I think we are seeing something unique in the annals of anti-colonial resistance here, because many have been the struggles to liberate, national liberation struggles to free one's own country, one's own nation, one's own people from colonialism and colonial rule. But there have been very few cases where people have sacrificed so much to decolonize others. They have won their sovereignty. They're battling the imperial system. But that's why, in the initial stages, it was characterized that the operation name Was ختمة طوفان, seal of the flood or the completion of the flood, referring to طوفان الأقصى, the operation on October 7th to try and liberate Palestine from settler colonial occupation. That made the link you know kind of clear even before the start of the war, in anticipation with the buildup when Foreign Minister Arakchi was in Qatar for. The Al Jazeera Forum.

Gabriel Rockhill: Mm-hmm.

Adnan Husain: His speech that he gave was not about how, you must please leave Iran alone, please lift the sanctions, don't have a war on us. His speech was about Palestine and the importance of Palestine. Why do they— why do they insist on that so much? And I think it's because, as we've been talking about, I'm sure all of us, for 2 and a half years, and even longer, even— Because the genocide just had a more intense phase, is that Palestine is crucial to the world system of empire, the imperial world system. It is this pivot point where the model for the future of the world is being worked out, right? Is it going to be Fortress Europe, the jungle surrounding the garden, with high walls and surveillance technology and—

Gabriel Rockhill: Right.

Adnan Husain: Techniques for managing and oppressing populations that can be developed and battle-tested in that environment and then exported to the rest of the West, the rest of the elites of the world, to reproduce the exact same model around the world. This is why what Iran is doing now and the— why, when the war started, when the war happened, I was not panicking. I mean, I felt like, OK. We've been waiting and waiting. Now is the time of decision. Decisions are being forced. And there is, as one Iraqi figure— I saw a clip of him on an Iraqi talk show speaking in Arabic. You know, he was telling people about a trip he had made to Egypt, where he had been interdicted at the airport and subject to scrutiny and questioning. And the airport security official in Egypt asked him, "Oh, you're from Iraq. Are you Shia?" And he said, "Oh, you know there's no Shia Sunni. This is like fifty years old. This whole game, this whole business. There's now only two madhabs, two orientations of religion or schools of thought." He said, "There's the madhab al-muqawwamah. There's the school of resistance." And there's the school, mathapal inbitat, of subservience. That's it. And you have Shia, Sunni, atheist. You have, you know, Christians. You have everybody in each of these 2 camps. It's the time of decision. Are you for resistance and for freedom? So this is what's happening. It seems to me the wider kind of significance of this is, you know, if If West Asia is decolonized, it means Palestine has to be decolonized, and it means a different world order, OK, different possibilities that are opened up. And so that's what we're seeing, in some sense, is the undoing of the whole Sykes-Picot— you know, Israel is interested in reconsidering the Sykes-Picot because they want Greater Israel, and Iran is contesting the— Right. World of this so-called postcolonial West Asia, that it was actually just reproducing colonialism. And, you know, what we're going to see is, you know, whether or not there will be the possibility of a liberated West Asia and what that means then for the globe and for the world. And what we're seeing Iran do is, I think, even more than just decolonizing West Asia. Now, given the strategies and accomplishments that they've had, You know, is that controlling the Strait of Hormuz is reorienting away from Western imperial control in a much more deep and profound way. And we was talking a little earlier about that in some sense what's happened is that they've sort of sanctioned back the world after 47 years where sanctions have been imposed on them. They're saying, well, we actually can have leverage over the world economy, and the imperial system is going to be under pressure, and we will be the ones with sovereignty over this geography to determine who, you know, pays a toll, who has access. So you want oil to flow, you pay in yuan, you pay a kind of toll and tax that can help Iran, you know, rebuild, etc. So there's something interesting going on that I think speaks to the deeper histories, right, of geography, of civilization, of development, the old— that for a brief period of world history, Europe had this, through extreme violence and colonialism, a conjuncture of certain kind of— we can talk a lot about, like, why there was this sort of so-called European takeoff 500 years ago. But whatever it was, that is ending. Those advantages that have built a certain kind of world system seem to be on the cusp of changing, and these older geographies and older patterns of history— China, which has been the center of the global economy for millennia before the modern era, is returning to a preeminent, you know, world-framing kind of position. And Iran, as a pivot point connecting parts of Asia and Africa— this is the historic kind of place, you could say, of, you know, this region, is that it has been, you know, a kind of transit for trade, and it is exercising exactly that power of its intermediate geography over Strait of Hormuz, potentially Bab el-Mandeb into the Red Sea. And so we're returning, in some sense, to— I think it's no accident why it is that Iran, you know, is where it is. And it has a 6,000-year history, and why it is, interestingly enough, before Larijani was assassinated, when Mujtaba, you know, in his first speech, al-Khamenei, the new supreme leader, Araqi has made similar comments, always talking about who— you know, we are a 6,000-year-old civilization.

Adeem Suhail: Mm-hmm.

Adnan Husain: And they've had 3,000 years of statecraft.

Gabriel Rockhill: OK?

Adnan Husain: What do they mean by that? They mean, in some sense, that there is a kind of latent kind of geographic, civilizational kind of perdurance. We are going to persist. We just have to outlast what you're doing right now. So, this is very hopeful, it seems to me. Very hopeful. I did want to come to a couple— if I have a couple minutes, maybe just a minute or two— Left is just—I'm so glad that the discussion of Islamophobia is put on the table, and my co-panelists here have made such important and useful remarks. It seems to me that it's a different kind, or what we can clarify—the kind of Islamophobia that we're talking about—is exactly what you were saying. I mean, and also, why is there such a difference? I remember the big protests in Iraq. I was in New York during that time, half a million people. And that was when the empire was comparatively a lot stronger. It should be— it's weaker. There's an opportunity. Why is it that we have less kind of mobilization? Obviously, a lot has happened in those 20 years. We need to kind of take stock of that. Why are we in the situation we're in? And what can we do to do our part in terms of solidarity with this anti-imperialist struggle that's taking place? But I think one component of it is, is that Islamophobia is worse or has transmuted even more than it was in the post-9/11 immediate environment. And why it was that you could have lots of mobilizations for Palestine is through the prism of them as victims, whereas you cannot— and Iran will simply not allow themselves to be framed and understood as victims alone. They are agents in history. They are resisting. And because they have sovereignty, it puts them, you know, in a different position, where we're less sympathetic, on certain quarters of the left, you know, and where Islamophobia activates, because, just like we did— we saw, you know, in the big protests for Palestine in London, they were called Hamas marches. Why? Because there were visibly Muslims entering political sphere. Instead of just being victims, persecuted and oppressed, they were defiant and saying, we want an end to complicity with genocide. And that caused a lot of anxiety and fear in the ruling classes of the empire. So, that seems like a very important thing. But I think also there is a problem that some of us, some of our colleagues, or as like Gerald Horne likes to say, our friends on the left—

Adeem Suhail: OK?

Adnan Husain: Which is that there is a certain kind of Islamophobia, you know, in the left, in the way that I'm mentioning about, like, you know, Iran. It's a theocratic system. It oppresses its people, et cetera. This is kind of an inhibition to really fully identify all the things that Nazia was mentioning that made people kind of complicit in preparing the ground for for this war. And that is, you know, that we have a little bit of a problem kind of thinking and understanding religious culture as somehow part of the potential fabric and resources available for liberatory movements, anti-colonial movements. And what we were seeing in Iran should be teaching us a lot, a whole lot, with this martyrdom Shi'i martyrdom, the way in which it has revitalized the revolutionary moment of '78-'79. It has given it a new lease on life for the generations that have grown up post-revolution and have no memory of the Shah's Iran, of SAVAK's, you know, oppression, of the liquidation of the Communist Party, the Tudeh Party, all of these things. You know, they are now You know, reviving a revolutionary kind of spirit. They are returning to really appreciating the Constitution of Iran, that says in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic that we must be in alliance with the oppressed peoples of the world and against empire. And that's what we're seeing being enacted, is what I was saying, that sense of solidarity. So, I want to just stop there and—

Nazia Kazi: Thank you.

Adnan Husain: I'm so excited for your comments and questions and discussion together, because I feel this is a hopeful moment, and we need to energize one another to do more than we've been able to do up to this point, to make this moment count. Thank you.

Gabriel Rockhill: Kill your mic, would you? Ah, kill your mic, yeah. Thank you so much to all of the panelists. I'd like to start out with a first question. And we don't necessarily have to have everyone respond to the first question. I have a few of them. So, if you want to punt it to the following question— the first question is a big-picture question of how we understand the current war on Iran within the geopolitical world that we currently live in. The way that I see it is that U.S. imperialism is on the decline and has been for quite some time. And that the rise of the multipolar world, and China in particular, causes an enormous problem that has been diagnosed by the U.S. administration and by the ruling class, and that is that they not only constitute a threat for leveraging parts of the globe out of the imperial death grip, but they put forth an alternative architecture for international development that could and is spelling the end of imperialism. So that the war on Iran, like the proxy war on Russia, has to be situated in the larger geopolitical war ultimately on China as the leader of this multipolar world, and that the fascist orientation of the imperial ruling class that you see on full display in the United States has been given a mandate, and that is that you have to stop the rise of China and the multipolar world at any cost. It doesn't matter if you break the laws, if you engage in genocide. Whatever it takes to stop this. While at the same time— and this brings me to my question— what you see now with the Trump administration having their foot on the gas pedal of an increasingly fascistic, openly colonial, openly racist, openly misogynist war on workers of the world, united, in this situation, you have elements of fissures within the imperial ruling classes themselves?

Adnan Husain: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: That you see in the ruling class, in the political leadership of the United States, within the celebrity culture, right-wing celebrity culture within the United States. So, how much do you think these splits within the imperial dynamic within the United States are significant? And relating that to an international question, how does that situate us in relationship to the ultimate defeat of imperialism? Because it's going to be much more difficult to defeat the imperialists if they're all united together. Right. But if it be the hedging of the Western European imperial powers, certain positions taken by Canada that, granted, are more tepid than some that others would like, but there's not an absolute univocal alignment of the imperialist powers on their enemies, how do you see this geopolitical dynamic playing itself out? And is there potential for splitting and further splitting the right within this country and the imperial powers globally? Because in doing that, we'll be able to divide and conquer them, like they've been doing to the left for decades, if not centuries. So I don't know who'd like to start with that.

Nazia Kazi: Well, I can very quickly say, first of all, amazing question, Gabriel. You know, it's said that Americans only learn geography during times of war. But if that were true, we would always know our geography, because we're always at war. However, I do think what Iran has done is give Americans a little bit of geography in just the past few weeks. We know that empire, U.S. empire, is really good at hiding itself, by design, OK? So, I spend my time in the university classroom. My students don't know that the U.S. has 1,000 military bases around the world. That other countries don't have foreign military bases—it's brand new to them. Even the ones who maybe grew up on a military base aren't aware of the archipelago.

Gabriel Rockhill: But I think it's like 990 now that Iran has demolished a bunch of them, and the army had run into the hotels.

Nazia Kazi: Yeah, minor correction. Exactly. So the you know I saw after after the first attacks on the United Arab Emirates in Dubai when the Burj Al Arab was struck, John.

Adnan Husain: Yeah.

Nazia Kazi: And then, as Jon Stewart, who I'm sure will run for president at some time, says, so let me get this straight. U.S. and Israel bomb Iran, and Iran responds by bombing everyone? As if, you know, he doesn't know that the U.S. has military bases in the Gulf countries. And actually, a lot of Americans don't know. And, of course, this is where understanding Islamophobia is really important. For a generation who grew up watching Aladdin, where the Middle East is just this one uniform, nebulous kind of place, Iran has done its part to show us there are actually distinctions in this region, and that the U.S. has strategic allies in the region, and it has constructed this archipelago of bases, which I don't think that this base-building model is sustainable anymore. I think that what we've seen in just a few weeks alone has issued an irreversible blow to this project of base-building. You know, the joke goes, like, why the hell did Iran put its country in the middle of all of our military bases?

Adeem Suhail: Yeah.

Nazia Kazi: All of a sudden people know what a guest worker— I mean, talk about a sick euphemism— is in the Middle East, in the Gulf countries. People know that there— now know that there are South Asian indentured people who built these skyscrapers. And they know it because of what's happened in the last few weeks. So Iran has given the American public an education that is denied to us here in the imperial core, and a geographical education as well. So that's not a full answer to your question, but hopefully a partial one.

Gabriel Rockhill: I don't know if anyone else— otherwise, I have another question to follow up on. Adnan? Adeem?

Adnan Husain: Well, it is a really important question. I mean, I think seeing, for 2 and a half years of the genocide, my big question was always, how do you explain the utter unanimity of the Western political class in this project, even when it's like against their like other interests or against their values, and they're willing to You know, the entire architecture of international law, human rights discourse, liberal theory— everything was sacrificable for unanimity in this kind of coalition of supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza. But now we are seeing, with resistance, pressure is put on the imperial system. And the resistance that Iran can offer as a sovereign nation with 93 million people and You know, they're in the top 10 of producing scientific and technical papers in the world. You know, they are capable. And so they are putting, you know, a certain kind of pressure that is opening up cracks and fissures, because Spain, you know, for example, is openly, you know, entertaining the idea that not only will we deny U.S. —basing, which is very important, because it shows that those Gulf countries, if they actually were independent countries, sovereign countries, could take decisions like that, as well. And, of course, we know Spain may suffer certain kinds of consequences, you know, in this. But they're understanding themselves as capable of denying U.S. use of its bases for prosecuting an illegal, you know, war in Iran, and also, as a result, They realize that hosting these U.S. bases, like many of these Gulf countries are learning, is not really for your security. In fact, it makes you a target. And so perhaps you should reconsider this arrangement, if you are capable of doing so. And that opens up other kinds of fissures. And, you know, so NATO might be under pressure. What's the shape of NATO going to be? And I think Iran has been —doing interesting things in attempting to exploit some sense of the ummah, the community of Muslims, and the collective values. Now, the ummah sat on its hands, other than, you know, the Axis of Resistance, for 2 and a half years. But people are in this position of being forced to choose and make these decisions. And the Gulf countries don't want to. It's not a comfortable situation for them. And the question is, is can they be turned? And Iran is trying to say, you know, we will use force. We will try and show you that your security lies in a regional collective security, right, rather than in hosting bases, in being colonial, you know, comprador vassal states. And so this is the question. Maybe there will be— I mean, if I'm Pakistan, we were talking about it before. I mean, it is also, unfortunately, a vassal state controlled by its military. And Adim could tell us so much more. But if I was, you know, after what happened with the success against, you know, Indian, you know, fighter jets because of the use of Chinese targeting and, you know, kind of satellite system, I— they've historically been allies with China. I mean, I would be reorienting, because the future clearly lies in the East. And so, one can hope that the— if this goes on longer, And the economic consequences continue, that there might be, you know, some rupturing in this imperial system. And certainly, inside, you know, the U.S., there will be recalibrations over what is our investment and why have we been taken into this, into this, you know, terrible, destructive war that is forcing the, you know, cost-of-living crisis to accelerate and so on. So, One— I mean, I'm saying this as if it's all a good thing. It's going to be painful. It's going to be, you know, a lot of shock. And especially the Global South is in a much more vulnerable position. A lot of the energy resources were going to India, East Asia, etc. But a lot of Global South, there is going to be, you know, problems with, you know, with this. But, you know, at the same time, there are also opportunities.

Gabriel Rockhill: Yeah.

Adnan Husain: Did you want to echo?

Adeem Suhail: Yeah, I just wanted to sort of— over these past 3 years, there should be a lot of clarity everywhere across the world, including here, that all that was prohibited to us, right, in the age of the primacy of aestheticism over politics, which was roughly, I would say, the period between 1991 and 2023, in many ways, that there were certain aestheticisms that governed what we called politics here in the imperial core should look like, would look like. What Al-Aqsa Flood made very clear, and Iran is making even clearer, is that everything that was prohibited to us, all sorts of alliances, all sorts of people with whom we could consider ourselves as being in community with, right, it's all possible, right? Now, what was being denied to us here, and is the bid by the imperial core in the Global South, is The very ability to have a politics. You know, we're not allowed to have a politics, right? And so, in order for us to build the conditions of possibility of a politics here, we will have to do the task of building a people, right? Which means that all of these fissures, right, all of these fissures that we see even here in the imperial core on the right, as well as sort of— Right. What passes for the left here, right? We have to construct that, right? And we have to construct that with the fragments of all that has been unveiled by sort of the resistance in the South, right? And so, what are the Yemenis telling us, right? They who are in a more advanced stage of political consciousness, of historical consciousness, we have to learn the lessons We have to learn the lessons of the Yemeni, the Palestinians, and the Iranians, right? And then open a front in the imperial core.

Gabriel Rockhill: So I also wanted to ask you, I know there's a lot of organizers here, and one of the things that people often confront is the assumption on the part of not only the liberal left, but even at times the self-declared Marxist or anarchist left, That the correct position on Iran is neither Washington nor Tehran, but really Washington. And so, that position is so prevalent that it confuses a lot of people. And I want to see if we can clarify that, because I think it would be helpful for people to have a basic framework. My sense is that one of the most important things to highlight is that the approach that many of these so-called leftists take is utopian. And they imagine that there's some type of leftist Iran that is in the imminent future and that we could just invoke that and wish that into existence. And what they lack is a scientific analysis of the material reality that when you look at these regions of the world, if Tehran loses to Washington, then we're going to have another Iraq, Syria, Libya on our hands. We're not going to have some leftist dream state that falls out of the sky. And so you can easily distinguish between a kind of utopian version of leftism and a scientific one that actually analyzes the material set of relations and thereby makes people have to choose. Because they're trying to also— their utopianism manifests itself in the fact that they're trying to tap out from history and say that my moral dignity, my intellectual clarity is above This crass struggle between the imperialists and the anti-imperialists, and we have to get them back in that struggle, right? So, I'm curious if there are other ways of dealing with this problematic of organizing in a world in which, in the belly of the beast, the dominant left is the liberal left. So, we're going to regularly confront this type of problem or other problems, such as those who are against development.

Nazia Kazi: Right.

Gabriel Rockhill: Who think that, well, no, we shouldn't have development. And where does that get us at the end of the day? Not very far. So I don't know if either or any of the 3 of you have responses to how to engage effectively with these pseudo-arguments on the left so that we can push people to embrace a real leftist position.

Adnan Husain: It's time.

Gabriel Rockhill: Oh, sorry. Everyone's looking at you, Adnan.

Adnan Husain: That is tough. I mean, we spend our lives in organizing with a lot of these people, you know? It is very difficult. It's the same as the Syria question that, you know, Nazia was mentioning. It's structurally very similar kind of issue. Yeah, I guess what I would say is, one tack that I like to take in trying to explain Iran is that if we weren't like really working to lift the sanctions, you know, we really were not giving Iranian society the chance to develop as it might have out of that revolution, and that the sanctions and the threat and the pressure on Iran has only Kind of entrenched the forces that they say that they're, you know, against, and that, in fact, actually, if we just took care of the fact that we have no business, you know, being an empire, a lot of the rest of the world would be able to develop in a progressive direction for— on behalf of their people. It's not, you know— I mean, people in Iran were, like, religious, but there were a lot of people who were secularized, westernized. Right. They didn't get activated in, you know, Islam as the ideology by which they wanted to govern their state just out of nowhere. They did it out of like 20, 30 years of, you know, repression, authoritarianism supported by the West, sponsored by the West, enforced secularization upon them, Westernization that did nothing for the society. Iran did not develop. Under the Shah. It was just like these, you know, in an earlier, even more premature early stage of like all of this capital accumulation than even the Gulf states. I mean, the literacy rates, the, you know, kind of the number of women. OK, so here we are. We're supposed to be defending women. There are so many— those missiles, many of them have been designed by Women engineers in Iran—that is sovereignty. That is woman life freedom. This is what I like to tell people: is that the you know the position of women compared to what it was under the Shah, you know, is like night and day. They are leaders of the society, and also you know is just like you know I was there a week in in December before the start of the initial economic. And I was very curious to see. I had heard, since Woman, Life, Freedom, Iran's government had, you know, loosened up on the kind of hijab requirements and so on. And I witnessed that. There was like 50%, you know, wore hijab, 50% didn't. There was no— I just never saw anybody like looking askance or putting pressure. Or you had mixed groups, women who were covering and those who were not.

Gabriel Rockhill: Right.

Adnan Husain: Socializing together, walking down the street. I mean, it was, you know— and what this illustrated to me is that Iran is more— its government is more responsive to the wishes of its people than ours is, OK? Mm-hmm. We want all these things. We get nothing. And they're totally resistant to change, despite the fact that we're in a democracy. Iran realized, well, we want to keep the regime. We have to do something to keep the society happy. Going to be the most important thing. The most important thing is that we survive as a nation and that we try and develop and so on and meet the needs of the people. So it seems to me there's a lot of political education we have to do with our colleagues, our friends on the left, about recognizing what it means when we say things like— you're always saying that this is— imperialism is the principal contradiction. I mean, without sovereignty, these countries cannot develop in any direction other than in kind of, you know, response, in reactive response to the pressure they're under.

Gabriel Rockhill: Let me just ask one final question, because then we're going to open it up in 5 minutes. And it sisters off of that. That is that many also on the left are confused, including on the Marxist left, about how we're supposed to relate to a state that's not a self-declared socialist state, that is a self-declared religious And they see this as somehow a contradiction. And so, how can we center the anti-imperialist struggle while addressing the issue of how religion relates to, or state religion, to the socialist project? I don't know, Nazieh, it seems like you might be able to address this question, given some of your opening comments, but we can also pass it to the gentleman, if you would like.

Adnan Husain: Sure.

Nazia Kazi: I mean, I think it does get back to that question of primary contradictions that Adnan raised that you often bring up, which is, I don't think we've done a good enough job of political education on that front. And you would think that we would have learned from history.

Adnan Husain: Right.

Nazia Kazi: For instance, you would think that the folks that we organize with might have learned those hard lessons from Syria. And that's why it was really astounding to see the very same discourse copy and pasted and regurgitated with Iran. So I think what we have to do, I mean, besides making everyone read what you've written— No, but to really reveal the roots of how leftist thought has been shaped in Western academia and obviously in Western organizing spaces, that stuff is really important. I mean, I don't think your average U.S. leftist knows what the National Endowment for Democracy is. You know, people here probably know that it's a CIA cutout, that it fronts as a human rights organization pushing for democracy, etc. Most people don't know that. You know, most people don't know what that HRANA human rights group that was reporting on the protests in Iran, what, who funds them. You know, I mean, I know we've probably all seen that You know that news clip that was circulating last week that was like on every channel? It was like, short-term pain for long-term gain, right? And you're like, why is every single channel saying the same exact thing? Well, we know why. But also, there are other places where you see that copy-and-paste discourse, like with your earlier question about where— how did so many people that we organize with come to say the very same thing? You can walk and chew gum at the same time. Which in this context meant you can criticize the Iranian government And you can criticize the U.S. empire at the same time. Now, of course, for anyone who's thinking even a little bit critically about this, it just reveals itself to be, you know, kind of like that meme of the guy in the FBI jacket wrote that line and circulated it. You know, 2 things can be true at once. I mean, we have to be really clear about repeating and repeating and repeating the dangers of these kind of counterinsurgent techniques. That circulate on the left and how savvy they are, because I think it's really dangerous that you can be in a big meeting, you know, for Philly BDS or something where you're with like-minded folks in a lot of ways who are grossly unaware of the sort of, you know, material bases of some of these really dangerous ideologies. So I think really the task at hand is to make very clear that imperialism is the primary contradiction.