Resistance Media Report 2 w/Laith Marouf of Free Palestine TV

Adnan Husain: Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Salam, hello, peace to you all and welcome to a very special edition of the program, another bonus live stream as we've been doing during the course of the Ramadan war, having a lot of discussions about what's happening in Iran and the larger region. And, you know, we have a wonderful opportunity today to speak with a fantastic guest who is a returning guest, an old friend. I'm always delighted to be able to welcome Leith Marouf to the program. Leith, it's great to see you.

Laith Marouf: Great to see you, Adnan, too, and best wishes to you and your family. It's been a long time. We haven't actually seen each other in person. Inshallah, this summer, if there's no war, I'll spy Canada.

Adnan Husain: We'll see. That would be great. That would be great. Well, you know, I mean, everyone is, I'm sure, familiar with your work, but of course, I do want to highlight And that in addition to being a community media legal activist, geopolitical analyst and commentator, you are also a founder and kind of one of the key people that you work with in your team for an absolutely indispensable resource for resistance media, Free Palestine TV. And, you know, I wondered, you know, if maybe you could just tell people at the outset the best places where they could go to watch. I know you're on YouTube and maybe you've had like some issues with that, but also, you know, on the web and where especially they can support Free Palestine TV.

Laith Marouf: Yeah, so our website is freepalestine.video. And from there, you can find all our social media accounts. We're on YouTube, X, Rumble, Telegram, Substack, Instagram, Upscroll. We were on Patreon.com. Odyssey and TikTok, and we were banned on those, although we were told for a long time that somehow Odyssey is better than even Rumble on terms of censorship. YouTube gave us monetization last month, and it lasted only one month. So they just yanked the monetization away from us. I was shocked actually at the amount of money that came from the views. There was around 750,000 views last month and we made around $2,500. So our budget is around $10,000 a month. So that would have been a big increase and it would have helped us grow. produce more content, hire more people. But it's really not something that we ever thought that we are going to get. We were surprised even that we were given that monetization. Our viewers are very loyal. Most of them donate directly on our website. Free pass of the video where people can choose on the donor box which way they want to pay, what currency they want to pay, how often. They want to donate and, you know, we appreciate people that do monthly donation because it helps us balance our budget and expect our costs for the months. But I think with all the throttling, with all the shadow banning, with all the blackballing of a lot of the media activists that are in the West, we're still reaching a huge market of people because our voice is authentic, because we are on the ground doing field reporting and their threats and showing people the reality and bringing the voices of our population here to the rest of the world in English. So we're very appreciative of our audience and our donors. And I think we've managed to survive for two and a half years without the manipulation of the social medias or the possible incomes from them.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, yeah, alhamdulillah. Well, I just want to encourage, again, everyone to go. The links are in the, at least to the website and X and so forth, and the YouTube channel, even if it is demonetized, you know, go check those out. The links are in the video description. And of course, people know that it's very important. necessary. It's so relevant because you're doing, as you say, the on the ground reporting that we are not getting in other formats. But I have to say, I love some of the other new kind of specials like we worked on in the series with Dr. Jamal Wakim, I mean, wonderful. I love his analysis, your dialogue, and it seems like he also has an underrated sense of humor as well. So that's really very cool. So everyone go check out that content. And while we're doing this sort of housekeeping, I just want to remind you, you can like this stream so that it'll get boosted. you know, on the algorithm and, you know, share it on social media. We're streaming on X as well. You could just retweet it. That's easy enough to do. The last thing I'll just say about fundraising is just I'm running a course this summer online for students in Gaza and they need internet access and data packages. And we're also hiring TAs to help with the on the ground, you know, uh assistance and running discussions and so on in the course it's a continuing fundraiser we'll continue to do it the link is in the chat as well my course that i'll be teaching them uh you know and in fact maybe i haven't talked with laith about this but we might have to have him make a guest appearance if he's free and able which is the course is guerrilla history anti-colonial resistance history theory practice um And so there's a lot of resistance media that could be done and has been done. And who better than this population of students in Gaza to be able to tell us, to be trained in telling their stories, their histories. And I know that is something that was the idea of Free Palestine TV. on the ground reporting, you know, in the West Bank when it was possible to do. So at any rate, do check that out. So Laith, anyway, without further ado, I mean, I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. I know you're on so many channels and, you know, people really want to have you on as a guest because you are always offering this kind of unique perspective and analysis combined with detailed on the ground knowledge from in the region. But I wanted to start with just a kind of high level kind of analysis that it's just been occurring to me more and more how different the tactics of waging war between imperialist and colonial war versus the resistance. And in Gaza, we heard about all of these tunnels. And they were themselves, the very idea of the tunnel was seen as a threat, as a danger, as something very scary. And certainly, we've seen, of course, in other theaters, but now in Lebanon, but especially, you know, Iran, which is a nation state that's been preparing, you know, for U.S. and Israeli war and attack for a very long period of time. They have also, of course, developed this infrastructure underground, you know and so we just keep seeing this repeated pattern i'm wondering if you have thoughts about in this age of anti-colonial resistance and imperial war you know is this the age of the tunnel you know um like how do we think about the importance and significance of this adaptation that resistance has taken

Laith Marouf: Yeah, I mean, we look at the traditional battlefield, military battlefield, and it's three-dimensional. You know, you've got the land, the sea, the air. And what has happened, of course, over the last 100 years is the total domination of this three-dimensional space by the air and naval power of the empire. And this three-dimensional space also includes in itself airwaves when we think about propaganda and or control of communication platforms, social media, what have you, the ether. well this new strategy that has been adopted of course from lessons all the way back to vietnam is that the resistance brought in a new dimension to the battlefield which is subterranean so although it still may look 3d in reality it's a 4d situation And this subterranean battlefield, the empire has no way possible to dominate it. Their air power cannot tell them what's happening under this ground. And even their electronic technology warfare of trying to intercept people speaking to find out what's happening. is prohibited on in this dimension okay so it is i think at once a very successful military strategy in terms of being able to hide from your enemy and appear whenever you wish from under their feet to fight them but also provide this added cyber warfare and communication and warfare immunity. So that's the major things that we can objectively draw out of this. Now, when we look at tactically what's happening in these battles, the United States has these huge bombs, with them, of course, the Zionist colony, and they're bombing locations around civilian areas to try to destroy the tunnels under. But even the biggest bombs they have are unable to destroy these underground cities in resistance bunkers. So we now are seeing that anything below nuclear threshold, and most probably even nuclear attack, wouldn't be able to destroy the cities. missile cities that Iran has under because much of the nuclear usually attack, the explosion goes up and it's not down. So I don't even know how the West is going to try to counter this subterranean warfare strategy that the Axis of Resistance has now perfected. And this is why there is no way in this war beyond the fact that the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian peoples are stubborn enough and have persistence enough to stay for years to resist, and decades, and at this point, a century. The fact is now, militarily, the United States and the Zionist colony and all the empire as a whole is incapable of defeating the axis of resistance.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, that wonderful analysis. I'm so glad you included also the airwaves war as one of the components and dimension, because I think Iran has we already saw it during, you know, the kind of videos from, resistance groups in Gaza, putting out their own battlefield records and so on, and of course making their statements and declarations and circulating those to the public on social media where possible. So we've seen that. And of course, that's something Al-Manar TV did during the course of the Islamic resistance's combat against the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. And so we've seen different stages of You know, trying to also take the battle to the information war and so on. But with Iran's recent like there's it seems like another quantum leap, you know, with the Lego videos, you know, like using the. you know, cultural, you know, the childish cultural, like, you know, kind of products of the West to then turn it to mock, you know, their enemies and also, you know, make deep sort of kind of political points in like two minutes, you know, a two minute funny video and all some of the anime that they've been doing. but i noticed also and i'm wondering what you think about this is that this mocking component and i know it's something that you're you know you you've had your own uh you know uh experiences with that i know uh of like putting out like mocking and demeaning is that you know even iranian officials and spokespeople like you know from the khatmal ambia spokesperson you know has been mocking you're fired trump or you know these things even a martyr ali larijani i thought he had a very kind of acidic, acerbic, kind of cynical, kind of really nice wit that he used in some of his tweets, also to mock like the US. What do you think is the kind of component, both broadly of how they've taken up the level of the cywar, the disinformation, to circumvent kind of the mainstream media blockade through fun kinds of things, but also the mocking component. It seemed to me they were goading, trying to goad the U.S. into, I don't know what, mistakes, et cetera. But, you know, what did you think about all of this?

Laith Marouf: You know, I'm glad that you brought this up. And I think the first thing that we need to understand before we assess Iran's propaganda game right now is look at what has happened already in terms of the propaganda battlefield against the Zionists and the imperialists over the last two and a half years. There was a dedication by the Palestinian, Lebanese, victims of Zionism and imperialism that is unmatched before in terms of self-recruiting into the propaganda war. So this first line of citizen journalists that on the one hand on the battlefield showed us the crimes of the Zionists and the perseverance of the people, And with them, another army of citizen journalists, mainly the Palestinian Arab and Muslim diasporas that retweeted, reshared, re-amplified those voices that in itself defeated the combined Zionist imperialist propaganda machine in all languages and in all formats. Okay, so the first line is the citizen journalists. The second line that we saw in Palestine and Lebanon is the military resistance media. That is unprecedented. The professional videos that came out from the front lines at the risk of life and death the resistance media professionals working with the military media would go out in the front lines, film the activities of the resistance, somehow survive and smuggle themselves back behind enemy lines to the locations where these videos will be edited. And those teams of editors who spent probably the last two and a half years underground, never seeing the sun, managed to produce this content for us, and then somehow also surpass all the surveillance technologies and so forth, and managed to get those videos out on social media. That in itself is another level of security, intelligence, glorious achievements. Okay? And then we got the third line. Look at this. We're not even got into Iranians. We had the third line of professional journalists that are aligned and dedicated their life to support the resistance and the liberation of our people. That includes, of course, journalists in Al Mayadeen, like martyr Fatima Ftouni, and before her the other Al-Mayadeen journalists, and journalists like General Ali Shaib, the most important military conflict journalist in the Arabic world, who also was martyred. And of course, the work of people like Free Palestine TV that are journalists that are on the ground of the battle, providing professional journalistic output. And again, under these crazy conditions of threat of death, threat of jail, and the overwhelming lopsided situation of imperial media dominating the airwaves, is still those journalists achieved the unachievable and humiliated the imperialist professional media. Well, now all of those three level layers of media that we talked about that are resistance that already have won all the propaganda wars against Zionism and imperialism over the last two and a half years, those exist in Iran. But added to it, there's a layer that there is a state and a state apparatus of propaganda and state media that is multimedia, that is professional, that has funding from a state. So, of course, Iran is going to take it to another level. They are gonna build on the achievements of the resistance media in the battlefields where there is no state to back it in Lebanon and in Palestine. And now show us what you can actually do with having a righteous state with resources to put into the media production to even amplify more our citizen journalists, our military media, and our professional liberationist journalists that are out there. So yes, Iran is now taking it to another level. And you can see how the state apparatus, beyond the fact that professional media outlets like Press TV and Hispan TV and Al-Alam and others and others and all the languages that are there coming out of Iran and the hundreds of radios and TVs and newspapers that are backed by the state of Iran. Well, you're seeing the foreign affairs structures of a state like the embassy, embassies of Iran using and utilizing their own social media to amplify And so, yes, right now, the coordinated Iranian military propaganda strategy under all of those restrictions and throttling and what have you is overwhelming. the imperialist media industry. And already that imperialist media industry was overwhelmed by the resistance media coming out from the small battlefields of Palestine and Lebanon, and now look at what's happening. There's no way for the imperialists to regain control of the narrative.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, I mean, I think that's so important to talk about the layered build up. I mean, and also, you know, a lot of our friends, you know, on the left, seem to think that without a state, it's wonderful, you can just, you know, you know, make the world you're free and all this, I mean, but we're seeing the way in which an anti colonial anti-imperialist state, you know, can harness. Even under 47 years of threat, of eight years of war and attack sponsored by its neighbors and the empire against it, and then, you know, maximum pressure sanctions, many attempts at like these color revolution, subversion, you know, despite all of that, a state, you know, that survives even with all of that is still such an incredible resource in amplifying them. you know, the resistance capability. So I think it's a pretty important lesson and point that, you know, it's built upon this, but then it shows us also the value of having an organized state resource. But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about, you know, maybe some general things before we talk a little bit about what's been happening in some of the particular fronts. You know, that There's been a lot of, I think there have been some discussions about trying to see or distinguish some groups in analyzing this war geopolitically, talk about difference in aims and goals strategically that Israel may have had versus the U.S. in starting this war and what they want to see. And I can understand that at some analysis that might make some sense because we've seen the Israelis being the ones involved in taking a lot of the escalatory steps and in doing some of the false flag attacks and so on. But very often, this is seen as some kind of a difference. The U.S. just was stupid and got kind of pulled into this. They misled Trump because he's dumb. So there's this kind of attempt to distinguish. But as we go forward... it seems like that kind of space of difference is really evaporating, both in terms of tactics of imperialist war and also, you know, what the kind of outcome and strategic kind of goals are. So I just wanted to start with that, and then there may be some other components to tease out. But, you know, how do you see this sort of question of the U.S. and Israeli approaches in war and in strategy in this context?

Laith Marouf: Yeah, I mean, when we do war games theory and we try to analyze battles or movements and tactics and strategies of players in the field, it's very, the number one thing that you need to you know, ascertain before you begin your analysis is what is the primary strategic goal of one player? So in the situation of the Zionist colony, their primary strategic goal is permanency. They need the Zionist colony to become permanent. That's their primary strategic goal. And the primary strategic goal of the United States is to, in our region at least, is to remain the primary hegemon.

Adnan Husain: Okay.

Laith Marouf: And on a global scale to remain such also. But even if we don't want to look on a global scale, the United States primary strategic goal is to remain the undisputed hegemon. Okay. So now we understand what's their primary strategic goal, each of these players. We can lay out the tactics they may use to achieve that goal or maintain it. not have to change their strategic goal. And clearly, in both situations, there are only tactical maneuvers available for them to achieve their strategic goals is the subjugation, complete subjugation of the Arabic and Muslim peoples in the region and or our complete eradication. there is no third tactical option in front of them to maintain those strategic goals. Okay, so once you understand that, then you see that these two strategic goals of the Zionist colony and the empire, even if you wanna pretend that they are different players are actually the same, they cannot coexist without each other, then it becomes irrelevant to differentiate between the two players. Because in fact, the Zionist colony cannot exist without the direct military intervention of the empire to sustain it. It cannot fight even the Palestinians by itself. let alone the resistance in Lebanon and or Iran. The Zionist colony is just a floating turd in our region, really. And it's not all this bogus talk about Israel being so powerful and so untouchable and best of everything. It's actually all a delusion. This empire couldn't last one day since 1948 without the direct intervention of the imperial powers behind them. And similarly, right now, it's very clear to anybody that didn't understand the history of the region that the United States presence in Western Asia and North Africa and East Africa and South Asia And the Balkans and the Ukraine cannot be maintained if the United States is not able to maintain the Zionist colony as its main operational hub where it punishes from it any apathy peoples in Asia and Africa and Eastern Europe. Okay, so the fate of the Zionist colony and the fate of the imperial hegemony in our region here are intertwined and they cannot exist without each other. Therefore, there is no difference between the Zionist colony and the empire. Now, if the United States as an empire decided that it can remain one of the hegemons, not the only hegemon in the world. It can stay as a superpower. If it abandons the Zionist colony and continue subjugating people in the rest of Africa, rest of Asia and Latin America, it's clear that China and Russia will not be challenging the United States for hegemony over those regions. If it did abandon the Zionist colony, it can stay as an empire for at least another 100 years. Another century. But as we see, the United States is refusing to change its strategic goal, which is this to be the sole hegemon, to change it to be one of the hegemons, okay? And therefore, it is coupling the fate of the whole empire with the maintenance of this Zionist colony. It is illogical when you do it as, play it out as war games. Okay, theory. But only if you don't include the theological and the racial and the supremacist attitudes of the governing class in the West. If they were not supremacist, to the point of thinking that they are the chosen people and that they have the right to eradicate Palestinians and colonize Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they would have abandoned the Zionist colony a while ago and the maintained subjugation of other peoples. And their economy would have been great. They would have continued to claim that they are at the top of the food chain of humanity. But no, they're willing to burn all of that just to maintain the Zionist colony. And this is where anyone that doesn't understand this history and only plays the, you know, puts the theories that are available to us, like, let's say, war games theory into action without putting those things into consideration will not be able to realize why the hell is the United States going crazy like this.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, that's, I think, so important. I mean, the way I characterize it, and I think I've heard you also saying things that are very complementary and parallel to the kind of analysis I would say from a deep historical perspective, is that it's this kind of supremacist ideology that is part of like the whole Western Christian kind of civilization as a crusader, Christendom, you know, that it has this compulsion that it developed from its deep earlier history of like having a universalist kind of domination and a particular kind of a vision of what that universalist domination should look like, that then, you know, it gets secularized and it's just part of, you know, colonial racism, but it's still the same structure of supremacism. And it is also... kind of reflective of what we see with Jewish supremacy. And it is a clear, I mean, this is like so known and understood by people in the Middle East Islamic world, but yet, you know, Western historians or people in academia or people who have taken up in some ways, maybe a secularist kind of framework of analysis, or I don't want to put it as that, but just not taking into account what you were just talking about, the ideological and cultural components that are also embedded in why it is that the West is such a genocidal kind of force. It's like they're wedded to that because They're wedded to this kind of vision of supremacist exclusion and they can't imagine a world without that, you know, that's the problem for them. Otherwise they could just, you know, go back to, as you're saying, you know, and there was even like some discussions like in the new defense strategy released earlier last year in March about a kind of new Monroe Doctrine, you know, kind of let's refocus on our primary area in the Western Hemisphere. But they can't really accept a world, you know, it seems where other parts of the world could prosper, flourish, potentially challenge the you know, universalist dominance of the West. Yeah, I don't know if you had that thought. Yeah.

Laith Marouf: You know, I think we had a conversation, me and you, maybe 18 years ago, I think, right? Maybe. We were talking about, you know, did it start 600 years ago in 1492 with the fall of Granada and the invasion of the Americas, this psychosis that is in... quote unquote, white minds. And at the time you were referring to the beginnings of the Crusades as actually that. So it's a millennium, millennia, not a, you know, sixth series. And since that day, you know, I've thought this out even more. And now I trace it back 6,000 years ago at the beginnings of the formation of European identity and the formation of the first other in that, you know, minds of Europeans and meaning the proto-Semitic tribes and nations of East and South Mediterranean. And once I traced it in my mind there historically and you could see how the Greeks first invaded looted the alphabet, looted the pantheon of the Canaanites, perverted it, and came back to the Canaanites to tell them, well, you can't worship Baal. You should be worshiping Zeus, who's the same as Baal, really. And the mythology of him is exactly the same, the wife, the daughter, raping the daughter, whatever it is. It's all the same stories. repurposed by the Greeks and perverted and then told to the indigenous people, you don't know your own God and your own mythology. I know it better than you. And then the Romans came after, did the same. with Apollo and so forth. And then eventually the looting of Judaism and the looting of Christianity. And now the attempt to loot Islam to pervert it. And every time in this storyline, it is the Europeans coming to us to tell us that we don't know our own theological heritage. We don't know even our own language, what it means. We are anti-Semites, although we're Semites, right? You know, we don't know what really Christ was preaching or Moses or Muhammad. They tell us what it is. We have to listen to them. And so, It is an essential part of European identity, the looting of theological heritage, cultural heritage of the East and South of the Mediterranean, and then the preaching to those peoples what they think is the true interpretations of these theological stories. Throughout this whole process, there was an attempt to create a monolithic, no, not monolithic, a monotone European culture that didn't exist before. There's Greeks, there's Latins, there's Germanics, there's Slavics, peoples that have different cultures and different languages, and they're trying to mold them into a monoculture. against any logic of geography or culture or language. And that only increased and became more possible with the furnace of the colonial genocidal era in the Americas, where suddenly those European identities can be compressed into one and then juxtaposed against the red man and the black man. Okay, this white man that was just fabricated in North America. And now we're seeing the full circle coming. And so throughout this process of 6,000 years, every time our peoples in the East and South of the Mediterranean have fought it, and manage to defeat it. And this time it's not going to be different. Yes, it's going to be a higher cost, but in the end, we will be able to retain our cultures, our language and control of them and our theological heritage.

Adnan Husain: Yeah, inshallah, you know, I mean, that's very important to have this long duray kind of perspective, and it really helps, I mean, give a sense of confidence, you know, the five, six hundred years of excessive hegemonic dominance of the West, is a kind of departure from the main structure and course of human history it's made some technological and various other kinds of accomplishments but it only happened you know the way it happened it's partly as i've been kind of suggesting on some conversations is you know because they were willing to use a certain kind of brutality and violence colonial racial kind of violence and eradication in such an extreme way at a time where they started to develop some kind of technical advantage when it comes to making war. you know, that it kind of it jumped them into a position that was sort of a false position when you look at some of the material conditions of longer term geography, history, resources and so on. And what we're seeing is going back in some ways, you know, to China being very important, dominant part of the global economy, the West Asian region as so important geostrategically. And, you know, even before it had its oil resources, it was a very wealthy part of the world where urban civilization, you know, began and all those developments you were talking about, you know, the alphabet and, you know, all of these writing. And so, you know, there was all these developments. And there's a reason why it's happened there is because of its, geography its history and the cultures that develop there over such a long period of time you know so you know we may be seeing a a return to a more balanced kind of world in terms of overall development where the natural advantages of societies in the east where the greater population where the better weather where you know the longer growing season like all these things that are part of the geography that is you can't change that you know um So we're returning to those kind of deeper sort of structures that gives people confidence, I think, you know, or should give people confidence that this is a phase that we're in. And maybe it's even towards the end. It doesn't mean that it's not going to be a bloody brutal because that's in fact what we see all these decolonization. In fact, I did want to ask you a little bit about this because We're seeing in the tactics on Iran, as it becomes less and less, very clear that they can't win this war. It leads to increased brutality, just like we saw in Gaza, just like we've seen in Southern Lebanon, is that when the resistance is successful, it leads to more brutality and violence against the civilian population and to try and destroy their infrastructure, to de-industrialize if they can, or at least make it more painful, even as they know that they are losing and they will have to withdraw eventually. So that means we're going to see a lot of that pain. But, you know, I mean, you raised, and maybe this is something I also wanted to ask you about, you raised something about the last, you know, kind of 100 years. And in some ways, commentators have been talking a little bit about, you know, the whole Sykes-Picot colonial arrangement is up for grabs. And I think you've been discussing this. And it seems like what we're facing now is something like either a greater israel project or a decolonized west asia and that's not going to look like uh the last you know 100 years or so or the sykes-picot era it's going to look differently is that some way that you see um you know see this happening and what do you think are the important lessons that come out of that history and that period as we're going forward now in this conflict

Laith Marouf: Yeah, I mean, the easiest way to think about this is that following Sykes-Picot and the purposeful fragmentation of the Levant, for instance, cutting off Iraq from Syria, from Lebanon, from Palestine, from Jordan, and from lands that are now in South Africa, what is now Turkey, that are part of the Levantian cultural basin. This took away from the Arabic people one of the most important cultural hubs of continuity. And as we saw, because the Levant is so important, not only to Arabic history formation and having the first capital of the empire being Damascus or Baghdad II, or having being the place where language ever first started or the birthplaces of the monotheistic religions. is this artificially raised the status of periphery parts of the Arabic world that are hardly populated and have no cultural, although they have some culture, I'm not trying to undermine anybody's culture or have very little cultural significance output into Arabic identity, say Bahrain. Maybe I can name one poet over the last 2000 years in Arabic that came from Bahrain, okay? And so forth. So that is, again, so the unnatural situation of the psychosphecal, even with those limitations, Syria was the first country on planet Earth to lead an armed revolution at the end of World War II and succeed in 1942, before even the Chinese succeeded in liberating Syria. what is to become the People's Republic of China. So that shows you how important it is. And what happened after is all these Arabic revolutions that overthrew the imperialist-appointed royal families. that have nothing to do with the people, that are poppies and vassals. And there was an attempt to overthrow the remaining ones that didn't succeed, meaning Jordan, the Gulf countries, and Morocco. And since that point, the war of the empire has been, and the Zionists, is to destroy any Arabic countries that escaped the rule of the vassal regimes and the empire. And with the fall of Damascus in 2024, in January 2024, sorry, 25, the Zionists were living a euphoric moment. It was for the first time since 1942, every Arabic capital fell back under imperial rule. A hundred years of resistance to colonialism and imperialism in the region just were wiped out as if they never happened. And in this moment of euphoria, The Zionists outwardly started to say things that they've been hiding behind, like the idea of having a greater Israel that was supposed to happen anyways in 1912, 1917. The valiant resistance of people of the Levant destroyed that project and the independence of Syria and then the withdrawal of the French from Lebanon and then the collapse of the King of Jordan. All of those things stopped the greater Israel project between the two world wars. Okay, so this is between and after the World War II. So this is where we are at right now. The Zionists won it. Now they thought that all the Arabic republics fell back into their rule. They can build a greater Israel project. At the same time, what just happened is because there was no more Arabic capitals, under independent governance, because all of them fell back to this imperialist clause, it became easier for the populations in places like Syria, who may have, some of them may have fell to the Wahhabi imperialist propaganda caused the 15 years war on Syria are right now waking up to see that the kingdoms in the gulf are selling them and their daughters on the black market and nothing good is going to come out from this and this is why we're beginning to see revolts happening in Syria even you know

Adnan Husain: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the situation in Syria. And we did also have a couple of comments in the chat, people wanting to know. And this was a topic I definitely wanted to ask you about because, of course, we know what was it, December 2024, when there was the Takfiri, jihadi takeover with the collusion of the usual suspects in the region. taking over and getting rid of one of the kind of governments, and we had a chance to talk about this one last time you were on, so not to review all of that, but then, you know, there was... It looked like they were trying to consolidate some kind of rulership over the country through their pogroms and massacres of other religious kind of communities, and then being recognized really by the Western powers as a legitimate kind of government. wasn't he recently you know al-julani wasn't he recently in germany conducting some kind of business he's been feted at like the munich security conference at this place that place but then now we've been seeing some interesting things happening uh you know with uh uh the passage of this law that just like i don't nobody who's been watching any of what you've been saying, or, you know, alternative media has any delusions, you know, like the fact that they passed some law about executing prisoners. You know, what it is, is obviously a response to the Al-Aqsa flood, right? I mean, it's like, okay, if that was designed around prisoner exchange and all of that, they're trying to just take this elimination approach. That's obviously going to change the dynamic. This has sparked all kinds of protests and movement and even in syria so where who is protesting why are they protesting so much about this what why has this been a trigger for uh within the context maybe of the overall uh ramadan war that's been happening but you know what's what's happening in syria this is um Such an interesting, and I don't think a lot of people have a good information, and I have not seen any real analysis about what's really happening in Syria. That's why one thing that really motivated me, I have to bring on Laith because I need somebody who will clarify what's really going on in Syria.

Laith Marouf: Well, I think just like how we were talking about the collapse of effect of imperialist media because of the successes of the resistance media right now, anyone that was in Syria or in the Sunni Arabic populations in the Arabic world that were somehow fooled by Wahhabi and Gulf media that were claiming, let's say, the Axis of Resistance is just abusing Palestine or that Iran and the US are playing a game. Well, you know, there was now a year and a half without Assad in Syria, and we saw nothing improve. And not only that, the Zionist expanded. Not only that, we saw basically al-Julani kiss the finger and the ring. And even anyone that thought he's some fundamentalist Sunni, we see him, you know, in the brothels and pubs of Europe and the West and playing basketball and what have you. Okay, so all the propaganda just collapsed because there was no opposition to it. There was nobody to blame anymore. You couldn't blame Assad anymore. Okay, so it's all done. And the Zionists are running rampant in Syria, beating up people, killing people, occupying more land. The American ambassador to the Zionist colony, you know, justifying the right to colonize all the Arabic people and killing them all and their children. It is right now there is no successful propaganda that can fool the people and this war, where Iran and Lebanon and Yemen are now on day 38 of bashing the hell out of the Zionist colony and the United States and succeeding all have. motivated people to fully wake up in Syria. And we saw the first demonstrations coming out in Daraa, which is the province right on the border with Jordan, right on the border with the Golan Heights, which also supposedly the first demonstrations against Assad 15 years ago started. So it's very significant, Daraa and the Valley of Huron, All the main tribes in North Jordan and in the Golan Heights, they're all related. This is very significant. And these people carried arms and went to the border of the Golan Heights and started shooting with their personal machine guns. That triggered demonstrations all around the country and a rush. by Al Jolani and his regime to try to ride this wave and manipulate it somehow, partially to divert it to useless demonstrations, partially to gain some more points for Al-Julani, let's say, to squeeze the Europeans for more money, partially to follow the strategy of Erdogan, the sponsor of Al-Julani, who likes to yap a lot against Israel, then does nothing. That's Al-Julani, what he's doing right now with these demonstrations. But no matter what, Al-Julani doesn't control the vast majority of territory in Syria, and there is dormant resistance everywhere in every sect, including the Sunnis. And as we saw just in the last, you know, yesterday or the day before, there was multiple missiles fired from Syria onto Israeli bases in the Golan Heights, coordinated with resistance from Lebanon and fire from Iran and Iraq. So there is right now clear beginnings of an armed uprising in Syria. We don't know how Al-Julani is going to deal with it and or if it's going to be a big resistance. But even if it's just one bullet, being fired from inside the Syrian territory onto the Golan Heights. This will trigger a reaction from the Zionists, which will require them to move big amounts of troops to defend the Golan Heights, which will in turn lift some pressure off Lebanon and off Gaza and off the West Bank. So the littlest possible resistance in Syria can have a very significant impact Return for the whole battle in general. And I don't think the resistance in Syria is going to be small and insignificant. I think we will see in the next few days it's growing and things going out of control.

Adnan Husain: okay really interesting i mean so because i was wondering if some of these groups that have reformed themselves in resistance factions are those soldiers who just melted away uh you know into the hills uh and mountainous kind of regions in the west uh you know part of of of syria you know and and um from the national army you know and whether They're reconstituting. These are the people. I mean, we know it was different groups in the South. They're close to Jolan, to the Golan Heights, et cetera. So, you know, like, what do you think are the prospects for, because it's also, we heard and we remember that after HDS took over, there was repeated massive bombardment by Israel of known people, kind of military hardware stocks of the of the syrian uh army and government to try and you know absolutely wipe out any military potential uh threat um you know in the post uh you know in the hts era and now they're also you know once his usefulness looks like it's question, questionable, you know. Now there's even sort of threats, I wonder what you make of this, like Ben-Gavir saying, you know, like we have to, you know, take out Jolani, you know. Now that they're maybe losing kind of control, you know, they'll kind of frame it as like, oh, we have to fight terrorism there or something. I don't know. Like there's something interesting going on. I think a lot of groups are confused about how to handle this situation. It's unpredictable.

Laith Marouf: Well, the threats of Ben-Gavir against Al-Julani is really more directed towards Turkey because, you know, Israel sees Turkey as the only competitor for them within the imperial structures to who is going to control the Levant. Okay? So this is really what it's about. It's not that Al-Julani is going to fight Israel.

Adnan Husain: um now in terms of the resistance that is right now we're seeing in that 15 months and we were told by a lot of propagandists oh just give him time you know all this he was always an agent and now we're seeing it but it's when the agent is no longer valuable in performing their role then they're expendable right so yes yes so of course if if if uh aljolani loses control of the country

Laith Marouf: They may kill him, the Zionists, because then they'll claim they did something by attacking a terrorist. But obviously, Erdogan will try to do anything he can to maintain a Jordanian regime. Now, having said that, There's multiple kinds of and layers of resistance right now brewing in the country, Syria. So you have the remnants of the Syrian military that, as you mentioned, dissolved. And some of them actually went into Lebanon and went into Iraq with their equipment, with their heavy equipment, including tanks and so forth. So those are... I think the most dormant of the possible resistance. It's not going to be the first thing that we see are tanks, former Syrian military tanks rolling in from Iraq. That's not going to be the first stage. There is also, of course, all the Shia, Alawi, and Druze, and Christian resistance that has been formulated prior to the fall of Assad's government, and since then also. There's, of course, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. that has and had thousands of fighters inside Syria, defending Syria throughout the war, and they will be active somehow. And finally, just so we can understand how dire the situation is for the Wahhabi death squads and al-Julani's regime. You have all these former ISIS and Al-Qaeda and HTS fighters that are Syrian, that have been abandoned financially since the takeover of Damascus. Turkey, Qatar, Saudis and Emiratis have been paying the salaries of mainly the foreign fighters that were given citizenship in Syria after the collapse of the Syrian government because they see them as the most loyal to them. and have been not helping the economic situation in the country and have fired most of the former Syrian fighters within ISIS, Al-Qaeda and others. So as we saw maybe Two months ago, even before the start of the war, there was a Syrian from a village that's close to the Golan Heights that got occupied by the Israelis on their way to Damascus, an area that is called the village. They occupied it, the Israelis, and this former HDS fighter, without any directives without anybody telling him or anybody giving him money just pulled his personal guns and killed israeli soldiers that are passing through the village right so there is right now an uncontrollable situation of poverty of uh people not satisfied with the rule and all of these things that are explosive And even former al-Qaeda and ISIS soldiers could at any moment, without the okay of former leaders, turn their guns on the Zionist presence in the country.

Adnan Husain: Okay, really interesting. Leith, I don't know how much time you have, if you have to go. There are a couple of other questions we could talk about, but it's up to you and the time that you have.

Laith Marouf: I do have another call, so I will have to let you go.

Adnan Husain: I'm sorry. No, no, that's all right. You've been very generous. We will hopefully, inshallah, have you back on sooner than the last time for updates and more on Yemen, Lebanon. iraq etc uh but we had a good historical discussion too and those are so fun so i really thank you so much for taking the time and joining us here and everyone in the stream please uh you know join me in in thanking laith and uh we wish him all the best safety uh inshallah and continued support for the work that he's doing so do check out the links in the description and support free palestine tv the on the ground reporting from the front lines, as well as the extraordinary analysis and other shows. Jazakallah. Thank you so much.

Laith Marouf: Thank you very much, Adnan. And inshallah, we'll see you soon again. I'm here for you and your blog anytime. Okay. Shukran. Okay.

Adnan Husain: Peace, solidarity to you all. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.