This Unwanted War: Interview with Professor Seyed Marandi

A few hours ago, George Galloway interviewed Professor Seyed Marandi, who clearly explains Iran’s position in relation to the unwanted war imposed on it by the “madman in Washington” in deference to the madman of Tel Aviv. Those of us following what is happening in Gaza, then Lebanon, and now Iran have been seeking out voices of reason and dignity. Professor Marandi, whether he likes it or not, is that voice. We need those words like water in the desert right now. He shocks you with his clarity of thought. He smashes every stereotype of Muslims, Iranians and Muslim women to smithereens. He forces anyone who defends the bloody record of the West to confront their double standards.

In all my writings, I look to him to understand what is happening. Many millions are now his students. Iran never wanted this war and has acted within international law. The Iranians behaved with complete civility in the face of the drunken, bankrupt, fascist barbarians of the US and Israeli regimes. He has taken Piers Morgan to task with that beautiful smile of his and never backed down because he should not in the face of this manufactured consent. He has led those in the West who knew they were misled. He has brought clarity. His words are important to hear.

Anyway, here’s an abbreviated transcript. I just need to remember his words.

The world is changing, and the West is becoming much more authoritarian and dangerous very rapidly.

Elon Musk and X and other social media supported the genocide in Gaza. They supported the slaughter. They censored people for criticising what was going on.

I recall numerous tweets of mine that were deleted. One was a picture of a number of Palestinian children who were massacred, and I wrote above it Western values in scare quotes, and they deleted my tweet.

They forced me to delete it, otherwise I would no longer be able to use my account. And that happened many times. So this is how they have been treating the Palestinian people.

Why not allow people to gather money to kidnap and torture me and kill me? It doesn’t surprise me at all. What I think though is that it does not affect me in any way or form. I’m going to continue to do what I have to do, and my family and my loved ones are all very upset, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

Every night, and often during the day, there are millions of people on the streets in Iran, as I’m sure you and many of your viewers know. In Tehran right now, as we speak, in different neighbourhoods, there are huge crowds chanting in support of the revolution, the armed forces, the constitution, the leader, and rejecting the United States. And they have been bombed on multiple occasions.

Western media won’t say this, but I’ve tweeted footage. I was at the Jerusalem Day rally on the last Friday of the month of Ramadan in Tehran. Across the country, they had rallies. It was huge. They fired missiles at the rally, but people didn’t budge. They murdered a woman with their missiles.

No one in the Western media, from the Guardian to Breitbart, cared. And they bombed other rallies in the north of Iran, in the city of Anzali and in the city of Hamadan. But people stood their ground. Young teenage girls, 16-year-olds, they stood their ground. They wouldn’t move.

So how can I behave differently from that 16-year-old girl, that 15-year-old boy, that 75-year-old woman, that 80-year-old man who stands his ground on the streets of Tehran, on the streets of Anzali, on the streets of Hamadan, and elsewhere throughout the country?

When these young kids, who could be sitting at home and doing what teenagers normally do, instead choose to go on the streets from different walks of life, when they are so steadfast and when the bombs strike, they are unfazed. They do not scream. They just continue chanting, saying that we are the nation of martyrdom. We’re the nation of Imam Hussein. We are resolute in our resistance.

How can I do anything but what they do? So I will continue to do what I have to do. But it is something that people should keep in mind, that Elon Musk is allowing his platform for people to gather money to take people hostage and torture them and murder them, but if you complain too much about dead Palestinian kids, you could get into trouble.

In the coming hours, if Trump decides to strike Iran’s critical infrastructure, Iran will force them to pay a price beyond their imagination. Iran is prepared for all-out war. It has not shown its true power yet. It is holding back. And all those family dictatorships in the Persian Gulf, in Qatar, these proxies of the regime in Washington, the Emirates, the Bahraini regime, the Saudi regime, the Kuwaiti regime, all of them, they are complicit in this war.

They assisted the United States in slaughtering Iranians. They’ve been assisting the United States for all these years and all their wars, whether in Yemen or in Iraq. When they invaded Iraq, these countries, these regimes, had funded Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. They gave him hundreds of billions of dollars. But when their masters in Washington told them to turn against Saddam Hussein, they did so immediately.

So these regimes will pay the ultimate price within hours. As soon as Trump starts targeting Iran’s electrical power plants, everything on the other side of the Persian Gulf will be wrecked. And so my advice to people in these countries is to leave tonight, because we don’t know what this mad man in Washington wants to do. He is completely irrational. He is moody. He has mood swings. He says one thing now, and he’ll say something completely different an hour from now.

So we have no idea where he’s going to go, but we’re prepared for the worst, and we’ve already shown him that. The Iranians have already shown him that when the Israeli regime struck Iran’s critical gas infrastructure with the consent of the United States. Trump is lying that he didn’t know. The US did know. If he personally did not know, that just shows how ignorant he is. But when they struck, Iran immediately hit back very hard, and Trump was forced to back off because he knows what this means.

So if they strike Iran’s critical infrastructure, that will be the end of oil and gas in the Persian Gulf. And the same is true for the regime in Baku, which is a close ally of the Israeli regime. Their oil and gas will no longer be exported in the near future. So Trump has to be very careful, because if this happens then it no longer matters if the Strait of Hormuz is open or not. If there is some sort of agreement, there will be no more oil or gas or petrochemicals and no ships to take those non-existent oil and gas and petrochemicals.

And that would lead to a global economic crash that the world has never seen in the last century, far worse than 1929. And the world will know that this is Trump’s doing. And it is all for Zionism. And if anyone asks why Iran is striking back at these regimes, it is because without their support, without giving the US their airspace, without giving the US their territory, without allowing the US to fire missiles from their territory on a daily basis, there would be no war today.

So they are fully complicit and Iran did not start this war and Iran did not start striking infrastructure. Everything that Iran has done till now has been in retaliation. So hopefully the madman in Washington, someone will force him to comprehend that the price that he will pay for this is beyond imagination. But Iran is prepared. Iran will not back down and it is waiting for the 48 hours to finish to see what it has to do.

This is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy and Europe has never been democratic. And what we’re seeing today is basically the end result of this whole project of liberal capitalism. But I don’t think this madness is just linked to Trump. Anyone from the Epstein class is mad. Anyone who conducts themselves in such a manner towards children and does the things that we’ve heard from the Epstein documents, they’re mad.

Anyone who hides it, whether in the mainstream media, whether it’s the presenters or the editors, that madness is very much associated with their behaviour as well. Anyone who is not outraged that the Epstein files are hidden away and the real evidence is not out there for the public to see and that no one of significance is being arrested, there’s a madness about them too. Any presenter in Western media who refrains from saying that what happened in Gaza is a genocide, there’s madness in that too.

So this is not surprising. This is a mad house. The political elites in the West and those affiliated to them, they all belong in this large mad house. But the reality will dawn upon them in the coming hours. If they make the wrong move, Iran is prepared to go all the way. We are not backing down. The United States, the Israeli regime have to back down and they will have to accept Iran’s conditions before this war comes to an end.

Iran’s conditions are not only about Iran, they’re about the region. They’re about Iran’s sovereignty and they’re about the future of threats against Iran. In other words, the Persian Gulf can no longer be a place where these family dictatorships allow it to be used as a foothold to attack Iran or Yemen or Iraq or Syria or Lebanon or anywhere else. And also Iran has to be compensated for everything that has been done to it.

And Iran will do that. The United States will not achieve its goals. This is a dying empire. Things in the United States are not going well at all and they’re going to get a lot worse. But if Trump makes this foolish move, they’re going to get a lot worse a lot faster than they thought it would. And again, I stress to people in the Persian Gulf, no one in Iran wants harm for them, but Iran is forced to retaliate.

And so I stress that people should seriously contemplate leaving Qatar tonight, leaving Oman, the Emirates, the Saudi regime, Kuwait, Bahrain, all these entities tonight, because it is quite possible that there will no longer be any electricity or any other critical infrastructure in the coming hours. So again, I stress that if these regimes were not complicit in this war and they were not complicit in the murder of all these Iranians, we would not have this conflict and you and I would not be having this discussion.

They brought it upon themselves. So we’ll all have to wait to see what the madman in the White House does.

The fact is that the United States needs this territory to wage war and the family dictatorships in Qatar and elsewhere, they provided him that and we have to bring this to an end.

So people should leave. The difference between Iran and the United States and the Israeli regime is that when Iran retaliates, it says so beforehand. When they bombed Iran’s critical gas infrastructure, all those poor workers who were there were facing a catastrophic situation. Missiles were striking the gas installation. Huge fires were erupting and all these poor workers who receive low wages and have kids waiting at home, they could have been burned alive.

But Iran, when it retaliated, said so beforehand. Some people in Iran criticised the armed forces. They said, “Why are you declaring where you’re going to strike the next day?” because they could beef up their air defences and perhaps shoot down missiles and drones. But the Iranians don’t want people to die. And this is exactly what we did during the war with Saddam Hussein as well.

During that time, when he was firing missiles at Iran for years, Iran did not reply. Ultimately, when it did, when it saw that the international community would not intervene to stop him, Iran would always give 24 hours’ time for people to leave. So here we have no option. We have to bring the Trump regime to its knees. And the only way to do so is to devastate the Trump regime and make sure that it can no longer use West Asia as a platform to strengthen its empire, to enforce its tyranny.

And so again, I stress that people should leave now. Perhaps he will not carry out this madness, but if he does, Iran will not wait a moment. Iran will strike back very hard and then perhaps there will be no time for people to leave. My advice would be for them to take their cars and drive towards Iraq or Yemen or to some other far-off place, Jordan, to be more safe and secure.

Look at AJ and in the comment section in Arabic and English and see what the views of Arabs are about these dictatorships. They despise all of them except for those who are on the payroll, because they all know that they’re sellouts. They all know that they’re proxies of the United States.

Every single one of them in different ways. The UAE has a passport-holding population of 1 million and a couple of hundred thousand, a small, very small city in Iran. But more importantly, it has millions of people who are workers who are indentured servants. Do they think that they can control these people when things get tough and they no longer have electricity? The ruling elites will flee the country before anyone else does, if they haven’t already left.

The same is true in Qatar. What can Qatar do with a population of 400,000? They’ve only destroyed Syria and wrecked Iraq and Yemen along with the Emirates. Of course, they’ve destroyed the Horn of Africa. All of them working for the interest.

Iranians have said that they did not fire those missiles and they also say that they did not fire missiles towards Turkey or Oman. And therefore we must conclude that these are false flag operations. But one thing that I wanted to add is that with regards to the Persian Gulf, the Emirates with a passport-holding population of 1 million, if push comes to shove, the resistance in Iraq, a country with 45 to 47 million people in Yemen, if they move into the Arabian Peninsula, who’s going to stop them?

If the resistance in Iraq takes over Kuwait, if Yemen enters Saudi Arabia, if Iran intensifies its attack and if their key infrastructure is destroyed, they will fall immediately. All of these regimes will fall. So the Emirates is in no position to threaten Iran. They’ve already done more than enough harm to the Iranian people and helped the slaughter of all those little children in Minab. So the smart thing for the Emirates to do would be to call their masters in Washington and their masters in Tel Aviv and start licking their boots and begging them not to carry out their threats because these regimes will pay the ultimate price.

I think that at the end of all this, there will have to be an agreement. As I said earlier, there will without a doubt be an agreement which includes all of Iran’s allies in West Asia.

Ultimately, this Israeli regime will not last. The world has woken up. And the fake allies of the Palestinian people, they’ve exposed themselves. But the people in their countries support Palestine. The government in Turkey continues to send transport oil and the Republic of Azerbaijan produces that oil. They have relations. They cooperate. They allow the US and Israeli military to gather intelligence against Iran.

The same is true in Jordan. The same is true in Saudi Arabia. But the people have woken up to the reality. They see their regimes are dishonest and they want something different. And people across the world are waking up. And one reason why I think that Trump and the Trump regime are waging this war is because the Zionists in the United States know that in the future they cannot do this again.

The youth in the United States have turned against the regime. People my age are turning against the regime. Even older people are gradually turning against the regime. So in future they cannot manipulate American society like they do today. They won’t be able to do it in Europe either and they cannot do it in our region.

The regimes that are complicit and have cooperated with the Israeli regime, they will all be swept away in one way or another and the people will be empowered and ultimately it is not going to be of value for Zionist Jews to live under these circumstances.

They can no longer live safely while slaughtering people and no one is going to invest in occupied Palestine anymore because those companies and those businesses could be bombed at any time. I’m optimistic about the future. These are dark days. They may get much darker, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Everyone should mobilise. Everyone should be active wherever they are and be optimistic about the future. No one should live in despair, no matter how difficult things get in the days and weeks ahead.