WTH is Going On with the Uprising in Iran? Behnam Taleblu on Whether This Is the One That Will Finally Topple the Iranian Regime
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2022
⏱️ 46 minutes
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Summary
On September 13th, 22 year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested and subsequently murdered in custody by Iran's so-called morality police. Her abuse at the hands of the Islamic Republic regime sparked the nation’s biggest uprising since the 2009 Green Revolutions. Over a month later, the chants of "Women, life liberty" have continued, but so has the brutal crackdown by the regime, resulting in hundreds of deaths. Iranian society is making clear that it wants an end to the system and the people that have governed Iran since 1979, but is that possible? And would the fall of the regime mean a power vacuum filled by Iranian military leaders? Back home, will Biden's support for democracy prove more “ornamental than instrumental”?
These questions and more with our guest Behnam Ben Taleblu. Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense for Democracies where he focuses on Iranian security and political issues. Prior to FDD, he worked on non-proliferation issues at the Wisconsin Project and has tracked a wide range of Iran-related topics including: nuclear non-proliferation, ballistic missiles, sanctions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Iranian security and internal politics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about? |
| 0:35.0 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:36.4 | I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:37.3 | Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell is Going On? |
| 0:40.4 | Mark, what the hell is going on? |
| 0:42.1 | Well, what the hell is going on is there are the largest protests in Iran since the revolution |
| 0:47.8 | of 1979. |
| 0:48.7 | I think that's fair to say. |
| 0:50.0 | There was a young woman, a 22-year-old woman named Masa Amini, who was arrested by Iran's |
| 0:55.9 | morality police, which is this police force that the regime has that goes around enforcing |
| 1:00.5 | whether your hijab is on properly, whether your clothes are too tight, whether you're showing too much |
| 1:05.8 | hair, or you're showing too much hair through your... |
| 1:07.8 | Too much lipstick, you look too sexy. They've got lots of ideas. Exactly. |
| 1:11.3 | And so they arrested this girl and she died in custody and they tried to pass it off and blame it on |
| 1:16.6 | a heart condition or something like that, but nobody bought it. And women in Iran rose up. |
| 1:21.9 | Not just women. But it started with women. And there's been this uprising happening in Iran that |
| 1:26.7 | wasn't just a blip. It's continued. it's spread throughout the country and people are starting to question whether this could be it, whether this could be the uprising. You know, every time there's an uprising, we hope that there's a chance that this could be the end of the regime, but there's rising hope that this could be a trigger. So I want to actually talk about that. I want to talk about what the end of the regime means |
| 1:46.2 | because I think people don't understand. |
| 1:48.2 | But first, I want to remind everybody, |
| 1:50.4 | Masa Amini was the first person to die, |
... |
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