Bubble Pop with Rachel Gilmore - June 27, 2025


What's actually happening in Iran, Gaza, and in our mainstream newsrooms？ (With Samira Mohyeddin)


Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

152.63

Word count

6,895

Sentence count

177

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

29

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The other thing, Rachel, that I really want to implore to your listeners and your audience is that change was happening in Iran.
00:00:08.800 So change was happening. 0.63
00:00:10.980 But guess what's happened in the past two days since this little escapade that Israel and America launched?
00:00:18.500 There is now a crackdown on human rights activists within the country.
00:00:23.360 There is now a crackdown on artists, on painters, on people, on dissidents within the country.
00:00:30.660 So the only thing, and I wrote about this in the Globe and Mail 10 days ago, I said the only people who are going to lose are going to be the actual people that they purport to want to save.
00:00:43.500 hello i'm rachel gilmore your least favorite person's least favorite journalist welcome to
00:00:55.280 bubble pop the show where we talk about some of the biggest headlines and juiciest news tidbits
00:01:00.320 so you don't have to doom scroll today we're talking about the united states illegal attack
00:01:05.600 on iran yeah politicians are trying to say that it was legal but international law experts say
00:01:11.480 otherwise. And I'm inclined to listen to them over politicians. On top of all of that, CNN reporting
00:01:17.820 on leaked intelligence suggests that the attack didn't even achieve the goal that politicians are
00:01:23.520 using to justify this illegal act, the destruction of Iran's nuclear sites. Meanwhile, before the
00:01:30.360 United States got involved at Israel's behest, Israel had already lobbed strikes on Iran,
00:01:36.080 killing hundreds of Iranian civilians, and prompting Iran to launch retaliatory strikes
00:01:41.120 that killed 28 people in Israel.
00:01:43.400 Altogether, the two countries fought for about 12 days
00:01:46.820 before a tenuous ceasefire was struck.
00:01:49.380 One Israel immediately violated,
00:01:51.580 but that has otherwise held. 0.59
00:01:53.660 But during those same 12 days,
00:01:55.260 Israel killed at least 870 Palestinians
00:01:58.200 in its ongoing genocide on Gaza.
00:02:00.760 This is the reality that prompted a group of journalists
00:02:04.100 titled Canadian Journalists for Justice in Palestine
00:02:07.220 to speak out this week with a press conference
00:02:09.680 to remind us of our professional and ethical duties.
00:02:12.920 Quote, to report courageously,
00:02:14.720 to challenge power unequivocally
00:02:16.240 and to fiercely protect the integrity of our profession
00:02:18.840 and the safety of our colleagues.
00:02:20.800 The world is watching
00:02:21.660 and history will remember how we respond.
00:02:24.380 Samira Moyedhan, an award-winning Iranian-Canadian journalist,
00:02:27.960 was among those who spoke out this week.
00:02:29.920 It's not a surprise she was there.
00:02:31.780 Samira has been fearlessly reporting on the genocide,
00:02:35.280 putting many folks with far more institutional support to shame.
00:02:39.220 On top of that, she has both the lived and journalistic experience to provide Canadians
00:02:43.480 with essential context. That's why I am so thrilled to welcome Samira on the show today.
00:02:49.340 Samira, welcome to Bubble Pop. Thank you so much, Rachel, for having me.
00:02:53.580 Thank you for being on. I am so excited to have you here. I was actually just listening
00:02:57.260 last night to your interview for The Hatchet and it was incredible. I learned so much about
00:03:01.840 your story and you're a total badass. Did that come out with Arshi? That's out?
00:03:07.220 it did yeah yeah i listened to it last night it was so good now i i wanted to start out um obviously
00:03:15.060 it's been a very big week or a couple weeks and months and years um in the news but i want to
00:03:23.060 start by asking you to kind of help canadians understand the situation that we saw in iran
00:03:29.220 over the last two weeks um because you have a level of expertise and context that you bring
00:03:34.020 to the table that i think is incredibly important right now so what are some of the biggest
00:03:39.940 misconceptions that you have noticed in the coverage of these both american and israeli
00:03:46.820 attacks on iran yeah i think i think uh rachel the biggest um it's not even a misconception it's
00:03:53.780 almost a a promulgation of a lie uh is that is uh iran is the aggressor here um well it's not
00:04:02.260 I think that is the biggest thing. And the other biggest thing is that Iran was a nuclear threat.
00:04:09.860 Rafael Grossi already came out, this is the general director of the International
00:04:14.820 Atomic Energy Agency, and said Iran was years away, years from being able to develop any sort
00:04:22.820 of bomb. And that's if Iran wanted to develop a bomb. There was no indication of that happening.
00:04:29.060 And then the other thing that I think is important to point out is that we don't even know, you know, after the U.S. bombed Fordow, we don't really know at this point what really that bomb did.
00:04:43.420 According to CNN, you know, it didn't destroy the entire area, to which, you know, Trump responded by calling CNN scum when it put out this report.
00:04:56.860 So we don't know.
00:04:58.140 and that the other thing i mean this isn't a big thing and people might not know this but iran
00:05:03.180 is a country that sits on some of the most seismic faults in the world it is so prone to earthquakes
00:05:10.700 and i was watching this video that the wall street journal had made and they were talking
00:05:15.180 to a person named tom krakow who's from a weird outfit called missile defense systems and he was
00:05:21.660 basically explaining this 30 000 pound bomb um this is a non-nuclear bomb that the u.s has never
00:05:29.900 used before it is the largest non-nuclear bomb that you could use it's a 30 000 pound bomb and
00:05:38.460 he he was basically on camera saying what you want to do is penetrate with one bomb so one
00:05:44.540 30 000 pound bomb and then you drop another one to go even further down and then he looks in the
00:05:50.140 camera and he says you basically want to cause an earthquake and i was thinking of this is wild
00:05:57.580 because 12 hours before the u.s dropped this bomb uh fox news wall street journal uh nbc and even
00:06:08.540 scientific american and the cbc's david common were all explaining in a weird sort of reverie
00:06:19.020 and in awe of this bomb. They were all like, this is what it can do and this is what it does.
00:06:24.620 I was like, there is no at all talk of what the environmental and human risks are of exploding
00:06:35.660 such a thing. Iran was basically Nagasaki 2.0 testing ground for the US when it dropped this
00:06:42.860 bomb on Fordow, Natanz, and in Esfahan. So we still don't know yet what the ramifications of it were.
00:06:53.180 But these are the types that this is the rhetoric that is so dangerous that the media just like
00:06:58.380 pushes. And, you know, again, humans are totally just out of the equation when whenever we're
00:07:05.420 seeing this, this, these types of broadcasts. And so it's very troubling. I mean, at least to me,
00:07:12.140 you know absolutely it should be troubling to everyone it's unfortunately it doesn't always
00:07:17.500 seem to be but it should be um yeah i i think that um you know one thing that i found really
00:07:24.700 striking are the assumptions that have been baked into coverage of this like you know you're talking
00:07:30.300 about people discussing the way the bomb works and talking about this bomb with a reverie
00:07:35.820 this was an illegal act even if you know politicians are coming out
00:07:40.540 do we even care what's illegal anymore international law exactly yeah exactly and
00:07:46.560 and it is you know the united states and israel that are attacking international law and setting
00:07:55.220 precedence of you know international law for some countries and not for others and meanwhile canada
00:08:01.300 is supporting these actions while claiming to be a world leader in international law. And I think
00:08:07.160 that it's infuriating. That was so painful listening to Carney. Listening to Carney over
00:08:11.700 the past week has been so painful. And his comment yesterday about, we have a Palestinian state as
00:08:19.300 long as it's Zionist. What? I literally had a question at the end of the interview about this
00:08:25.000 for you because I had to ask you about that. Let's come back to it then. Yeah. Okay. We'll put a pin
00:08:30.180 in it. So you guys got to stick around because we got some good stuff going. But, you know, I think
00:08:34.860 that a question that a lot of folks have here, like, especially when you consider all of the
00:08:40.860 stuff you just laid out, right, is why? I mean, if the if the perpetrated goal was to destroy
00:08:48.260 the nuclear sites, first of all, it failed. And if the perpetrated goal was to stop Iran from having 0.67
00:08:54.060 nuclear weapons, all the experts that I have heard from, and you can let me know if this reflects
00:08:58.920 your understanding as well, because you know way more about this than I do, say that this,
00:09:04.920 if anything, would create more interest in weaponization. And this is, I'm just going to
00:09:10.320 quickly explain this for the listeners. The way that you make a nuclear bomb, I'm not giving you
00:09:16.720 a guide right now, but the steps that a state has to, the knowledge they have to have in order to
00:09:24.600 do it is they have to know how to enrich uranium. Iran knows how to do that, but there are civilian
00:09:29.640 purposes for that. You can use it for nuclear power. You can use it for all kinds of things.
00:09:33.560 This is a technology that other countries are able to use and have that self-determination to
00:09:38.180 have their own energy programs. But once you enrich uranium up to 60%, it kind of speed runs,
00:09:45.920 and it's faster months rather than years to get to 90%, which is the point that you need to hit
00:09:54.320 to be able to put it in a nuclear weapon. 0.59
00:09:58.300 But even if you have, as Iran does, 0.86
00:10:00.640 a stockpile of 60%, 0.98
00:10:02.080 you aren't months away
00:10:04.720 because you have to be able to take that 90%
00:10:06.760 and put it into a warhead.
00:10:08.600 That is called weaponization.
00:10:09.860 It is extremely specialized knowledge 0.89
00:10:12.400 that Iran would have to go out of its way to obtain.
00:10:15.600 And it has shown no indication to want to obtain that.
00:10:17.940 So it is not on the cusp of dropping a bomb on anyone.
00:10:22.240 And I think that that reality and all of the misinformation and the assumptions being made that this was somehow protecting the world from Iran's nuclear program, when if anything, it just exacerbated that risk, which also Israel has, it's widely believed to have nuclear weapons and hasn't committed to the same level of monitoring.
00:10:43.060 and sorry i'm just ranting at this point but but my point is what that clearly isn't the goal to
00:10:49.780 destroy iran's nuclear program they're either just really bad at achieving their goals or
00:10:53.700 that's not the goal so what do you think the usa and israel were actually trying to achieve here
00:10:59.940 i think there were a number of things i think that first and foremost this was a war of distraction
00:11:06.500 distraction from the genocide that israel is conducting in gaza and it did a great job gaza
00:11:12.980 fell way down you know maybe on page 12 of any paper um and so that was completed you know
00:11:22.020 check mark that the other thing is that people a lot of people don't pay attention to is the
00:11:27.940 propaganda embedded within what israel is trying to do in iran which is regime change
00:11:33.940 So this Operation Rising Lion really appeals to a level of nostalgia that Iranians have
00:11:43.540 about what their country was before the 1979 revolution.
00:11:48.340 And so the IDF has an IDF Persian page where I start my mornings every day. It's on Instagram
00:11:55.540 and it really sets out to me what is being promulgated towards Iranians both inside and
00:12:04.020 outside of the country and it's been quite effective they do it in the Persian language
00:12:08.960 they use a mixture of nostalgia misinformation and quick rapid sort of imagery you know that
00:12:17.000 combines the two that is something that really needs to be looked at I look at it all the time
00:12:23.160 and I talk about it as much as I can. And then the other thing, I think, was to really use this bomb
00:12:29.560 to see what happens when you use it. Because this isn't about Iran's nuclear capabilities
00:12:37.400 or developing a bomb. Iran's nuclear energy program began in 1975. Now, under the Shah,
00:12:47.160 this is Mohammed Reza Shah pre-revolution, Iran realized that it needs to provide electricity,
00:12:56.760 nuclear energy, like all of that stuff that a state does and is allowed to do.
00:13:01.240 And in fact, the Prime Minister of Iran at the time in 1975, Prime Minister Hoveda,
00:13:08.920 came and visited the Pickering nuclear energy site here in Ontario.
00:13:15.640 So they had started this program but the revolution stopped it. This is what's interesting,
00:13:23.480 the revolutionaries and the new government that was coming into power, they actually killed the
00:13:29.400 man. They assassinated him, the man who was responsible for taking Iran nuclear. They killed
00:13:38.520 him and what ended up happening is that the war started with Iraq. So you had this eight-year war
00:13:44.280 of attrition and the nuclear plant that in Boucher was bombed by Iraq during this time so there was
00:13:54.520 no development happening and so that it was only after Iran achieved a little bit of stabilization
00:14:01.880 that it started to bring back this um this plan to bring nuclear energy to the country now Israel
00:14:10.040 has gone and killed 14 of Iran's top scientists. This is another thing that nobody talks about.
00:14:18.040 They have assassinated some of Iran's best and brightest who, according to Israel, were doing
00:14:24.520 nefarious things. But even if they were, you have no right to kill 14 scientists.
00:14:32.680 You know what I mean? As we come back to that international law,
00:14:37.240 israel operates like a thug like a mafia um and everything it has done everything it has done i 0.99
00:14:45.960 mean we could go back years but the crippling of international law and this whole international 0.77
00:14:51.560 rules-based order that canada attests to i mean if canada really believes its own reputation
00:15:00.760 it wouldn't be supporting israel in the way that it does but it has shown the canadian government
00:15:07.560 has shown even before carney even during trudeau where he stood up and said i am a zionist as if
00:15:14.280 he was like at an aa meeting um the way canada has behaved has basically shown that it's willing
00:15:23.360 to sacrifice its own reputation in the international community just to allow
00:15:30.560 Israel to run roughshod over international law, which is so disappointing. 0.75
00:15:37.520 Yeah, and one thing that I found really interesting that is part of this too is,
00:15:44.880 what really got me thinking about it was a great piece from our friend of the show,
00:15:49.200 Paris Marks. He questioned why the U.S. should get to decide whether Iran has the ability to use
00:15:57.420 nuclear power, particularly when Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and
00:16:03.440 Israel's signatory in the Middle East. Israel doesn't even acknowledge that it has warheads.
00:16:09.400 Exactly, exactly. So I actually posted on Blue Sky and I asked people like what they want to know
00:16:16.080 about this issue and a question a lot of them had about this that ties really well into what
00:16:21.940 Paris wrote as well is if Iran did have a nuclear weapon, would that actually compromise American
00:16:28.340 or Israeli national security? Because it seems that nuclear weapons can be a really strong
00:16:34.700 deterrent. That was what one user wrote. What do you make of that kind of analysis and what are
00:16:43.060 thoughts on it in general you know uh i in order to sort of answer this question i think i need to
00:16:49.620 put myself in the position of iran's leaders so you have a neighbor pakistan share a border
00:16:57.700 who is a nuclear power has multiple nuclear warheads you have india also having multiple
00:17:06.340 nuclear warheads if i was iran i'd be thinking to myself you know i need to arm up
00:17:11.220 yeah um and i can tell you i mean you asked this earlier iran now if it didn't before it will do
00:17:19.380 that yeah you know it has it has been given every incentive to do it and i wonder was this israel's
00:17:27.220 move was that the point to push iran to the brink of wanting to develop nuclear weapons
00:17:35.940 it because it just doesn't make any sense it is such a a schizophrenic way of conducting foreign
00:17:44.920 policy you know you have this uh but but the thing is it did it it did it even in negotiations
00:17:52.480 with hamas to release the hostages right they were in negotiations and what do they do they
00:17:58.060 murder and assassinate the head of the people they're negotiating with ismail hania this was
00:18:03.680 also in tehran right so then again while iran is at the negotiating table with the us
00:18:11.200 they go ahead and they kill the person that they were negotiating with
00:18:18.960 it just doesn't make sense no it shows that you know and then what does the media do
00:18:25.600 it portrays the people who are being killed as the aggressor we're living in this weird
00:18:33.680 weird I don't know loop spiral what do you want to call it it just doesn't make any sense the only
00:18:41.160 thing the only thing that I see actually the just to come back to your question about motivation 0.78
00:18:46.500 I think that Israel really wants to make Iran into another Syria where it is crippled economically
00:18:56.160 it is crippled militarily so basically Israel is now controlling and was controlling Iran's skies
00:19:03.100 for the past three days where it was just relentlessly bombing Tehran a city of 12 million
00:19:11.660 and it's basically doing what it wants to do what it has been doing in Syria right oh coming in and
00:19:19.500 bombing every once in a while but the Syrian government is like okay if you want you know oh
00:19:24.780 you want to take that water okay go ahead we can't really do anything because you've you know destroyed 0.96
00:19:31.340 all our capabilities to retaliate against you that is really what israel wants in iran 0.86
00:19:38.060 and this whole idea that it's coming to free people i mean
00:19:43.580 yeah not dumb i can't even really i wanted to ask you about that no i wanted to ask you about
00:19:51.900 that specifically like about the whole idea of you know regime change in iran because 0.66
00:19:57.180 i i think that it's a narrative we're seeing a lot in western media um and you know a lot of people
00:20:03.740 sort of manufacturing consent for regime change and i and i don't yeah watching cbc i was watching
00:20:12.140 cbc i i decided to watch newsnet on the day that um trump had called this truce and then
00:20:20.940 israel bombed it like relentlessly uh right later i watched newsnet from 9 a.m to 2 p.m
00:20:30.540 and the word regime change was said between 70 to 80 times i can't remember the number i tweeted out
00:20:36.540 the exact number every single guest and every single host and every single guest that cbc news
00:20:44.300 hat on was either from the middle east institute an extremely right-wing um think tank in the u.s
00:20:53.500 so people like alex vatanka um and then they also had the former editor-in-chief of the jerusalem
00:21:00.860 post oh my god natasha fata asking him about regime change regime change and she kept coming
00:21:07.260 back to it even when the guests were like you know this isn't something that is really a good idea
00:21:12.220 she kept coming back and like yeah but what about regime change some people say now is the time and
00:21:17.420 i was like what is this what what are we doing here how are you benefiting how is journalism a
00:21:25.020 public good right now it's not it was so scary and disgusting to behold absolutely and so my
00:21:35.340 understanding too is that like a lot of iranians don't like the current regime oppose the theocracy
00:21:41.580 but that doesn't mean that they want yeah like like the figure i was told was something like 80
00:21:47.020 but i think that might have just been an off-the-cuff guess um like that kind of thing
00:21:50.540 but does that sound about right it's that it's actually it is 80 okay um and this was a study
00:21:57.580 done in 2018 and the number has probably gone higher by now it's a research group in the
00:22:03.820 university i think it's the university of leaden in amsterdam um and uh it's it's just a fact
00:22:13.900 particularly the young people particularly young people who are like why do we have to live under
00:22:19.980 these geriatric men who are you know it's iran is is a theocratic totalitarian system and i know
00:22:28.940 that right now within the landscape of what we're seeing on the streets and you know it's garnering 0.52
00:22:34.140 a lot of um support from people who are in the pro-palestinian movement but this is a mistake
00:22:42.220 uh it's a mistake from people who don't really understand the government there and the way that
00:22:47.820 it brutalizes its own citizens its own dissidents and so that's something that i you know it's it's
00:22:54.860 It's almost a losing game when you bring that up because people are always saying to you,
00:23:00.380 this isn't the time to criticize Iran.
00:23:03.020 Well, guess what? 0.55
00:23:03.540 It's never a good time.
00:23:04.980 It's never a good time because when you do criticize the government, people see you as
00:23:09.180 a warmonger, right?
00:23:10.700 So it's a very precarious place to be as an Iranian who is both critical of the regime
00:23:19.120 and critical of Israel and America.
00:23:21.440 You know, I always say to people, they're like, people message me, they're like, I don't understand. Why are you critical of Iran? And I say, because I can chew gum and walk at the same time. I have plenty of hatred in my heart. I can spray it out to many different governments, okay? It's not just either this or that. And I think people need to wake up to this reality a little bit.
00:23:47.580 Totally, totally. And I think that a nuance here that I think from the interviews I've done, and again, you know so much more than me, so you can tell me if my understanding of this is correct, is that there can be appetite for a different regime without them wanting an American or Israeli imposed regime change.
00:24:12.500 And right now, there is not really a clear candidate.
00:24:17.200 And this is where I want you to tell me if my understanding is right.
00:24:20.580 My understanding is there isn't really a clear opposition movement candidate that's sort of centralized for people to gather behind.
00:24:27.880 The only options are Reza Shah, who is, you know, like an L.A. Nepo baby at this point, is how he was described to me, and kind of pro-Israel.
00:24:36.780 and then there's um the mek which is kind of like the way it was described to me as like a cult 0.57
00:24:43.160 um they're flying out like steven harper and rudy giuliani and melissa lanceman and judy
00:24:49.660 oh really yeah melissa lanceman took a trip there in 2023 to albania visited the headquarters 0.52
00:24:56.760 with former former foreign affairs minister john baird it was a big queer festival you know
00:25:04.380 Yeah. And the U.S. talks about them like they're the official opposition, basically. But no one in Iran talks about them like that. 0.61
00:25:11.400 john mccain would visit you know this is the mek is a death cult the mek um uh was very effective 0.82
00:25:20.580 in getting themselves off the terror list harper took them off the terror list here after the u.s 0.67
00:25:26.960 took them off the terror list in 2012 and i'm going to tell you something right now that is
00:25:32.060 gonna blow your freaking mind can't wait the person who was the lawyer for the mek in the united
00:25:42.700 states to get them off the terror list was the woman who was just appointed last year to the 0.79
00:25:49.340 supreme court by trump what was her name oh god amy coney barrett jesus christ that's it oh i
00:26:00.380 i can't believe i just left my brain amy coney barrett was the lawyer wow jahideen
00:26:09.340 and so that's wild a weird like weird bedfellows coming together here because
00:26:18.940 the mujahideen in the 1960s and 70s in iran were responsible for killing american
00:26:27.020 generals who were inside iran this is very well known but you know give rudy giuliani 10 000 bucks
00:26:35.500 and he'll fly out to paris or albania and give a speech and say how mariam rajavi these the cult
00:26:43.180 leader of the mek is the best thing and i'll tell you something else this is something that will be
00:26:49.660 exclusive to you there was a meeting held a couple days ago where melissa lansman was in that meeting
00:26:58.460 and i can't tell you who my source was but she said that the best um best opposition right now
00:27:07.660 is the mek wow the best group so there's some things that this is a thing that iranians are
00:27:14.300 scared of because the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein in the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. They
00:27:22.860 took up arms against the people of Iran. And so Iranians remember this very well. 1.00
00:27:31.180 And they also remember that Reza Pahlavi went to, and remember this, this is when people,
00:27:38.540 hundreds of thousands of people were on the streets of Tel Aviv protesting against Netanyahu.
00:27:42.860 Reza Pahlavi took a trip to Israel during that time. Through the invitation of Israel's intelligence,
00:27:54.200 I think her name is Zila something. She is head of their intelligence. She invited him there,
00:28:04.760 and he went to the Wailing Wall, put his hand there, you know, the whole thing.
00:28:08.960 yeah you know and so he went there during this time a time when the people of Israel were saying
00:28:17.260 we don't want Netanyahu so this is something that everybody remembers you know and right now our
00:28:23.000 community is very disparate we are a divided community rightly so you know for many many
00:28:29.420 reasons I don't think and I'll tell you this I don't think that unity is always a good thing
00:28:37.080 you know i have watched people come together the masses when they come together over one thing
00:28:44.180 it isn't always a good thing that happens um it usually leads to fascism so uh i i'm okay with
00:28:53.760 our community being you know griping and and picking at one another because
00:28:59.480 we are in a very dangerous place right now you know uh iranians by and large do not like this
00:29:06.620 government, but they love their country more than they hate this government. And I've been telling
00:29:13.760 people this and they're like, yeah, but this is the time. And I'm like, no, no, no, this isn't the
00:29:17.800 time because two things could happen. You could have a brutal civil war inside the country. And
00:29:25.780 the last thing we want is somebody coming from outside and appointing some sort of puppet
00:29:31.060 government. Exactly. Because that's not going to be a good thing. So the other thing, Rachel,
00:29:37.780 that I really want to implore to your listeners and your audience is that change was happening in
00:29:44.820 Iran. In 2023 they elected probably the biggest reformist president that we have had in the last
00:29:59.700 46 years and after the woman life freedom movement you would be hard-pressed to find women 0.52
00:30:07.700 wearing a veil in the streets of Tehran. And so change was happening incrementally. A lot of our
00:30:18.600 artists had won awards. They were allowed to go and get those awards, come back. Now that might
00:30:24.320 not seem like a big thing to people, but it is a big thing in Iran, a very big thing. And Nagisa
00:30:32.080 Mohammadi, who is the Nobel Peace Prize winner, she was supposed to go back to prison. She was 0.99
00:30:37.780 on medical furlough. She was supposed to go back to prison in December. She has done dozens of 0.85
00:30:43.760 interviews, Vogue Italia, British Vogue, Time Magazine. She spoke to our very own Margaret
00:30:49.380 Atwood for Time Magazine. She has still not been taken back to prison. This is more than eight
00:30:56.660 months after she was supposed to go back. So change was happening. But guess what's happened
00:31:01.620 in the past two days since this little escapade that israel and america launched there is now a
00:31:09.140 crackdown on human rights activists within the country there is now a crackdown on artists on
00:31:16.500 painters on people on dissidents within the country so the only thing and i wrote about this in the
00:31:22.020 globe and mail 10 days ago i said the only people who are going to lose are going to be the actual
00:31:29.860 people that they purport to want to save.
00:31:34.420 So that crackdown has now begun.
00:31:37.980 Hossein Aronaghi, who is a huge voice in Iran's dissident community inside the
00:31:42.580 country, was arrested.
00:31:44.620 He has not been heard from since.
00:31:47.340 And so this is what happens when the outside meddles with the people who are
00:31:53.620 actually trying to effect change on the ground in Iran.
00:31:57.540 They are the ones who suffer.
00:31:59.860 That is exactly why I think your voice is so important right now, because this is the context that every newsroom should have at the forefront of its coverage because it would prevent harm.
00:32:12.480 But that doesn't seem to be the priority, which is why I actually I'm going to pivot a little bit right now, because I I want to have a conversation with you about the media and about the coverage, not just of Iran, but of Gaza.
00:32:24.320 um you you yeah i know you spoke out this week among other canadian journalists to demand that
00:32:33.240 they to seriously oversimplify it stop screwing up coverage of the genocide can i ask you
00:32:42.300 why do you think our peers are so reluctant to do this um you know this is a question that i've
00:32:52.040 been asking myself for years yeah and a lot of people have said to me you know it's getting
00:32:59.660 better Samira and I actually think it's getting worse um and I'll tell you why I say that it's 0.89
00:33:07.540 because there is a strange doubling down on Zionist narrative even when this whole charade 0.65
00:33:20.380 is being blown wide open and we see the way israel has killed journalists the way it has killed
00:33:28.140 journalism itself in many ways and the dismantling of the entire international rules-based system 0.89
00:33:36.060 the killing of united nations workers the blowing up of un buildings you know i always remember and
00:33:44.300 I go back to this. In 2021-2022, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International put out two reports
00:33:53.260 which essentially called Israel an apartheid state. We didn't cover it. I remember thinking
00:34:05.020 we would never do this with any other report. The Uyghurs, China, we covered it. 0.99
00:34:11.820 um we didn't wait for the gavel to drop on the rohingya and say that myanmar is conducting a
00:34:18.860 genocide canada was one of the first countries to come out bob ray actually went and visited those
00:34:25.180 camps we didn't wait for it to work its way through the international court of justice which
00:34:31.740 is the bilge that mark carney is spewing oh you know i i don't want to politicize the term
00:34:38.540 what exactly it's not a political term it's a legal it's a legal term and so i think things
00:34:46.780 are getting worse and we know we launched the canadian journalists for justice in palestine
00:34:53.020 not just out of frustration but out of seeing that our craft and our credibility
00:35:01.260 as journalists as media outlets over the past 20 months has been decimated yeah and we have
00:35:10.860 nobody to blame but ourselves and it goes back to your question about why and I really think it's
00:35:20.300 fear there is such a level of cowardice yeah and careerism and because people know once you're
00:35:31.740 called an anti-semite by honest reporting or by anybody else you know i had the israeli ministry
00:35:40.940 come after me jesus so i mean honestly kudos because that means that what you're doing is
00:35:46.780 impactful and you scared them i wear it as a crown i'm gonna tell you this now if you call yourself
00:35:52.860 a journalist and you've been reporting on gaza and you haven't been called an anti-semite yet
00:35:59.500 you're not doing your job yeah you are not doing your job and so i think there is a real fear
00:36:06.860 and rightly so because you must know this very well rachel if you are um if you are called an
00:36:13.500 antisemite you're done yeah nobody's going to touch you in this uh media industry that we have
00:36:21.340 you're on your own so you need to figure out a way to make money you know we need to figure out a way
00:36:28.060 to uh be employable even if it's just for ourselves and we do everything we shoot we edit
00:36:35.420 we write we produce i mean the things that we are doing on our own as independent journalists
00:36:41.420 would be unheard of 20 years ago yeah but in order to be able to report truthfully on palestine
00:36:49.820 that's what you need to do and you know what we're doing it we're gonna do it
00:36:56.540 and to our journalists to who can't because i'll tell you something and i talk about the cbc a lot
00:37:02.700 because i was there for nearly 10 years both as host and producer there are people inside that
00:37:07.420 building who are doing excellent work yasmin hassan sarah jabbakanji like there are people
00:37:14.860 who are doing stuff on the ground and getting those voices who are on the ground in those stories
00:37:22.220 and getting it published in digital muhammad rashini all of these people are doing excellent
00:37:27.100 work but they're all being targeted by honest reporting as they do it and i'm not privy i'm
00:37:33.420 not privy to what their managing editors are doing to them but if it's any indication of what i went
00:37:38.780 through it's not a good time for people who are trying to report the truth so i give kudos to
00:37:45.260 those journalists um who are still trying to work within the system because sometimes you know when
00:37:51.980 you try to work within the system the system just ends up changing you um and so i applaud them
00:37:59.740 really it's not easy at all what they're trying to do yeah and and you know i think anyone who's
00:38:05.980 had a conversation with these people behind the scenes um not naming names and i haven't spoken
00:38:11.500 to the individuals you listed but um it does take such a toll and some of them are still fighting
00:38:18.380 and you know between you and me we've got cbc ctv and global like we've been in those newsrooms and
00:38:24.620 it's clearly a very institutional systemic issue because you're echoing everything that i have
00:38:30.860 encountered and seen and heard um so i know you have a hard out in about five minutes and i
00:38:37.100 promised that we would get back to carny talking about zionist palestine my god um i barely saw
00:38:45.900 coverage of it first of all despite canada's largest muslim advocacy organization calling for
00:38:51.820 an apology i mean what do you make of this yeah i didn't i didn't see it on cbc i didn't see it on
00:39:00.860 ctv or global i saw it on cnn really yeah it was in the interview yeah yeah that's where i saw it
00:39:10.220 and i think amanpour also put it on her social media okay and so that i just couldn't believe
00:39:17.100 it and you know i have to say this um i don't think mark carney knows much about this issue
00:39:23.980 i really don't think so uh and i don't think how he i don't think he understands how dangerous
00:39:31.420 what he actually said is yeah you know um it's it's sort of like saying to somebody in the south
00:39:37.820 in the 30s and 40s okay you you know you can have this little pocket of you know 40 acres and a meal 0.70
00:39:43.660 but you need to be okay with the kkk all right i'm sorry that's exactly what it means when 0.79
00:39:50.700 you're telling a palestinian who has watched or been the victim of a genocide um that you just
00:39:57.820 can't voice because you think it politicizes it uh that's basically what you're saying to the
00:40:03.900 palestinians um that's not okay and and mark carney really does need to apologize for this
00:40:11.580 it is a breach of any any any sort of morality first and foremost but it's a breach of international
00:40:19.260 law the the palestinians do not have to accept um their own subjugation in order to have a state
00:40:28.220 and listen anybody who understands this knows that the two-state fantasy was just blown out of the
00:40:35.420 water more than a decade ago it's impossible to have a two-state now with more than 700 000
00:40:42.860 squatters uh illegals i call them squatters by the way that's an actress women's they're squatting 0.52
00:40:50.620 and they are enacting i mean we saw a pogrom yesterday brutal um in taipei which is the main
00:40:58.620 palestinian christian neighborhood so this isn't a matter of jewish versus muslim either let's get
00:41:03.980 rid of this whole another myth that people like to promulgate. This is Palestinians under attack 0.99
00:41:12.300 and these homeless Israeli youth that the Jewish National Fund gives money to, to enact these
00:41:22.700 pogroms on a daily basis against Palestinians, which never get reported. That is just left out
00:41:30.940 of the media um the footage is there you know our own um margaret evans of the cbc
00:41:39.100 uh did a great great this is i think eight or nine months ago uh a great um look at these
00:41:47.260 at what goes on in the occupied west bank it didn't get much coverage um i think it should
00:41:53.660 have been really looked at over and over and over again and she came under attack by these very same
00:41:58.860 settlers uh water youth so uh there is work being done but it is so spotty and uh greatly just like
00:42:09.740 when it comes out it just goes you know normally if we had a situation like this every outlet you
00:42:15.820 know cbc is not just the national right yeah um you would get radio on this you would get
00:42:21.660 syndication on this it would go across the country you know everybody would be talking to margaret
00:42:26.140 but that just really didn't happen yeah and that's our failure you know as canadians that's
00:42:33.500 canadian media like it is a much better job and and i had a somebody was very surprised when i
00:42:41.020 said this a while back but i think the when it comes back to your question about why and i was
00:42:45.900 about the cowardice and the fear i think the americans do a much better fearless sort of
00:42:52.540 reporting on gaza and israel's crimes in gaza uh you would never have a host like eamon mohey al-deen
00:43:01.500 um here in canada like you do in in america on msnbc it just wouldn't just wouldn't happen
00:43:08.700 you know it's funny sana said the same thing on this podcast that that canada canadian media has
00:43:14.060 yeah has uniquely disappointed her um like with the how bad it is um samira i've already gone
00:43:20.140 over time i'm so sorry about that um but i just want to thank you i want to thank you so much
00:43:25.260 you know you get a lot of requests and you don't take them all like the one you got from canadaland
00:43:30.540 iconic response by the way um so i very much appreciate you taking the time
00:43:37.900 you're publishing all around uh saying about me and then i'm just gonna go yeah sure i'll come on
00:43:44.380 It's wild. Anyways, your response, your response was iconic. So I am very, very honored that you
00:43:50.280 said yes. Um, thank you so much for taking the time for anyone who was listening. And I kept
00:43:54.960 singing the praises of your work and now they want to go check it out. Where can they keep up with
00:43:59.440 you? Yeah. I mean, you can find me on patreon.com slash on the line media. You can also go to the
00:44:06.180 YouTube page where I do a lot of intimate conversations with voices you won't hear, um,
00:44:12.360 elsewhere and uh that's also at on the line media so you can find me there great and you're also
00:44:17.960 very active on instagram i believe yeah and all socials and everything so yeah at s moyedin awesome
00:44:24.200 okay it's amira thank you so much for your time thanks take care
00:44:33.640 thank you for listening to this episode of bubble pop i'm rachel gilmore your least favorite
00:44:38.200 person's least favorite journalist if you enjoyed this episode consider subscribing on youtube
00:44:43.160 patreon sub stack or wherever you like to listen you can also find me on tick tock instagram twitch
00:44:49.160 and blue sky i'd like to say a special thank you to hans vivian wenzel for making the incredibly
00:44:53.880 groovy music for bubble pop you can find his music on spotify under the artist's name hans
00:44:58.760 that's a lowercase h with an exclamation mark thanks again for spending this time with me i
00:45:04.280 could not do this work without your support and I am so grateful for it. So thank you and I'll see
00:45:09.940 you next time.