Iranian National Dr. Nazee Moinian Gives Perspective

There are some things shared in this interview we bet you never considered. Great chat with a member of the Middle East Institute, Dr. Nazee Moinian. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Good morning everybody. If you are just joining us, where
you been. We've been here for a couple of hours
as we start officially today our twenty fifth year of
the Morning Show with Preston Scott. I am Preston. He
is Jose running the radio program as always Show fifty
five sixty four, and I am delighted to have with

(00:24):
me as a guest doctor Nazi Moynian. She's a political
science and ron A scholar from the University of Saint Andrews,
but she now serves as an Associate fellow at the Middle
East Institute in Washington, DC. Doctor Mornian, Welcome to the program.
How are you today, Good morning?

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Thank you for having me on. Happy twenty fifth year.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I thought it
was important to get your perspective on the events that
have unfolded in the last few weeks in Iran. You
left the country in nineteen seventy nine to give our
listeners some perspective, give us us just a little bit
of snapshot of your family and your reason for leaving.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Sure, I'd be happy to do that. So I left
on December thirteen, nineteen seventy nine. And so when i'm
asked that question, I sometimes say nineteen seventy nine. I
sometimes I add sixteen seventeen more days and make it
nineteen eighty. So it is just a very simple forward story.
We didn't go on the back of a pickup truck

(01:24):
or on top of a horse to cross the mountains
into Turkey and then Europe and then US. We literally
just sat in a plane on a plane with my
mom and my brother left Iran, landed in London, and
then landed in JFK, where my sister lived with her
husband in New York. I was little, so it was
my brother, so everything was very new to us. America

(01:46):
was the land of Disney World and Mickey Mouse and Flintstones,
and you know, we were excited. I can see still
to this day my mother's face which was pained in anguish. Why,
I mean, I can go on.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Well, I'm just curious what was described. Why the pain
and anguish.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, you know, she was a forty year old young
woman with five kids at the time. We were the
last two of my brother and I. She had left
her country behind. We are also Jewish Iranian, so it
was a huge tectonic shift, not only for us, for
the Iranian Jews to leave a country they called home

(02:29):
for about twenty five hundred years and go to another country.
But they had been doing that. They had been emigrating
to Israel after nineteen forty eight, the independence of Israel.
So a lot of Iranian Jews had already left to Israel.
But that had nothing to do with the Islamic Revolution.
That was out of their ownvolution. And they made beautiful
lives in Israel. And there was the ranks of higher

(02:52):
ranks of army, and maybe this was different. This was
an imposed on us because we and I've said the
story before, so I apologies to those who have heard
it already somewhere else. But you know, it was a
very modern, forward looking country. We had four hours of
English studies every day, British English and four hours of

(03:15):
Persian and Arabic was only taught to us in the
context of learning the religion and Oran, which was mandatory
at the time. So I, as a Jew, learned Oran
just as a Muslim did, sitting next to me, and
actually I excelled. And my teachers sometimes would turn around
until the class look at this Jew. She has the

(03:36):
highest grading class. And you guys are all failing, and
that was just, you know, to me, that was just
another top grade in my report card. I didn't care
if it was math or it was Gooran. But I
was very much into learning about different cultures in different languages,
which is why I'm doing what I'm doing now. The
point that I'm trying to make is that we never

(03:56):
saw this revolution coming. My parents didn't see the service coming.
CIA analysts didn't say city's revolution coming. We saw the
writing on the wall. Basically, when our very modern western
eyes skiing in Staden Saint Mary it's in the winter

(04:17):
and going to central Fine summer, neighbors around us would
come to the top of the buildings and rooftops at night,
under the cover of darkness and chance atla Akba, which
at the time it was something we were used to hearing.
We you know, we had been in a Muslim country
for thousands of years and it has a melodic sung

(04:39):
to it. The Five Prayers were part of our culture
and upbringing. This is different. This was a belligerent call
to take up arms, and my father and I basically
looked at each other, and I was sitting next to him,
and he said, it's time for us to leave, and

(05:01):
we didn't have a passport, we didn't have tickets, We
didn't know where to go, what to do. My father
didn't either, But you know, at the time, a little
bit of money greasing someone's palm would have achieved a lot.
And he did that, and he got passports and tickets
and in a few days we left.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Doctor Mornian. The regime that has been in power since
the Revolution of nineteen seventy nine has been responsible for
the deaths of perhaps thousands of Americans, certainly Israeli's weather
directly or through proxies, but mostly its own citizens since
nineteen seventy nine. What do you think is the narrative
missing from Americans understanding of this conflict as it unfolds

(05:44):
right now?

Speaker 2 (05:47):
That's an important question present. Thank you for asking, and
please call me Nasi every time as someone calls me doctor,
I'm ready to grab my stethoscope somewhere. I mean, I
don't have you know. The the gist of this regime
is that it's an ideologically driven regime that aims to

(06:09):
transplant the Western civilization with an Islamic caliphate. There is
no gray area with that doctrine. That's been the doctrine
since the nineteen sixties and the evolution of Ayatol Homani,
the leader of the Islamic Revolution, and the compilation of
his works and his sermons, and later on when he

(06:30):
became the leader of the Islamic Revolution, his public statements.
He was part and parcel against what he thought was
the corrupt infidel West and the teachings of the West.
And he thought Muslim lands were usurped by the Jews
and the Christians, and the Muslims were subjugated and they

(06:53):
lost their way and because of them, because of the
Jews and the Christians and the Western civilization, there needs
to be a reckoning that we need to take these
lands back, push the Americans and Israelis and the Europeans
out of their lands, and be able to announce a
global Islamic caliphate based on morality and justice. So just

(07:14):
by those two last words, we know how corrupt this
regime is. There is no sense of morality. A regime
that considers itself an ally of God, a representative of
the Divinity, is corrupt to the core and kills randomly
and purposely its own citizens and the citizens of other countries.

(07:37):
So doing that in the name of religion just disqualifies
this dictum on every angle. So back to your question,
what don't we know about the Islamic regime. The Islamic
regime is not a monolist. There are Iranians now about
eighty percent of Iranians who are against the regime. They

(08:00):
on it gone according to surveys done over the years,
but recently out of a company or an organization called
Gaman Ga m Aa and out of Netherlands who anonymously
got in touch with forty four thousand Uranias and aster views,
so it has about ten to twelve million followers. Because

(08:23):
it's a country of ninety two million people, there is
no tier to be shed for anyone in the regime
that's taken out by the coalition forces. Preston, I don't
have to tell you. IEDs don't just plant themselves magically
by the roadside. In Afghanistan and Iraq, embassies and military

(08:46):
bases don't just magically blow up. And you know, hamas
Husbilan Hutis are not funded by two ferries. These are
all the works of the Islamic regime which brought jihadism
into four Prior to that, we had the Federian of Islam,
which did you know, terrorists, the terrorist activities Federan Islam

(09:10):
was known to countries that were the targets of Federanisam,
but they were limited in objective. They were limited to
removing a random prime minister or random oil industry in
the executive. But now this is a global movement and
unfortunately we see adherence to that movement in college campuses

(09:31):
around this country. In Europe. It's all over and we
ask ourselves where did this come from? Well, this came
from the nineteen seventy nine Islamic Revolution, which made political
Islam a modus operandi and announced over big bullhorns. It's
objective of pushing back against the American power jews around

(09:55):
the world European countries, which I went through before. So
when I hear some pundits, mostly intellectuals in Western think tanks,
that say, you know, we should have kept Larry Johnny.
He was he was a moderate. He we could have
dealt with him in a rational manner. Yes, you know,

(10:16):
that's that's an okay thing to think, but that's not
okay thing to act on Larry Johnny and his cohorts
or any of these guys that were taken at had
maximilist aims, but they played it so well. They played
good cup, bad cup against the persons that's sitting across
the table with them, so that you will have that

(10:37):
sense that this is a regime you can deal with
and we don't have to take him to a war, which,
by the way, they asked for. We gave them all
kinds of exits, off ramps, opportunities, deals deals. You know.
That's if you are not a jee hardist ideolog ideologue,
he would have said, Okay, this makes sense for my people,
for the Iranian people. This regime is not meant for

(11:01):
the well being of Iranian people. This regime is meant
for the wellbeing of this jihadism. And the expert of
the revolution across the world.

Speaker 1 (11:15):
If I add up all her degrees, she's been on
a college campus just a little longer than than me
joining us doctor Nazi morning from the Middle East Institute,
where she's an associated fellow Nazi. If you were sitting
at a table today with President Trump, maybe even Secretary
of State Mark or Rubio, what would you advise them?

Speaker 2 (11:38):
I would advise them to stay the course. And I'll
tell you why I was thinking about this yesterday when
I was at the gym working out. We are taught
from early years when there's no gain, no pain, no gain,
you have to work towards what you want to be
able to get what you want. And it could be hurtful.
It could be painful physically, emotionally, psychologically, economically, but it's

(12:05):
worth the end goal. This is what we're going through
right now, and I'd like for that to be at
the top of our minds when we're watching the events
the theater of operation in the Gulf evolve, you know,
the kinetic action, the unfortunate escalation of the war. This
is what we had We had to have done years

(12:27):
ago to be able to signal to the Iranian regime
that they cannot act with impunity, they cannot continue to
act impunity. We didn't, and the monster became even a
bigger monster. But you know, President, I think of the
regime as a Russian nesting doll. You take out the
outer layer. It's big, it's powerful, it's imposing, and you

(12:52):
think this is it, and there is another doll inside
and you take that or not, and there's a doll,
another doll inside, and each doll might be more potent,
more lethal than the one before it, But there is
an end to this, and I want us to know
your listeners, my students, that it's worth. It's a noble cause.

(13:14):
It's a noble cause to save the way we live,
to the values behold year, to the way to the
world we want to leave our children to it. Bothers
me when people say, but there is no eminent cause,
There wasn't no eminence for it to us. Why does
it have to be at our front door for us

(13:35):
to take action? And it has been at our front door.
Letsten just try to kill our president twice our secretary
of state? Are other American officials and other dissidents American
dissidents in this world? Uh, it's painful, but I'm sorry.
It's very simple, no pain, no gain.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Let's transition that and talk about the people that your
family left behind. There have to be relatives and friends
that have languished under this leadership for reasons that we
may not ever understand. They could not leave, did not leave.
Tell us about the Iranians. How many what would your
guestimate be? You said eighty percent earlier? Is that really

(14:19):
what we're looking at? Eighty percent of that country is
in support of what we're trying to do.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I don't know if it's at support. It's true that
eighty percent are against the regime, and I just want
to leave it at that. I don't think anyone wants
to see their country bond. Sure, it's a huge psychological
trauma to look at your window and see explosions like
you were looking at fireworks. But you know, magically enough,

(14:48):
the people I talked to in Iran and the videos
that they sent to me when internet is up, they
are cheering this on. They're like, we understand this is
costly to American lives, American treasure to us, but we
want you to finish the job. So these people and
the Iranians in general president are worldly, sophisticated, educated people.

(15:12):
And I'm not talking about people who live in big cities.
They want to be part of the West, they want
to be in America's orbit. They speak fluent English. I mean,
how many times do you walk on the streets of
Tehran or any other country and you start a random
eleven year old boy and he tells me that he

(15:34):
learned English on over internet, and he speaks it beautifully.
He wears jeans, he has a very modern haircut. He
agrees with American values. Usually in Middle East, what has
happened is that the regime is pro Americ, pro West.
They need ammunition, they need the purchase of oil, but
the Arab street is against American values. This is the

(15:56):
reverse in Iran. Iran street is for America and values
and the regime is against. If anything, we have to
embrace their lives because the lives of Iranian are a
mirror to our own lives, and that doesn't happen too
often in Middle East, the only other countries, probably Israel.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
I appreciate your time and your expertise, your experiences and
bringing them to our conversation. And as I mentioned in
the break, I welcome you back anytime. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
Thank you to you joining us.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Doctor Nazi Mornian with the Middle East Institute in DC,
PhD Political Science around Studies from the University of Saint
Andrews in Scotland, master's degrees from Columbia Graduate School of
Arts and Sciences. Yeah, she's been added a bit and

(16:48):
a great person to give us some context to what's
happening in the Middle East. Twenty nine past the hour