The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 14, 2025


My Thought on the Israel-Iran Conflict (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_840)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
John Wayne Gacy Ayatollah Khomeini Anwar Sadat Occam
Visiting Iceland & England, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, & Free Palestine! (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_839) A Fan Letter - The Case for Israel and the Power of Inoculated Minds (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_841)

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

138.81

Word count

1,781

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Israel's attack on Iran's nuclear sites, and the removal of some of their top military brass and nuclear scientists, has many people in the world concerned. Is this a good or bad thing? And what role should the United States play?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. Hope that you're doing well.
00:00:04.620 Just returned from a trip from Michigan where I was speaking at three Northwood University events.
00:00:12.060 Wonderful trip.
00:00:13.720 In any case, while I was away, the news came out that Israel had attacked various Iranian nuclear sites
00:00:23.600 and also taken out some of their top military brass and some nuclear scientists who were key figures
00:00:32.160 in the development of a nuclear weapon for Iran.
00:00:37.520 And so I've been going back and forth with some people on social media or in some cases just watching what people were saying.
00:00:44.220 And I thought I would offer some of my own insights to this unfolding reality.
00:00:53.600 Iran, as you know, was taken over by the Islamic regime under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.
00:01:02.760 Prior to that, while of course Iran was hardly a democracy, it was certainly a lot more secular and modern
00:01:09.700 in that if you look, for example, at images of how women dressed and so on,
00:01:14.960 they're dressed very differently from how they've been dressing over the past nearly five decades.
00:01:21.040 And as many of you who are aware of the Iranian reality, many people in Iran have not been happy with the Islamic regime.
00:01:31.600 And so certainly within the context of their own country, many people are desperate to get out of the grip of the Islamic regime. 1.00
00:01:41.040 So that's issue one.
00:01:42.620 Secondly, the Iranian regime has repeatedly said over and over and over again that they have to ultimately,
00:01:52.740 if able to do so, get rid of the great Satan, meaning the United States, death to America, and little Satan, Israel. 0.98
00:02:02.600 And that is a fundamental premise of their outlook on life.
00:02:07.240 The only reason why they haven't done it is because they can't do it.
00:02:11.720 But it's certainly not because they don't have the desire or the willingness to do it if they were able to actually do it.
00:02:18.960 For many, many years, there have been endless number of diplomatic attempts to ensure that Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon.
00:02:28.260 And all of these have failed.
00:02:31.560 And so, as often happens in life, there's a tipping point where you have to act.
00:02:37.640 You're too fat. 0.62
00:02:38.820 You're going to die of a heart attack. 0.98
00:02:40.400 So you decide this is the day where I'm going to start taking care of my blood pressure, of my elevated cholesterol score, whatever it may be.
00:02:49.680 And so Israel decided that it was time to finally act.
00:02:53.180 As you, of course, know, Iran is the state-sponsored, you know, the state-sponsored terrorism comes largely from Iran,
00:03:04.700 whether it be Hezbollah, to some extent Hamas, and so on and so forth.
00:03:09.120 You know, they have all of their proxies in my home country of Lebanon.
00:03:13.980 And so one can simply ask the question, has the Iranian regime over the past nearly 50 years been a force for good or not? 0.88
00:03:25.880 Would it be better if the world had an Iran that was more secular and modern or a world where within the eschatology of the Iranian regime, 0.98
00:03:38.700 they welcome an end-of-times battle?
00:03:43.000 They've said it.
00:03:44.200 It's literally part of their Shia doctrines.
00:03:48.300 And so it doesn't take a profoundly astute student of Iran to understand that this is a regime that most sane people in the world would say
00:04:02.700 is probably the cause, not probably, is the cause of incredible instability.
00:04:07.860 They have been responsible for the death of many Westerners, including many Americans. 0.96
00:04:14.540 And so from that perspective, the fact that Israel decides to now go in and first try to get rid of the nuclear weapons
00:04:24.040 and possibly put pressure on the Iranian regime to be ultimately toppled is maybe a good thing for the world, right?
00:04:34.160 Now, let me address some of the concerns that I've heard from some of my American, quote, friends.
00:04:41.980 And I use that term very loosely.
00:04:44.320 So some libertarians who are very much also isolationists say, here are the Jews who are, again, bringing us into an unnecessary war.
00:04:55.840 Well, first of all, you know, right now the United States is not directly involved in that battle.
00:05:02.680 I mean, you could argue that, of course, the United States gives a lot of funding to Israel.
00:05:07.280 So in that sense, they are involved.
00:05:09.420 But the actual fighting, the actual hitting of those targets doesn't involve directly the United States.
00:05:19.560 Isolationism is fine unless you're dealing with someone who would be perfectly happy to get rid of you if they were able to do so.
00:05:29.020 So the Iranian regime has repeatedly stated for nearly 50 years that it is a fundamental objective of theirs to destroy the United States. 0.98
00:05:40.100 So for most sane people, they would say, hey, if we can get rid of that enemy who either directly or indirectly has been the cause of many threats to us,
00:05:49.920 us meaning the United States, then you would think that that is certainly a good objective to pursue, namely to topple that regime.
00:06:01.120 So the idea that you should be isolationist, well, nobody's asking the United States to go in with boots on the ground to, you know, to fight the Iranians in Tehran, right? 0.93
00:06:12.280 Okay, so that's number one. 0.99
00:06:14.680 Number two, people say, well, why is it that the fucking Jews can have a nuclear weapon but not the Iranians, right? 0.99
00:06:25.700 I mean, exactly. 0.99
00:06:27.600 I mean, why does a chef use a knife and so why can't a serial killer have the knife?
00:06:37.800 That's probably not a good analogy.
00:06:39.180 Let's draw another one.
00:06:40.040 I mean, you know, my eight-year-old son wore a clown suit, so why can't John Wayne Gacy wear a clown suit?
00:06:50.500 I mean, why is it that the eight-year-old can wear a clown suit and not the serial killer of young boys who used to dress in a clown suit?
00:06:59.840 I mean, surely we understand that Israel having nuclear weapons doesn't pose the same threat to the world as Iran having nuclear weapons. 0.63
00:07:13.560 And from Israel's perspective, given the fact that Iran has said that their number one objective is to annihilate the Zionist entity, the cancer, 0.60
00:07:24.980 then it probably is not difficult to understand why they might want to get rid of those nuclear capabilities, right?
00:07:33.900 And then you have other people saying, this is a manifestation of the Zionist project of expansion. 1.00
00:07:40.840 I mean, it is difficult to imagine someone being so idiotic. 1.00
00:07:46.220 And yes, that is anti-Semitic. 1.00
00:07:49.440 Because to say, was this the optimal strategy to take out the Iranian nuclear sites now, that's perfectly fine. 1.00
00:07:57.240 You're debating actual cause.
00:07:58.620 But when you start hallucinating about illusory realities, only because it is related to Israel, the Jewish state,
00:08:08.520 then that tends to suggest that you're maybe, you have dark impulses in your heart, right?
00:08:16.700 Israel gave back the entire Sinai to Egypt on the condition that Egypt signs a peace treaty,
00:08:25.520 which they ended up signing in the Camp David, of course, in 1978 with Anwar Sadat, right?
00:08:31.680 If they were an expansionist Zionist project that's meant to take over the entire Middle East, 0.90
00:08:39.000 would they have given up a region that would have made their country an astoundingly larger country?
00:08:48.040 When they gave up the Golan Heights to Syria, would that have been a measure of expansionism?
00:08:54.420 So, in what world would it make sense for them to be attacking the nuclear facilities all around Iran?
00:09:05.280 And that is just some frivolous war that the Zionists are engaging in because they want to expand their territory. 0.95
00:09:13.480 But between Israel and Iran, there are many other countries.
00:09:17.320 Explain to me geographically.
00:09:19.360 For those of you who know mathematics, you know, the four-coloring, the four-color problem,
00:09:26.140 you know, how to color the map of the world such that no two countries share the same color.
00:09:31.640 How do we get from Israel to Iran as an expansionist, a territorial expansionist project while skipping all the countries in between? 0.78
00:09:40.100 So, what kind of talk is that to think that?
00:09:42.300 Iran cannot have nuclear weapons for the same reasons that felons are not allowed to purchase automatic weapons.
00:09:52.320 Because a law-abiding person is allowed to have a gun.
00:09:56.840 A felon is not allowed to have a gun.
00:09:59.420 Both of these people are human beings.
00:10:01.780 One of them, because of their status as a felon, can't have a gun.
00:10:06.260 So, France can have nuclear weapons.
00:10:10.220 Britain can have nuclear weapons.
00:10:12.900 Israel can have nuclear weapons. 0.69
00:10:15.780 United States can have nuclear weapons.
00:10:18.280 Because we recognize that those countries do not share the same outlook on the world as, say, Iran. 0.94
00:10:26.140 It's not that there is anything dispositional about Iranian people that makes them incapable of having weapons.
00:10:32.840 It's the Iranian regime that has a very clear objective, and that is to destroy great Satan and little Satan, if they had the possibility to do so. 0.99
00:10:45.220 So, do you not think, for all of you libertarian isolationists, if Iran had the capacity to create a dirty nuclear bomb or a ballistic nuclear bomb,
00:10:56.300 would that make Americans feel safer?
00:10:59.840 Would that add to the likelihood of the national security of the United States, or would it hinder it?
00:11:05.900 So, stop saying things like Zionists and the Jews and so on.
00:11:10.480 Just look at it using Occam's razor.
00:11:13.720 Try to rise to the occasion.
00:11:16.160 Okay?
00:11:17.660 If France right now were to take...
00:11:20.060 Had it not been Israel who did what they did, but it was France, 0.99
00:11:23.640 Would you have said the same kind of venom, the French expansionist, colonialist project?
00:11:30.640 No, you would probably say that the French decided that, for whatever reason,
00:11:35.240 it was imminent for them to take out the nuclear capabilities of Iran. 0.75
00:11:41.260 This is exactly what's happening with Israel. 0.97
00:11:43.440 If Israel had the assuredness that, you know, Iran would never cause them any threats,
00:11:51.180 they might have a different perspective on the issue.
00:11:54.720 But the reality is, as I've repeatedly said, this is their central mission in life.
00:12:00.920 By the way, I've interacted with tons of Iranian students, many of whom come here to do, you know, graduate degrees and so on.
00:12:08.280 They will tell me how much they despise the Islamic regime.
00:12:12.020 Very educated people, very sophisticated people with an incredibly rich heritage,
00:12:19.000 with an incredibly rich culture that predates Islam by thousands of years.
00:12:24.060 So, from the perspective of, does the removal of this Iranian regime and their capacity for having nuclear weapons, 0.50
00:12:32.620 does that add to world security, or does it, you know, make the world more dangerous by not granting Iran a nuclear weapon?
00:12:42.380 That's it.
00:12:43.380 Forget about Zionism and the Jews. 1.00
00:12:45.620 That's the key metric.
00:12:48.540 Have a good day, everybody.