Transcript from CounterVortex podcast of June 15:

Welcome to the CounterVortex with your ranter Bill Weinberg, ranting at you in the wee hours of June 15, 2025, as always from my apt on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. So we seem to be simultaneously on the very brink of going over the edge into fascism here in the US while the situation in the Middle East is gong over the brink into full-blown war between Israel and Iran—as let us recall, the daily horror in Gaza continues unabated and Israel continues to launch intermittent air-strikes on Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

As we are all now aware, in what has been dubbed “Operation Rising Lion,” Israel launched air-strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites on Friday June 13. The four most significant being the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, associated industrial sites in nearby Isfahan, a second enrichment facility at Fordow which is heavily fortified and built to withstand air-strikes, and the reactor at Khondab. It has only escalated from there, with Iran launching retaliatory missile and drone strikes on Tel Aviv and Israel now targeting Tehran, having struck the Defense Ministry headquarters earlier today.

The US role has been a little hard to read; I believe there is some intentional ambiguity at play here. The US acknowledges it’s helping Israel to intercept incoming missiles. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially said “Israel took unilateral action against Iran. We are not involved in strikes against Iran.” But Trump told multiple reporters the US knew an Israeli attack was coming, warning in one interview that there is “more to come, a lot more,” and in another saying that Iran “should now come to the table to make a deal before it's too late.” So explicitly using the Israeli strikes as a bargaining chip in the US negotiations with Iran on a deal to curtail its nuclear program, negotiations which have now been suspended by Tehran of course. The US pulled diplomatic staff out of Iraq and Kuwait and other countries in region in the days before strikes. So I think it’s pretty clear that “Operation Rising Lion” was green-lighted by the US, and the appearance to the contrary has been contrived.

Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), issued a statement decrying the Israeli strikes, stating: “[N]uclear facilities must never be attacked, regardless of the context or circumstances, as it could harm both people and the environment. Such attacks have serious implications for nuclear safety, security and safeguards, as well as regional and international peace and security.” He emphasized that “any armed attack on and threat against nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes” is a violation of the UN Charter and the Statue of the IAEA.

There might be some ambiguity around the phrase “peaceful purposes”; they are officially for peaceful purposes of course, Iran denies it is seeking a nuclear weapons. However, it should be noted that the IAEA’s Board of Governors adopted a resolution just hours before the air-strikes began, which found that Iran had breached its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by conducting secret activities involving undeclared nuclear materials.

So that’s not good, and I’m as skeptical as the next guy about the “peaceful purposes” line. But this does not mitigate the criminal recklessness—at best—of bombing nuclear strikes, with the serious risk—at least—of releasing radioactive contamination into the environment. Both Iran’s own nuclear agency and the IAEA, which has its own monitoring equipment on hand, have confirmed some contamination within the grounds of the facility at Natanz as a result of the air-strikes, and the worst could be yet to come. I would argue that this recklessness with radioactive releases actually constitutes a step on the ladder of escalation toward actual use of nuclear weapons

And let us recall that Israel itself, now bombing several countries and under investigation by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and the World Court for genocide... already has nuclear weapons, and has since the mid-1960s. It is thought to have an arsenal of some 300 warheads—so rivaling or exceeding the arsenals of the UK, France and China. This is an open secret; it has never been openly acknowledged by Israel but is widely accepted by world monitoring agencies. And Israel is a non-signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And what is really causing me special consternation is that Bibi Netanyahu in his public statement addressed to the Iranian people upon commencement of the bombing, cynically invoked by name, in both English and Parsi, the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement that shook Iran for months from September 2022. I quote:

The time has come for you to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime. This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Israel’s fight is not with you. Our fight is with our common enemy, a murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you. Brave people of Iran, your light will defeat the darkness. I’m with you, the people of Israel are with you.

So deeply, deeply sickening and dystopian.

Of course nothing is less conducive to pro-democracy civil resistance in Iran than to have this cause associated with the foreign power that is bombing the country's territory—and is itself oppressing the Palestinians with biblical justifications, claiming the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” et cetera. There are two clerical-reactionary regimes fighting each other, and if Israel has traditionally been more democratic than Iran (if we mean Israel proper, within the Green Line, and exclude the Occupied Palestinian Territories), Netanyahu has of course been dramatically closing political space in Israel for the past years, and, especially with his reform of the judiciary, attempting to consolidate a dictatorship.

So Netanyahu’s supposed embrace of the civil opposition movement in Iran paradoxically constitutes a profound betrayal of that movement, serving the propaganda of the regime that paints it as fomented by foreign powers and making the situation of dissidents and opposition activists within Iran more precarious. I trust that the Iranian opposition activists can see through this hypocrisy, and oppose both Israel’s bombardment of Iran and the ultra-reactionary and oppressive ayatollah state.

And it is important that we here in the West adopt this position and not ourselves be confused by Netanyahu’s cynical propaganda.

So lest any of you are in danger of taking the tankie bait and rallying around the Iranian regime at this moment, let’s briefly review contemporary political realities in Iran.

For starters, as we have noted before, the current worldwide spike in executions has been driven primarily by three countries: the People’s Republic of China, US ally Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Total executions in Iran last year surpassed 900, marking a record. Iran has executed at least 500 people so far this year, averaging three executions per day, in what Human Rights Watch recently called an “execution spree,” with at least 113 executions reported in May alone.

And what are people being executed for? Among those currently awaiting execution is the popular singer Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo, known as Tataloo, who was convicted of “blasphemy” for “insulting Prophet Muhammad” (yes, these are capital offenses) for his song lyrics!

Also awaiting execution is the Kurdish activist Pakhshan Azizi, who was convicted on completely baseless charges of advocating terrorism for her solidarity work with the Rojava Kurds of Syria.

Ethnic minorities in Iran, especially the Kurds, Baluch, Ahwazi Arabs and Azeris, face systemic exclusion and persecution. The Ahwazi have especially been subject to a kind of ecological warfare, with water diverted from their region in Khuzestan province of the southwest to serve agribusiness in more central areas of the country, leading to the aridification of Khuzestan, which is really now facing dust bowl conditions—and fueling protests there, which have of course been met with repression.

And coincidentally or not, the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising was sparked by the Sept. 16, 2022 death in custody of a young Kurdish woman in Tehran, Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by the Morality Police for wearing her hijab incorrectly. The protests went on for months and spread nationwide, with hundreds killed in the repression unleashed by the authorities.

The authorities also called off patrols by the Morality Police in an attempt to mollify opposition. But in the summer of 2023, with the protest movement then in abeyance, the patrols were resumed, enforcing the mandatory wearing of the hijab. And in fact, the hijab law was toughened, with repeat offenders now subject to five years in prison. For wardrobe violations—quite literally.

The ultra-hardline president Ebrahim Raisi who oversaw the repression had famously been a member of the so-called “Death Committee,” a panel of four special jurists that that oversaw the secretive execution of some 3,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988. They were mostly followers of the Mujahedin Khalq armed resistance movement, who are very cultish and I don’t like, but that’s kind of beside the point.

Following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May 2024, the supposed reformist Masoud Pezeshkian was elected, but we see things have not changed for the better. And in any case, the powers of the president are subordinate to that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who serves for life, was appointed by a special committee of ayatollahs, and has veto power over all legislation.

Within the greater Middle East region, Iran has militarily backed the genocidal Bashar Assad regime in Syria (now happily overthrown) and is aiding ultra-reactionary forces such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. And if you are among the misguided progressives who romanticize these entities, I suggest you see what the international human rights and humanitarian groups have to say about them. Listing a litany of their many crimes against the peoples of Lebanon and Yemen is beyond the scope of this particular rant.

So civil resistance and democratic opposition within Iran are to be supported despite fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is feigning support for these things. Do not be confused.

As in our last podcast on this question back when Israel and Iran were last hurling missiles at each other, last October, I again advocate a neither/nor position that rejects the militaristic and reactionary regimes of both Zionism and political Islam, and looks to a secular order in the Middle East.

That’s my story and I am most emphatically sticking to it.

This has been Bill Weinberg with the CounterVortex.

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And rant on you next time.

Bill Weinberg is a longtime independent journalist and anarchist activist in New York City. He blogs daily at CounterVortex Daily Report and rants weekly on the CounterVortex podcast.