Demystifying Iran and the Resistance Axis w/Rania Khalek and Nima Shirazi

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has unleashed a low-grade regional war that is gradually escalating towards what could become an all-out conflict. The central players in this simmering conflict are the members of the informal Resistance Axis, which include Hezbollah in Lebanon, a number of armed Palestinian groups including Hamas, the Syrian and Iranian governments, the Houthis or Ansarallah in Yemen, and Iraq’s armed Popular Mobilization Forces. Numerous strikes against Israeli and US military and commercial targets have already been carried out by these groups across the region, from US military bases in Iraq to Israel-linked commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

As the possibility of a regional conflagration looms, corporate media outlets are turning their attention the Resistance Axis—and often regurgitating stale, Orientalist narratives that have deployed for decades to justify US and Israeli aggression in the region. Central to this media narrative is the presentation of Iran as a kind of puppet master overseeing and coordinating the activities of the Resistance Axis. What this narrative fails to take into account is that it is not Iranian cunning that has created the Resistance Axis, but decades of US and Israeli aggression. Journalists Rania Khalek and Nima Shirazi join The Real News for a conversation on the media narratives spun around the Resistance Axis and Iran, and how such portrayals have primed the US public to support forever wars in West Asia for decades.

Rania Khalek is a Middle East-based journalist for Breakthrough Newswhere she hosts the show Dispatches. Her work has also appeared at The Intercept, Truthout, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Al Jazeera, The Nation, Salon, AlterNet, Vice and more.