Benjamin Radd
speaker
1,820 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2025
last heard 4 Mar
Benjamin Radd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We were all concerned with the spread of communism.
Nobody was paying attention to the Islamist threat.
Nobody was paying attention to really any other kind of threat at all.
It was very much the unfettered, uncontrolled, unsupervised CIA running around with no oversight and with very deep pockets.
And that changed at some point.
That changed in 2001 when Al-Qaeda successfully carried out the 9-11 attacks in New York.
And all of a sudden, the threat that we had all been ignoring was on our doorstep and had grown so wealthy and had spread so vast across the world that Islamic extremism became almost overnight a household term.
Now, there's still a difference between Al-Qaeda Islamic Shia extremism and what is practiced in the Shia faith and with the outcomes that the Shia militants are trying to pursue in support of Iran.
But it's hard to differentiate that in the United States where we don't understand the difference between Sunni and Shia.
Annie, what do you think this war is really about?
It gets complicated because Khomeini, with an O,
was the original leader of the revolution and was later replaced by Khamenei in A. Okay, there's two.
It's a fascinating period.
In 1951, so basically under the Iranian constitution, the Shah, the king, has the authority to select the prime minister with the consent of parliament.
The consent part is really nominal.
And so Mossadegh, who is a senior member of parliament and also a member of the previous royal dynasty, is distantly related.
This elderly statesman who the Shah, out of sort of courtesy after having gone through a successive list of prime ministers, says, okay, I'm going to appoint him prime minister.
So
He wasn't democratically elected.
He was elected to parliament.
Showing 61–80 of 1,820 · page 4 of 91
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