As part of its ongoing efforts to document grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law resulting from the recent military aggression by the United States and Israel against Iran, and to contribute to international human rights discourse through engagement with leading international experts, the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (ODVV) conducted an exclusive interview on 13 July 2026 with Dr. Kevin J. Barrett.
Dr. Barrett is an American scholar of Islamic Studies, author, journalist, and political commentator. He holds a Ph.D. in African Languages and Literature (Arabic and Islamic Studies) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and has written extensively on international politics, media narratives, terrorism, and contemporary conflicts.
In this interview, Dr. Barrett discusses the historical evolution of the so-called “War on Terror,” examines the relationship between military intervention, media narratives, and psychological operations, and offers his perspective on the role of international law, public opinion, and independent scholarship in responding to contemporary armed conflicts. He also addresses the humanitarian consequences of military operations against Iran, the role of Western media in shaping public perceptions, and broader questions concerning accountability within the international legal order.
The views expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the Organization for Defending Victims of Violence.
The full transcript of this interview follows:
1. For more than two decades, the “War on Terror” has been used to justify military interventions, sanctions, assassinations, and attacks on sovereign states. In your view, does the recent U.S.–Israeli military action against Iran represent a continuation of this doctrine under a different narrative? What do you believe are the broader political objectives behind this pattern?
The so-called “War on Terror” is the public face of a plan that Israeli leaders sold to the United States almost 50 years ago. In July of 1979, six months after the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Netanyahu convened the first Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT). Participants included US Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the top US politician representing the military-industrial complex, as well as the West’s most influential Zionist Orientalist, Bernard Lewis of MI6. The purpose of the conference was to create a bogeyman called “terrorism” and brandish it as the West’s ultimate civilizational enemy. Netanyahu and Lewis, the Zionists, wanted to convince the Western public that “terrorism” and “Islam” were synonymous. That would allow them to frame Israel’s enemies as the enemies of the entire West.
The Zionist plan to create the “War on Terror” took on more importance for the US military-industrial complex when the Cold War ended in 1989. They needed a purported threat to replace Communism, and the Zionists convinced them that “terrorism” would be the perfect enemy. It would frighten the public into accepting bigger military budgets, and it was flexible enough that any potential adversary could be labeled and targeted.
On September 11, 2001, the Zionists and their American accomplices blew up the World Trade Center with explosives after using remote-control to fly planes into the buildings, creating a media spectacle for the public relations launch of the so-called “War on Terror.” Shortly after that “hideous fraud,” as Thierry Meyssan called it, General Wesley Clark was shown “a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.”
That plan to completely remake the Middle East on behalf of Israeli expansionism had been outlined in Netanyahu’s “Clean Break” document, published in 1996. The false flag attack of 9/11/2001 provided the pretext for Israel to hijack the American military for use against regional enemies, the most important of which—and the last on the “seven countries in five years” list—was the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But it took them twenty years, not just five years, to launch their big war on Iran. The resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere slowed them down. And pushback from the realist faction within America’s strategic complex, including such people as Zbigniew Brzezinski, also complicated and delayed the neocon-Zionist plan to attack Iran. As former president Obama recently revealed, every US president since Bush has come under heavy Israeli pressure to attack Iran, and none of them until Trump were stupid enough to do it.
The key to understanding this whole story is the way US and Israeli interests converge and diverge. The architects of the “War on Terror,” Netanyahu and his Likud and neocon allies, have been trying to hijack US policy on behalf of genocidal Israeli expansionism and regional hegemony. To that end, they grossly exaggerate the alleged convergence of US and Israeli interests, selling the Zionist entity as a crucial regional ally allowing the US to dominate the energy-rich West Asia region, with the “War on Terror” as an ideal pretext. US-Israeli control of West Asia, the Zionists claim, will give the Americans leverage over China, the US empire’s biggest competitor, by way of control over China’s West Asian energy supplies.
But by dragging the US into a losing war on Iran, the Zionist neocons have ironically greatly damaged US power and prestige in West Asia. The war provided Iran with a legitimate reason to exercise its “Hormuz option” and destroy and degrade regional US military bases.
The Zionist neocons may try to revive the power of the “War on Terror” trope by staging a big false flag terror attack on the US and blaming Iran. Their objective is to degrade Iran as much as possible, and they may imagine that a false flag would provide the pretext for much bigger attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. But since they cannot defeat Iran militarily, and since Iran can match any level of infrastructure destruction by targeting Gulf Allies as well as Israel, such a plan would be of no strategic value, and in the long run would prove counterproductive to US and even Zionist interests.
So the “War on Terror”—an Israeli scam designed to hoodwink the US into fighting the Zionists’ West Asian enemies—may have run its course. On its tombstone, this epitaph: HERE LIES THE “WAR ON TERROR.” BORN IN OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, 1979. DIED IN THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ, 2026.
2. During the recent attacks, numerous civilian sites—including residential neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools—were reportedly affected, resulting in significant civilian casualties. Yet these incidents received relatively limited attention in much of the Western mainstream media.
How do you explain this disparity in media coverage, and what impact does it have on public understanding of war and accountability?
All cultures are ethnocentric, to varying degrees. Human beings have a natural tendency to care more about their own people’s suffering than about the suffering of others. But the US and the West, whose ruling elites are disproportionately Jewish-Zionist, have plumbed record-setting depths of hypocrisy in professing universal humanitarian ideals while committing the most extreme, horrific crimes against civilian populations. And Western media, which are even more disproportionately Jewish-Zionist than other elite sectors, have been deeply complicit in these crimes and coverups.
I emphasize the Jewish-Zionist factor because Jews have been, for almost 2500 years, the most ethnocentric culture on Earth. French historian Laurent Guyénot’s From Yahweh to Zion, which I translated into English, details the history of this rabid Jewish ethnocentrism with its hatred and dehumanization of non-Jews, the despised goyim. Even today, when the majority of Western Jews are superficially secular and liberal, an undercurrent of seething fear and hatred of the goyim leads the Jews who dominate decision-making positions in Western media, as explained by Jewish ex-New York Times journalist Philip Weiss, to grossly skew their coverage in favor of the genocidal Zionist entity.
To their credit, many Jewish American journalists like Weiss, and non-Jewish ones like his former New York Times colleague Chris Hedges, insist on fair-minded application of universalist humanitarian ideals. But like Weiss and Hedges, they are barred from working in mainstream media. To practice mainstream journalism, one has to ignore or downplay the deaths of “enemies of Israel” like Iranian, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Yemeni people, and to wildly exaggerate the suffering of Israelis and Jews in general.
In addition to the Jewish ethnocentrism factor, there is also the American one. Most Americans are notoriously uninformed and uninterested in the world their nation is trying to dominate. So although more and more younger Americans are using social media to discover the suffering of civilians murdered by US tax dollars in West Asia, the majority, especially older people, are easy prey for the mainstream media propagandists.
And we shouldn’t forget that it isn’t just the Jewish-Zionist media owners and operators, but also the US deep state, that’s behind the media’s downplaying of the crimes of the US empire, and the suffering of its victims. Since the creation of the CIA’s media-control division, Operation Mockingbird, in the 1950s, the military and intelligence wing of the US empire has heavily infiltrated and steered mainstream media coverage, as well as Hollywood filmmaking, in an effort to make it churn out imperial propaganda. Ignoring the cries of the empire’s victims is the duty of imperial propagandists, and people like Hedges and Weiss who refuse that duty quickly find themselves expelled from the mainstream media consent factory.
3. Throughout your work, you have written extensively about propaganda, manufactured consent, and the role of information warfare. To what extent do you believe modern military conflicts are shaped as much by media narratives and psychological operations as by military force itself? How was this reflected in the recent conflict involving Iran?
It isn’t just modern military conflicts that are shaped by narratives and psyops. At least since the time of Sun Tzu 2500 years ago, it has been recognized that the objective of war is to end the fighting on one’s own terms, not the enemy’s. So convincing the enemy to stop fighting, and accept one’s terms, is the goal. That means that war isn’t just “politics by other means” but communication by other means. Dropping an actual bomb is one kind of communication. Tweeting a threat to drop a bomb is another. And repeatedly tweeting the same old empty threat to “drop the biggest most beautiful bombs, bombs like nobody has ever seen before” is a profoundly stupid way of communicating, but that doesn’t stop Trump.
As I mentioned earlier, the hugely mendacious psyop called the “War on Terror” has just about run its course. It was based on selling gargantuan, preposterous lies:
*That “terrorists” are non-state insurgents. (Actually states commit 99% of all terrorism, which is defined as “deliberately targeting civilians to induce fear.”)
*That Israel’s enemies are “terrorists.” (Actually Israel, a euphemism for the slow-motion genocidal annihilation of the civilian population of Palestine, is an inherently terrorist project, and its enemies are the ones fighting against terrorism.)
*That Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately terrorists. (Actually they are disproportionately the victims of Zionist terrorism.)
*That false flag deceptions like 9/11, 7/7, Bali, Madrid, Charlie Hebdo, and so on are the work of radical Muslims, when in fact they are orchestrated by Zionist-infiltrated Western intelligence agencies.
Unfortunately the “War on Terror” psyop succeeded to some extent in demonizing Islam and delegitimizing self-defense by Muslims, not only in the eyes of non-Muslims, but even some Muslims as well. But this era of maximum deception and maximum Islamophobia is coming to an end, thanks to Iran’s victory in the current war. It is simply impossible even for habitual, practiced liars, to cast Iran as the “terrorist” aggressor, when the facts about who aggressed against whom speak so plainly for themselves.
Western populations, and much of their leadership, oppose the war on Iran and would rather capitulate than escalate. Iranians, by contrast, are united in outrage and determined to fight until victory. Clearly Iran is winning a lopsided victory in the information war, despite being outspent by a factor of hundreds or thousands to one.
4. Many observers argue that repeated military actions carried out without meaningful international accountability are gradually weakening confidence in international law and the United Nations system. What practical steps do you believe independent scholars, journalists, and civil society organizations can take to strengthen public awareness and promote genuine accountability for violations of international law?
The first task for scholars, journalists, and civil society organizations is to understand that international law is under deliberate, concerted attack. The Jewish exceptionalist neocons, and the American exceptionalists allied to them, are avowed enemies of the very notion of universal moral law. They hold themselves above the law, and want to create a “rules-based order” in which they rule and give the orders.
These exceptionalists draw on the thought of people like Machiavelli and especially Thomas Hobbes, and more recently Carl Schmitt. Hobbes taught them that the only possible “rules-based order” is a tyranny with a single sovereign who makes the rules but holds himself above them. They want to be that sovereign.
Machiavelli taught them that it’s okay to lie, cheat, steal, and murder in order to be a sovereign prince. In other words, he taught them to hold the universal moral law in contempt. (Whether Machiavelli really meant that is an open question, but this is the lesson that ethnocentric Jews and neocons like Michael Ledeen drew from him.)
Carl Schmitt pioneered the notion of using the “state of exception”—declaring an emergency—as an excuse to overthrow the rule of universal moral law. Enemies of a system of universal, just laws, including much of the US and Zionist leadership, have been powerfully influenced by Schmitt.
These self-serving ideas are being grasped at by the flailing, panicking, dying Zio-American empire as excuses to try to use nefarious means to postpone its demise. Zionists, in particular, recognize that a world under international law would have no place for “Israel,” which is just a euphemism for the genocide of Palestine. So when Trump and Netanyahu flout their own solemn agreements, ignore their promises, and openly boast that they care nothing for international law, we are not witnessing mere individual pathology, but a systematic attack on the very notion of the rule of law and universal morality. That attack on logos as well as nomos (المعروف) is an ugly spasm unleashed by the death throes of a moribund empire. It is not something we can argue with, because it is fundamentally irrational. Its proponents—the mad helmsmen of a dying empire—will need to be decisively defeated. In the wake of their defeat, the new multipolar world will be faced with the task of building an impartial system capable of enforcing international law in service to a universal moral order.
