All right, could you introduce yourself for us?
Yes, my name is Eli Mori, first name E-L-I, last name M-O-R-E-Y.
Okay, so what are you guys out here protesting today?
So we're out here to say no to war with Iran.
We're just one of dozens of protests that are happening across the country today
in protest against the war with Iran that Trump launched on Saturday morning.
We want to say unequivocally that the American people and polls bear this out,
you know, just from talking to people on the street.
People in the United States do not want this war.
People are against this war.
Something like, you know, according to polls,
75% of people are either fully against the war or unsure whether this is a good thing,
mostly because, you know, they're not keeping up with the news or whatever.
But I think everybody knows that, you know, we need to stop sending all of this money
to the military, to, for these, like, adventurous wars abroad,
and we need to start spending that money on making people's lives better here in Wisconsin
and the United States, generally.
So this is early in this conflict.
What do you think people will know about this war and why it was started?
Yeah, so I'll give you the justifications that Trump has given
and that the, you know, U.S. military has given,
and then I'll give you the real reasons.
So Trump has said that the reasons are, you know, primarily they want to
fear monger about the Iranian nuclear program.
Iran does not have any nuclear weapons.
They've never said that they want to acquire nuclear weapons.
They are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
which the U.S. is not, by the way.
The U.S. has the most military, the most nuclear weapons out of any country in the world.
Iran has always been very clear that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
They have been developing it in order to create energy for their country.
No country has the right to tell another country what they are and aren't allowed to do
in terms of building their energy infrastructure.
So that's the first justification that he's given, which is nuclear weapons.
And, you know, the U.S. and Israel have been saying for 30 years that Iran
is on the cusp of building nuclear weapons.
You can see headlines from the 90s about the U.S. or, you know, Netanyahu or Bill Clinton
or George Bush or whoever saying, you know, Iran is on the cusp of building nuclear weapons.
But the fact is that they have never said that they want to.
So that's one reason.
The other reason is that Trump is giving is that he's worried about human rights in Iran.
And what I would say to that is the leaders of the United States need to take a good,
hard look in the mirror before going halfway around the world in order to try to, you know,
fix human rights.
We have the most prisoners per capita and total out of any country in the world here in the United States.
We have thousands of people in ICE concentration camps.
We have people getting shot and killed, like Alex Predy and Renee Good on the streets
for protesting against ICE.
So, you know, the United States doesn't have the right to lecture any country in the world
about human rights.
But the fact of the matter is, and now it gets to the real reason behind this,
it's not about human rights and it's not about nuclear proliferation.
The real cause of this conflict is that the United States, you know, the Trump administration
think that they have the right to control the energy resources of the Middle East,
that they have the right to control the flow of oil in the Middle East,
and that any country like Iran that exercises any degree of sovereignty
that does anything that the United States doesn't like,
that we have the right to go and overthrow their government.
So that's why we're out here today is because we're all people who believe that's not true.
We don't believe the U.S. has the right to determine who's allowed to be
in power in any government around the world.
We should focus on the problems we have here at home, which we have plenty of,
rather than running around the world risking the lives of Americans,
risking the lives, you know, we've killed, I want to say,
the most disturbing thing that I've seen so far on Saturday morning,
over a hundred school girls were killed in a bomb.
We don't know for sure whether it was an American bomb or an Israeli bomb,
but one of the two which struck a girl's school in Iran,
and it killed over a hundred school girls between the ages of seven and twelve.
Nothing justifies that. I'm a teacher. I think about my students.
I think about how I would feel if a bomb hit my school and killed a hundred,
over a hundred of my students. It's devastating.
It makes me really angry and it gives me the energy to come out here.
We were just out here on Saturday. We're back in the streets today,
and we're going to stay out here until this war is over.
What would you say to those who believe that the regime in Iran is oppressive
and it needs to be changed?
I'll say exactly what I just said,
which is that the United States has plenty of human rights violations
that we're committing here in our own country.
We have over two million people in prison.
The vast majority of them black and brown people from poor communities.
We have people, immigrants, some of them who came here legally
or some of whom who were on temporary protected status
who are now rotting in concentration camps.
Some of them are dying.
Dozens of people have died in ICE detention this year.
We don't have any right to lecture other countries about human rights.
We should deal with our problems here.
Dropping bombs on Iran, killing people in Iran by dropping bombs on them
is not going to bring anybody more human rights.
It's only going to destabilize the country.
If the current government in Iran falls,
it's not going to be replaced by a prosperous democracy.
We've heard those lies before.
We heard those lies with Iraq, with Libya.
Are those countries as Iraq, is Libya a flourishing,
prosperous democracy now? No.
They're worse than they were before US intervention
because US military intervention,
dropping bombs on people, does not bring human rights.
What do you hope to get from protests like this
and protests you may have in the future?
Our hope is that when this war comes to an end as quickly as possible.
We don't want to see any more innocent people die.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you.