Uncategorized
Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential
Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25, 144 pages
As we scroll through the final portion of human history before it gets permanently revised by AI, Ben Lerner has written a lyrical novel of loss.
This three-part novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and the Pulitzer finalist The Topeka School, presents loss in many forms: loss of recognition which leads to a confusion of identities; loss of memory which prompts whole new stories; or just, in a banal but usefully metaphorical way, the loss of the unnamed protagonist’s iPhone when he drops it in the sink near the start of the first section, “Hotel Providence.” This tech misadventure means that he will have to use an old landline to dial up his daughter before her bedtime and to rely on his frail human memory to remember the final interview he has with Thomas, his mentor and father figure.
As in his previous autofictional trilogy, Lerner uses a narrator — a writer who, like Lerner, went to Brown University — who hovers between being him and not. A writing assignment has brought him back to his alma mater, but the visit to his professor is more than just a work project. The initial piece and, as it turns out, later pieces about the trip, will be labors of love — with all the agita that accompanies those. The absent digital transcript of his interview at Brown seems to be what gives this book its name as well as what marks him as brave or foolhardy in the eyes of his peers at a later colloquium about Thomas. But the existence of the book as a “transcription” also avows the possibilities of human creativity in the face of transmission losses.
Transcription begins on a train journey and, just to prove that it is about moving away from the here and now, its first words also imply the start of a dream state: “I was falling asleep on a train.” Through the narrator, Lerner tells us as clearly as he can, that he is writing (script) in transit — and investigating how it is to rewrite from a place that is not your own. As the narrator along with Max — Thomas’ son who becomes a second narrator — recount their travels into adulthood, the book’s journey into the unknown is haunted by Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be.” Caught between fatherhood and filiation, they navigate a world that seems equal parts Escher and Kafka.
The book comprises three sections, each named for a hotel — a place to stay while dislocated: “Hotel Providence,” “[Hotel Villa Real],” and “Hotel Arbez.” The first is set punningly in Providence, the second is set in a hotel referred to in square brackets as if interposed later by editors, and the final one sits half in France and half Switzerland. Indeed, Max is named for the wartime owner of the hotel, since “during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase.”
Hotel Providence, which is located near Brown, is a name to conjure with, and Lerner — a decorated poet as well as a Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellow — conjures with it briefly as he takes his narrator to the interview. On the way, every landmark has either changed or been infused by memory, every person he sees is overlaid by his imagination. Without his phone he feels hypersensitive to his surroundings — “my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of supersensitivity” — but unlike augmented reality, his senses overlay meaning, not information.
As the narrator walks through Providence, the ghosts of his time frame his vision — “the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war.” Generational perception, shaped by how his daughter Eva views the world, also changes how he sees the streets around him. Plus, he has to actually deal with the real world in the shape of a woman who hails him by name. She “approached me with the confidence of someone sure she’d be recognized” but when she is not recognized, “she discerned my confusion and offered, mercifully, Chloe.”
Reminded by Chloe of their mutual friend Anisa, the protagonist drifts off into one of his more significant digressions, detailing the web of lies she spun, that took him further away from his college girlfriend after a split. That girlfriend, Mia, is now his wife and mother of his child, yet we never hear how the rupture was mended. In a slender volume of scarce novella length, the story of Anisa’s lies takes up valuable real estate and hits us before we get to the ostensibly major characters. The “botanical models made by glass artists” that he and Anisa see at the Natural History Museum at Harvard become the underlying metaphor for how art is created. Their story is the story upon which this story is written.
Transcription works by exploring the specific and allowing it to stand in for the general. For example, almost no one understands the magic of technology but the narrator’s parenthetical aside about a text to his dead iPhone “(I don’t understand where a message lingers, or for how long, when there isn’t a device to receive it.)” has almost spiritual connotations for a novelist who is also an award-winning poet. When he asks Chloe about Anisa, social media is able to complete the specific web of acquaintance but at the same time we remain deeply unconnected: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said, but I know from Instagram that she’s in Atlanta.”
Thomas, the mentor who left post-War Europe for Rhode Island, is described by his son, Max, as “kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman.” Max, who is the main narrator of the third section “Hotel Arbez,” is only a year older than the narrator and the two were friendly for a while at college. Thomas confuses them with one another as, increasingly, we do as readers. Their lives, their young daughters, their relationship with Thomas, merge. Max recounts the difficulty of looking after a distant elderly parent, while bringing up a child. He feels the distance from family, as many of us did, most keenly over the pandemic. The scenes of phone calls and visits that take place during and after the COVID period are intensely moving: what is done and what is said, despite what cannot be said.
The narrator’s relationships with Anisa and Mia, the near twinning of Max and the narrator, the fraught, heavy, insecure filiation of Max, narrator, Rosa and the others at the colloquium with Thomas, all of these spill over one another in ways that are endlessly reflective.
Many have written about the difficulties of conveying meaning from one person to another, from one generation to another, from one language to another. Translation, for example, is often viewed with distrust — “translation is treason” as the saying goes — but for Lerner, transcription is a new way of thinking about how we write meaning down or across or over. The concept becomes a way of thinking about translation, transmission and also, in the sense of over-writing, palimpsests — pages written over previous writing. Transcription is a function that our machines and AI can produce, but it is also the word that we use for expressing our genetic inheritance: DNA code expresses its nature through transcription into RNA.
In our age of Zoom, where we meet through machines and delegate our next steps to transcriptions and AI, it makes sense for Lerner to probe the nature of those pregnant gaps between humans that we all too often assume are filled with facts and decisions.
In the second part “[Hotel Villa Real],” the narrator continues to think about the Anisa episode about which Chloe reminded him. He googles Andrés, the Spaniard that Mia had had a fling with decades ago, an episode embroidered and extended by Anisa at the time. As if to compare the nature of testimony, he is made aware by his friend Rosa, a curator at the host institution, that his colleagues felt that he had “falsified” Thomas’ “testament” in the paper he had given, confessing that he had not recorded the final interview. Rosa says they feel his account of the night is a “deepfake.” The narrator finds it inconceivable that he is not trusted, but revisiting that evening, especially in the wake of the Anisa episode, makes it feel somehow suspect.
There is a convenient transactional conceit that a transcription will be complete or accurate but it is a convention intended for business, not for life. Everyone knows that even if Zoom transcriptions were not filled with errors, inconsistencies and nonsense, they would be woefully inadequate records of how humans experience one another. What we hear can have transactional value but, without context of the whole gestalt — the smells, the sounds, the body language of the person that we are interviewing — to claim that a recorded and transcribed interview is more accurate than a curated memory by a trusted author is to mistake the idea of veracity itself.
The closing epitaph from an artisan about how to “become a glass modeler of skill” is just the final example of how the glass touchscreens that enclose our lives are the least interesting of the ways of understanding our existence. We have no “secret apparatus” to form our worlds, but we increase our abilities by honing them from parent to child, “the touch increases in every generation.”
For Lerner, the Jewishness of his writing is in what he cannot escape: whether that is noticing the fringe cultists of Neturei Karta holding Free Palestine signs at a protest in the background of his daughter‘s FaceTime as he talks to her from abroad, the quirk of Hotel Arbez that gave Jews safe harbor from the Nazis, or the murky European history of his mentor with his Holocaust survivor wife. But in the end, what is more Jewish than a book written to study how we write and how we transmit wisdom, knowledge, information, behavior, and mistakes from generation to generation.
The post Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump Labels Carlson a ‘Low-IQ Person’ After Criticism on Iran, Says ‘I Don’t Respond to His Calls’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
President Donald Trump on Tuesday lambasted far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of his longtime supporters turned outspoken critic, as the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran continued to fragment online discourse among right-wing influencers.
“Tucker’s a low-IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” Trump said in an interview with New York Post national security reporter Caitlin Doornbos when asked about Carlson’s condemnations of his Easter message promising massive destruction on Iran.
“He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him,” Trump said of Carlson. “I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”
On Monday, in his continued efforts to frame himself as a devout defender of Christian faith, Carlson released a more than two-hour long podcast on X and YouTube, announcing it by saying that “desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.”
Carlson took issue in part with Trump’s social media post the prior day, Easter Sunday, issuing a warning to the Iranian regime.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global shipping that Iran has effectively closed amid conflict with the US and Israel.
In addition to attacking the president, Carlson criticized multiple faith traditions and Christian Zionist religious figures including White House senior adviser Paula White and Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and of Samaritan’s Purse. Carlson also maligned the megachurch movement and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He has previously called Christian Zionism a heresy and said that he disliked its proponents “more than anybody,” remarks for which he later offered an apology.
Carlson’s 40-minute opening monologue framed his opposition to Trump in theological terms, asserting that Christians should have opposed the president’s effort to seize Venezuela’s oil, saying, “That’s not acceptable for Christians. In fact, that’s unacceptable for Americans or any civilized people because taking other people’s stuff by force cannot be allowed.” Carlson called Trump’s decision wrong “under the American legal code, but it’s also wrong under the Christian legal code.”
Carlson also argued that during Trump’s inauguration, he didn’t take the oath of office with his hand on the Bible.
“That should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about,” the online media personality added, claiming it “became clear that maybe [Trump] didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book. And what’s inside that book are limits on human behavior.”
Carlson condemned Trump’s Truth Social posting on Sunday, calling his words “maybe the most real thing this president has ever done and also the most revealing on every level. It is vile on every level.”
On Sunday, former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also used religious rhetoric to reject Trump’s use of the phrase “Praise be to Allah,” which appeared to be in jest.
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” Greene wrote on X in a post that has since received over 9.6 million views. “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”
Greene then referenced the Strait of Hormuz, arguing it’s closed “because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.”
Returning to religion, Greene wrote “our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace.”
On Tuesday, Greene called for members of the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution to remove Trump from power following his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.”
Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has also advocated Trump’s removal, asking a guest on his Monday InfoWars podcast, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” On March 31, Jones said that Trump “does look sick … the brain’s not doing too hot. And so, we just cut bait on Trump, and we just mobilize against the Democrats.”
Other influential far-right media figures who previously spent years boosting Trump have also now called for his removal. On Tuesday in response to the same Trump threat, far-right podcaster Candace Owens wrote that “the 25th amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness.”
The 25th Amendment states that if key government leaders determine that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the vice president “shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
On Tuesday, conservative radio host Mark Levin labeled those calling for the 25th Amendment’s use as “the Woke Reich neo-fascists.”
Owens had reposted Carlson’s podcast condemning Trump.
On Sunday in response to Trump’s post, Owens wrote on X in a post seen by at least 3.8 million people that “this is a satanic administration. We all realize that satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress needs to move to have the Mad King Trump removed.” She added, “All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing that Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah. We are in uncharted territory. Leaders worldwide need to act accordingly.”
On Tuesday, Owens accused Trump of involvement in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Resharing an X posting by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian asserting his willingness to die in defense of the Islamic regime, Owens wrote, “The Iranian President tweets that he is willing [to] sacrifice his own life for his people. Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice Charlie Kirk and is willing to sacrifice every American life and livelihood for Greater Israel. Who is the animal again?”
Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center and a conspiracy theorist ally of Owens, wrote on Tuesday in response to Trump’s threats of civilizational eradication that the president “believes he is threatening Iran with destruction, but it is America that now stands in danger. If he attempts to eradicate Iranian civilization, the United States will no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force in the world, but as an agent of chaos — effectively ending our status as the world’s greatest superpower.”
Kent reposted Carlson’s podcast too and came under fire from CNN’s Jake Tapper for also sharing Iranian propaganda falsely suggesting that the United States intentionally sought to kill its own downed pilot rather than rescue him.
Ann Coulter, the right-wing polemicist who authored 2016’s In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, has also turned against the president, writing on Tuesday that “Trump is going to set off the wildest rush for nuclear weapons the world has ever seen. Should go well.”
Coulter wrote in response to Trump’s Sunday message: “I really wish ‘legal experts’ hadn’t screamed bloody murder about every little thing Trump did, so they could speak with authority now that he’s actually committing war crimes.”
Antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes has also jumped on board the anti-Trump bandwagon.
“I’ve been saying this for the past couple of days: You have to understand that all Trump does is lie. It’s by design. This is the function of rhetoric from the White House,” Fuentes said on April 1 on his Rumble show. “But that’s the Trump doctrine, which is you flood the zone, you saturate the information space with disinformation or contradictory information, and the purpose of it is to throw your enemies and even your allies off balance.”
Fuentes added, “We are stuck. We made an attempt to destroy the Iranian regime and we failed. We took a shot and we missed. And what this has allowed Iran to do is seize the Strait of Hormuz and take a fifth of the world’s energy hostage. And we have no ability to take it back. Because the regime survived, it is now actually stronger. So, it’s not going anywhere. And what’s more, Iran prepared for exactly this scenario.”
Fuentes’ so-called “Groyper” movement promotes antisemitism, racism, rape, and support for Hamas. Proponents seek to infiltrate the Republican Party and subvert it from within, a tactic Fuentes has instructed. Conservative journalist Rod Dreher reported in The Free Press that his sources have told him that approximately 30-40 percent of Gen-Z Republican staffers sympathized with Groyperism.
While initial polling showed firm Republican support for Trump and Israel’s efforts to crush the Islamic regime in Iran, new research indicates diminished enthusiasm. A poll from YouGov and The Economist released on March 31 showed that while 62 percent of Republicans supported the conflict, that figure divided between pro-MAGA Republicans (79 percent) and non-MAGA Republicans (33 percent.) Self-proclaimed MAGA Republicans comprise roughly twice the number of non-MAGA Republicans.
Polling also shows that a majority of younger Republicans, a cohort more heavily influenced by Owens and Fuentes, now reject the war, with only 49 percent supporting Trump’s actions.
Tuesday wasn’t the first time that Trump blasted Carlson.
“Tucker has lost his way,” the president told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month. “MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Carlson told Status News editor Oliver Darcy that “there are times I get annoyed with Trump, right now definitely included. But I’ll always love him no matter what he says about me.”
Uncategorized
Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
President Donald Trump has backed himself into a corner on Iran. His increasingly apocalyptic threats — including a Tuesday morning social media post that warned “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not accede to his terms — make that much clear. Trump is looking for any way out of this war that will let him not just avoid blame, but claim superiority.
One uncomfortable possibility for how he might do so: follow the lead of far-right pundits, and pivot to blame the Jews.
We know how Trump handles failure. The 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? shows a 20-something Trump learning his strategies at the knee of the late, disgraced titular attorney, who instructed him never to admit error or accept responsibility for his failures. “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn,” Matt Tyrnauer, the documentary’s director, told NPR.
The techniques break down to this: deflect, attack, deny.
Trump has tried a combination of them as the war has defied a quick conclusion. He has denied reality, declaring victory two weeks ago. He has lashed out at the media for supposedly undermining the war effort through clear-eyed reporting, going so far as to have the FCC threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for war coverage he finds objectionable. He promised in an Easter Sunday message to bomb civilian infrastructure if Iran doesn’t “open the f— Strait” of Hormuz to maritime traffic.
But what if ramping up attacks won’t work? What if it becomes impossible to deny reality, as gas prices soar higher, American casualties pile up, and taxpayers see themselves shelling out more billions for a war they don’t understand?
Trump could look into a camera and tell the American people that he miscalculated. That the buck stops with him, and that as commander in chief he and he alone made the decision to go to war, and the war’s successes and failures are on him.
Or he could turn back to the first of those Cohn strategies, and deflect. And the easiest culprit to deflect blame to is, clearly, Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long pushed for a military strike on Iran. And a subset of erstwhile Trump supporters, including commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — both of whom have long records of spreading antisemitism — have been laying the groundwork for Trump to take advantage of that widely known fact for a last, desperate bit of narrative spin. They and their ilk have claimed that Israel and its American Jewish supporters, including, bizarrely, Chabad, pushed Trump into the unpopular war. Trump could easily slide into the nefarious narrative they have prepared for him, and cast himself as the innocent manipulated by a foreign government and its American agents.
The consequences of the president of the United States placing the blame for what could be an unpopular, failed, costly and deadly war on Israel and, by extension, Jewish Americans, are unforeseeable, and existentially frightening. They are also consequences that, given Trump’s track record, we need to consider.
Because here’s what we know about Trump: He has never accepted blame for anything during his presidency.
Confronted in 2020 with the suggestion that his administration had failed to effectively address the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump said, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” then blamed former President Barack Obama. When his ill-conceived tariffs sent the stock market into a nosedive, forcing the administration to reverse course and pause the tariff to avoid a market collapse, Trump and his spokespeople said that was the plan all along. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said. While 48% of Americans blame Trump for the spike in gas prices since the start of the Iran war, he has deflected, posting that the increase is “a very small price to pay… only fools would think differently!”
If Trump wants to get out of the war without following through on his threats to commit mass war crimes — which, despite his evident glee in playing bully, he may — he will need to cast blame in a way that makes him look like the reasonable party.
To those Jewish Trump supporters who think there is no way Trump would throw Israel, and by extension Jews, under the bus, consider this — he’s already tried.
After Israel’s March attack on an Iranian natural gas facility, which outraged Gulf allies and sent gas prices soaring, Trump claimed the U.S. “knew nothing” about the Israeli plans. But Israeli and American officials later confirmed that was a lie, and that Trump himself “green-lit” the operation.
Trump hung Israel out to dry once, and it’s far from inconceivable that he could try again.
Never mind that blaming Israel would make no sense. Successive administrations, including the first Trump administration, chose not to pursue wars with Iran because, well, the U.S. can freely choose when and when not to go to war — and Trump is the decider. Netanyahu has not been the world leader threatening civilizational destruction on Truth Social. And American Jews, crucially, oppose the current war. According to a GBAO Strategies poll commissioned by J Street, 60% of American Jews opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran.
But think of how easy it would be for Trump to, say, announce that the U.S. has accomplished its goals, then suggest Israel has been holding out for more wins, and that he’s told Netanyahu the U.S. is done fighting on Israel’s behalf?
If Trump were to go there, it wouldn’t be the first time Jews found themselves blamed for an unpopular war. The first Russian-language editions of the antisemitic forgeries The Protocols of the Elders of Zion sought to scapegoat the Jews for the country’s 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Following World War I, German antisemites promulgated the “stab-in-the-back” myth that Jews and Communists conspired to undermine the war effort.
American Jews and their institutions, already targeted as a result of the Gaza war and increasingly unhinged right-wing antisemitism, could be put in even greater danger by the president’s lifelong inability to take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. To quote Trump, only fools would think differently.
The post Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran Calls on Children, Civilians to Form Human Shields Around Power Plants Amid Trump Threats
Iranian citizens, including children, form a human chain around a power plant in Tehran on April 7, 2026, as officials urge civilians to protect key infrastructure amid rising tensions with the US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Iranian authorities have urged children, teenagers, and civilians to gather around power plants and other sensitive sites to serve as human shields, in an apparent effort to raise the cost of potential US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s infrastructure.
The call came as US President Donald Trump’s deadline of Tuesday night for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a ceasefire proposal rapidly approached.
Trump previously warned that if Iran refused to reopen the strait — a critical global shipping chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to international waters, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — US strikes would destroy the country’s key infrastructure, including bridges and energy facilities including power plants.
“We have a plan according to which every bridge in Iran will be destroyed and every power plant will be bombed by midnight. It will happen within 4 hours if we want,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday.
Trump appeared to escalate his threats on Tuesday.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.
“However,” he added, “now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
In response, Iranian officials issued stark warnings that, should the strikes on Iranian soil go ahead, Tehran would retaliate by targeting infrastructure and other civilian sites in Gulf states hosting US forces, risking a broader escalation across the region.
Even as negotiations remain formally underway, Iranian officials signaled little change in their stance, insisting that Washington’s demands and tone “have not changed” amid ongoing conflict.
“There are no negotiations with the US, which wants Iran to collapse under pressure. We will show flexibility after we see flexibility from the US,” an Iranian official told Reuters.
“Iran will not open [the Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for empty promises,” he continued.
With tensions now approaching a breaking point, Iranian government and military officials have publicly urged civilians to gather near key infrastructure sites to act as a deterrent against potential airstrikes.
During a televised speech on Monday, Alireza Rahimi, Iran’s deputy minister of youth affairs, urged citizens to join the “Iranian youth’s human chain for a bright tomorrow” by gathering around power plants to serve as human shields.
“I call on all youth, athletes, artists, university students, and professors to gather tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 pm, and form a circle around our power plants, which are national assets and the nation’s capital,” Rahimi said.
“Come regardless of political views, because these facilities belong to the Iranian youth and their future. Let the world see that targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” he continued.
Old habits die hard.
In the Iran-Iraq War, this regime deployed children with plastic keys to heaven against Iraqi machine gun fire and to clear minefields. This is a regime which also deployed Iranian and Afghan children alongside the Basij to fight in the Syrian Civil War. https://t.co/vfR3iqZnG5
— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) April 7, 2026
In a separate televised message, Hossein Yekta, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), addressed parents directly and urged them to send their children to sensitive locations and checkpoints.
“Send the children to the checkpoints so they can become men,” he said.
The regime’s use of human shields appears to extend beyond minors, with reports indicating that political prisoners and dual nationals are also being positioned near sensitive sites as part of broader deterrence efforts.
Last month, the IRGC officially lowered the minimum age for war‑related roles to 12 as part of a campaign recruiting children to serve as “Homeland‑Defending Combatants for Iran,” assigning them to patrols, checkpoints, and logistics duties.
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.