JNS
The lawyer, who is based in Los Angeles, told JNS about the Iranian regime, which funds Hamas, jailing her mother and executing her mother's cousin.
Elica Le Bon has lost friends and associates and seen family members’ lives put at risk because of her views. But the non-Jewish, Iranian American lawyer and activist says that she continues to defend Israel out of “a sense of responsibility.”
“If I don’t say it, who will?” she told JNS.
Le Bon quit her job as a criminal attorney in Los Angeles to spend full time in social media advocacy and to write a book exploring how hard-line “ideologies have festered in the Western world.”
The latter, she says, will help people “make sense of why the world feels so upside down.”
Born and raised in London to parents who fled the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Le Bon is best known for compassionate, level-headed and seemingly unscripted takes on Middle East news. Some half a million accounts follow her on Instagram and X, and her posts have been viewed tens of millions of times. She has also been featured widely on the news, including on Fox News and Piers Morgan’s program.
Her activism gained significant traction during the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 after Jina (“Mahsa”) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, died in a Teheran hospital after the regime’s morality police arrested her for not wearing a hijab.
“It felt like we were getting through to people,” Le Bon told JNS. “It felt like people were speaking up. It felt like people became interested. It felt like people understood that this was a terrorist regime.”
She saw Israelis stand with freedom-loving Iranians, as she befriended many Israelis and learned of their common enemy with the Islamic Republic.
“As I was doing that, I was learning more about Israel. I was learning more about the Jewish experience, and I was following content creators that were just really good at this sort of explaining how the propaganda has really rewritten the story of the Jewish experiences, the Israeli experience,” she said.
The more her videos went viral, the more she began to think, “God, I really do need to keep putting myself out there. I would say it just became a responsibility at a certain point.”
When then-U.S. President Barack Obama gave $150 billion to the Iranian regime during the nuclear deal, Le Bon’s political stance changed from left to centrist, as she tells it. (Republicans, including U.S. President Donald Trump, have accused Obama of delivering $150 million to Iran, while others have questioned the $150 billion number or said that Iran was able to access unfrozen monies rather than cash from Washington.)
“I wanted to know why Obama was giving money to oppressors,” Le Bon said.
She “spoke up immediately” after the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but “really thought that was just going to be a blip,” she told attendees at a Feb. 19 StandWithUs Canada event at Beth Torah Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Toronto.
“The world’s going to be outraged, and I’ll just move on with that,” she said at the event. “That was my first sort of encounter with something very bizarre happening in the world that I couldn’t make sense of at the time.”
Her friends, who had been silent on the atrocities of the Iranian regime, were “falling out of the woodwork to post in favor of Hamas.”
Six days after Oct. 7, she wrote on social media that “for years, I spoke up for the people of Palestine and their right to self-determination and to live in peace. For years, nobody cared. For years, Iranians have spoken up against their terrorism and brutality at the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. For years, nobody cared.”
“For years, I had felt we shared the same unnerving struggle, which is the world’s indifference to the loss of our lives. Over the past week, however, I’ve seen something that I’m ashamed to say I had never seen before, and I can’t believe what it took for me to see it. When Jews are murdered, the world is not just indifferent. Instead, the world rejoices,” she wrote.
“To the Jewish community, you are my brothers and sisters. I am so sorry that I let you down. I am so sorry that you screamed about it for years, and I didn’t hear you,” she added in the public post. “I am so sorry I didn’t stand up with you. I am so sorry I pretended not to see the flagrant and hateful antisemitism. But my eyes are open, and I see you now. I hear you. I’m with you, and I promise to never let you down again.”
She told the Toronto crowd that she was reminded of the Middle Eastern idiom popularized by Islamic fundamentalists: “First the Saturday people. Then the Sunday people.” That meant targeting Jews first and then Christians, she said.
“I thought maybe Sunday, then Monday, Tuesday,” she said. “Antisemitism seven days a week.”
When she probed the popular “white colonizer” narrative, which is a fixture on the far left, Le Bon found what she considers “a contrived plan here to frame this in a way that makes Jews look like the bad guys.”
“It’s trying to demonize Jews,” she told the Toronto crowd.
She felt the best way to counter these arguments was to “speak their language” and say, “I’m with you. I’m anti-colonization. Did you like it that Jews were colonized in the seventh century by Arabs?”
Le Bon also tells those who will listen that the Islamic regime in Iran “is the biggest imperialist force in the Middle East, possibly in the world,” with proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
“You said that you were against imperialism, so why are you in support of the proxies of this imperialist empire? And then they have nothing to say, right?” she said at the event.
Leftist ideologues are “literally empowering our oppressors,” she added. “This terrorist regime is giving money to its proxies to slaughter people in the Middle East and in Israel. So how exactly is it that you are standing for the oppressed?”
Anti-Israel activists avoid every other oppressed people in the world but “stand up for Palestine every day of the week,” she said. She thinks that it will take a “concerted effort from different factions of society, from institutions, from government” to undo the lies, given their depth, she added.
Le Bon told JNS in an interview after her talk that the Iranian regime jailed and killed several of her family members.
Her mother’s cousin was “on the run from the IRGC” during the Revolution on charges that “were nothing serious” and likely came from openly criticizing the regime, she said.
Authorities also arrested Le Bon’s mother and took her to Evin Prison in Tehran. Le Bon told JNS that she heard from her mother that in the early 1980s, the Iranian regime “had a row of dead, hanged bodies lining the walkway of the prison, kind of like a statement of what you’re going into.”
When her mother’s cousin turned herself in, the regime let Le Bon’s mother free. But it executed the cousin, Le Bon told JNS.
Fortunately, her father, who had a state-sponsored scholarship from Iran, had been studying at the University of Oxford during the Revolution, which allowed him to apply for asylum. He became a British citizen. Le Bon’s mother, who became ill, got a medical visa to stay in London. There, she met Le Bon’s father, and the two married.
In March 2024, Le Bon visited Israel to attend a Tel Aviv Institute conference. She visited Kibbutz Be’eri and the site of the Nova festival.
Driving past Gaza, she could see smoke billowing from bombs. She told JNS what was going through her mind at the time.
“The only thing I could think of is that I hate the regime,” she said of the Islamic Republic, which is bankrolling Hamas. “It just seems so obvious that the rest of the world doesn’t pick up on that.”
