WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's new talk show, "The World Tomorrow," has premiered on the Kremlin's English-language satellite broadcaster, and its opening episode featured an interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Assange called Nasrallah a "freedom fighter to millions" while being seen as a terrorist by the U.S., Israel, Canada, and the Netherlands. During the interview, which was conducted via videolink and with the help of translators, Nasrallah and Assange spoke about a range of topics, including the Arab Spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the current violence in Syria.
(Credit: RT YouTube Footage)
Nasrallah told Assange that Hezbollah had contacted the Syrian opposition and tried to motivate it to speak with the regime. "Right from the beginning we have had a [Syrian] regime that is willing to undergo reforms and is prepared for dialogue. On the other side you have an opposition which is not prepared for dialogue and is not prepared to accept reforms. All it wants is to bring down the regime. This is a problem," Nasrallah said.
Hezbollah has been widely accused of working in collusion with the President Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria and reportedly receives the majority of its arms from there.
Later in the segment, Assange and Nasrallah also shared a joke about encryption -- with the latter saying that Hezbollah kept Israeli code-breakers on their toes by using Arabic farm slang.
According to The New York Times, Nasrallah noted wryly that even the most sophisticated Israeli decryption technology could not decipher the village slang his young fighters used over walkie-talkies. He said no computer analyst would understand what the father of the chicken is and why they call him the father of the chicken. He added with a twinkle, Its not going to do you any good at WikiLeaks, by the way. The two men laughed companionably.
The World Tomorrow opened Tuesday on the RT network, a broadcaster criticized by some as a Russian propaganda mouthpiece.
The WikiLeaks founder has promised that his guests have told him things they "could not say on a mainstream TV network."
Assange remains under strict bail conditions at an undisclosed location in England while he fights extradition to Sweden on sex-crime allegations.
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