Western ‘society of tolerance’ has led to ‘universal moral drought’
Lawyer Elica Le Bon is a fresh voice for people living under extremist regimes in the Middle East. Underestimate her at your peril.
There’s a lot I could say about Elica Le Bon.
I could tell you she has a laugh that feels like an invitation to cook up some kind of mischief. That she is surprisingly petite. That she has confronted and bested some of the most vicious anti-Semitic voices in the world during her rise to prominence as an advocate and activist.
Then there is a grace with which she carries herself that makes our interview seem more like a catch-up with an old friend.
But the one thing I really want to say is this: Underestimate Le Bon at your peril.
It’s Thursday afternoon just gone and we’re seated at a beachside cafe. She has been in Sydney for less than three hours (her first time in Australia) and has agreed to meet me ahead of her upcoming speaking tour.
She is dressed for the beach, in casual T-shirt and shorts, her dark hair held back by a bright scarf, and she looks ridiculously fresh after a long-haul flight. She wears a gold necklace with a word in script I don’t understand.
Le Bon is in Australia to speak at a sold-out series of events in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The tour was organised by United Israel Appeal, an apolitical, not-for-profit humanitarian organisation.
Is it any wonder the tour is sold out? For those following the conflict in the Middle East, and the global fight against Islamic extremism more broadly, Le Bon has become a voice to be reckoned with.
For those unfamiliar with her story, she was born in London to Iranian parents. Her father was studying for his PhD at Oxford University and was granted asylum when the shah of Iran fell. Her mother escaped from the notorious Evin prison, one of very few people to do so in the early days of the Islamic revolution. Le Bon moved to the US to study law and spent a decade being a criminal defence lawyer.
I ask her, given her family story, if this life as a global voice for Israel since October 7, as an activist and an advocate for people living under extremist regimes throughout the Middle East, was planned.
She tosses her head back and laughs loudly.
“No, nooooo way.” She leans forward, her face animated as if imagining the absurdity of being able to orchestrate it all.
“I would have actually carried on being a leftie my whole life. I would have probably lived this sort of semi-leftie bleeding heart, let’s fix the crime thing.”
While the subject matter is weighty, Le Bon holds it with a lightness that opens the door to greater inquiry. Describing herself frequently as a former leftie leads me to probe the why and the how of her ideological shift. She says it was organic.
“The thing that let me know something was wrong was there was a conflict between my mind and my gut,” Le Bon says.
“(Joe) Biden, for example, was giving $US6bn to the (Iranian) regime as part of this hostage exchange … and you had thousands of Iranians saying, please don’t do this, they will commit terrorism, and they refroze the money after October 7, but the whole point is that as I was watching this all unfold, I was like, ‘Oh my god, you guys are liars.’
“That was the unravelling for me, where I was just … I thought that between the left and the right I was protected by the left and when I realised I wasn’t it was like, there’s something very dishonest happening on the left.
“After October 7 when people started supporting terrorists I think that was sort of the calling for me. I had been posting about Iran since the uprising and the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was killed for showing a little bit of her hair. That was in 2022.
“Even that time people still understood that these were terrorists, you know, this was a terrorist regime, people got it. Then, after October 7, people started saying: ‘Oh, but these aren’t terrorists, these are freedom fighters’, and not understanding that it was the same thing.”
Le Bon quit the law in December 2024. She is now an “author to be” (her description) and an activist.
“We are living in a time of universal moral drought. Universal moral confusion, depravity, all of those things,” she says, firmly and with conviction.
“I just realised that’s where my mission is. It’s about sort of restoring moral clarity where it’s been lost. Because look, once people have that moral clarity, all of the issues just make sense. You don’t have to do the separate thing of Iran, Israel, it’s applicable everywhere and it just makes sense.”
What if I told you there is one clear problem and one clear solution for all of humanity? pic.twitter.com/u3A2h7O4Hq
— Elica Le Bon الیکا‌ Ù„ بن (@elicalebon) February 5, 2025
Our conversation meanders at an easy pace. From our respective visits to Israel since the war with Hamas began, to this overwhelming sense of bewilderment at the West’s insatiable appetite to sacrifice values on the altar of “tolerance”.
She uses the word brainwashed often in this context, especially as we repeatedly circle the subject of privileged women in Western democracies who support regimes whose record on the treatment of women and girls is horrifying, who side with the perpetrators.
“They’re brainwashed,” She says firmly. “They don’t know any better. Women have become so brainwashed even to the extent that they don’t even know how to protect feminism any more.”
So, who is to blame, I ask.
“You know what I’ll tell you it is? It’s the softness of our Western society. We have become a society of so much tolerance that all of these ridiculous, grotesque ideologies that have been passing through the media, through universities, through this, through that, saying ‘oh … free speech, it’s all fine, it’s all good’, it’s like these aren’t thoughts and ideas, this is ideological subversion, which is incredibly, incredibly dangerous.”
Ours has been a relaxed conversation until this point, when Le Bon begins to fire up the engine of her formidable intellect.
She starts laying out in detail the history of misinformation aimed at destabilising the US and the West more broadly that started back in the 1920s. With an unholy alliance between communism and Islamic extremists, united by a common hatred of the West and of Israel.
“People don’t understand that these ideologies have deeply, deeply infiltrated our institutions, our media, our universities,” Le Bon says. “Historically, these were actual disinformation agents. But they were deliberate.”
She references Romanian Ion Mihai Pacepa (whom to my shame I have to Google when I get home from our interview), the highest ranking Soviet bloc defector who, after escaping to the West in 1978, detailed the extent to which the Soviet Union had dedicated itself to spreading misinformation in Western democracies. It was a deliberate plan with future generations in mind. As Le Bon says, they were playing the long game.
Pacepa later co-wrote a book with law professor Ronald J. Rychlak called Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion and Promoting Terrorism.
“This isn’t an accident,” Le Bon says. “This isn’t like, wow, where did this come from? We can actually trace the inception of these ideologies and they’re so, so, so dangerous to the fabric of our society. And so I think, seeing what happened to Iran, where Iran fell in the last instance, it was a direct result of these exact ideologies that we’re seeing in the West today and that’s very concerning.”
A soft breeze beckons to the ocean a few short blocks away. Le Bon asks if the gelato shop next door is any good. I mean to ask her about her necklace, what it says, but forget, and we say our goodbyes.
Later that night, fact-checking her quotes, I ask. The necklace is in Russian.
“It says disinformation,” she says. “Because it’s the root of everything.”
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