“I know we are here today to talk about ‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’. But how can we end the day without talking about those beautiful cities — Tehran, Isfahan and Beirut that are up in flames?”Just weeks ago, Arundhati Roy made headlines by refusing to attend the prestigious Berlinale film festival following German filmmaker and international jury member Wim Wenders’ remarks regarding German support for Israel during the Gaza war.On Monday, she gave out a strong statement against the US-Israel attack on Iran at an event organised to discuss her memoir ‘Mother Mary Comes To Me’.Invoking “Mother Mary’s spirit of candour and impoliteness”, she said she would like to use the platform to talk “about the unprovoked and illegal attack by the United States and Israel on Iran”. “It is of course, a continuation of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. It’s the same old genocidaires using the same old playbook. Murdering women and children. Bombing hospitals. Carpet bombing cities. And then playing the victim.”However, Roy warned: “But Iran is not Gaza.”“The theatre of this new war could expand to consume the whole world. We are on the brink of nuclear calamity and economic collapse. The same country that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be readying itself to bomb one of the most ancient civilisations in the world. There will be other occasions to speak of this in detail, so here, let me simply say that I stand with Iran. Unequivocally. Any regimes that need changing, including the US, Israel and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission.”Slamming the Centre, she said: “Iran is standing up to them, while India cowers. I am ashamed of how gutless, how spineless our government has been. Long ago we were a poor country of very poor people. But we had pride. We had dignity. Today we are a rich country with very poor, unemployed people who are fed on a diet of hatred, poison and falsehoods instead of real food. We have lost pride. We have lost dignity. We have lost courage. Except in our movies.”“What sort of people are we whose elected government cannot stand up and condemn the US when it kidnaps and assassinates Heads of State of other countries? Would we like that done to us? For our Prime Minister to have traveled to Israel and embraced Benyamin Netanyahu just days before he attacked Iran — what does it mean? For our government to sign a groveling trade deal with the US that literally sells our farmers and textile industry down the river, only days before the US Supreme court declared Trump’s tariffs illegal — what does it mean? For us to now be given ‘permission’ to buy oil from Russia—what does it mean? What else do we need permission for? To go to the bathroom? To take a day off work? To visit our mothers?”She also said that the government of India sent thousands of poor Indian workers to Israel to replace expelled Palestinian workers at the height of the genocide in Gaza and said that while Israelis are today taking shelter in bunkers, it is being reported that Indian workers are not allowed into those shelters.The book discussion was held at Kamani Auditorium where she was in conversation with Nilanjana S Roy.