While American and Israeli forces have been dismantling Iran’s military infrastructure over the past three weeks, and while Iranian missiles have struck a Qatari gas terminal and Hezbollah sympathizers have attacked Jewish preschools on American soil, the children of Iran’s ruling class have been going about their lives in remarkable comfort.
In Ohio. In California. In Oklahoma. At American universities.
The pattern is not new — reporters have documented it for years — but the Iran war has given it a context that demands it be said clearly: the men running the Islamic Republic, signing off on missile strikes, and calling America “the Great Satan” are sending their own families to live inside the Great Satan while their ideology kills people outside it.
Here are some of the names.
Ali Larijani served as Speaker of the Iranian Parliament for over a decade. He has described the United States as “a threat to the entire world” from the floor of Iran’s legislature. His daughter, Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, recently completed her first year of residency in internal medicine at the University Hospitals of Cleveland, Ohio. America: threat to the entire world. Also: good enough for my daughter’s medical training.
Zahra Takhshid is the granddaughter of the late Ayatollah Mohammadreza Mahdavi-Kani — who served as the head of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, one of the most powerful clerical bodies in the Islamic Republic, responsible for selecting and overseeing the Supreme Leader. His granddaughter teaches law at an American university.
At UCLA, Niloofar Nobakht Haghighi holds a position as clinical assistant professor of nephrology. Her brother Ehsan is an assistant professor of medicine at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Their family’s connections run to the upper levels of Iranian government administration.
At the University of Oklahoma, the Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies — funded by major gifts from the Farzaneh family — employs faculty with documented ties to Iranian regime figures. One assistant professor of Iranian Studies at the center, Dr. Vahid Abedini, is the son-in-law of a former Iranian parliament member with alleged connections to Evin Prison during the 1988 massacres. ICE detained Abedini briefly in late 2025 before releasing him.
At the University of Arkansas, a political scientist heading the Middle East Studies program was removed from her directorship after using university letterhead to advocate on behalf of Hamid Nouri — an Iranian official convicted by a Swedish court of war crimes related to the 1988 execution of political prisoners.
What unites these cases is not a coordinated intelligence operation — though the question of Iranian academic influence networks on American campuses has attracted serious analytical attention. What unites them is a simpler and more damning reality: the ruling class of a regime built on anti-American ideology has made a consistent, private judgment that America is the best place in the world to raise, educate, and employ their families.
They do not send their children to Russia. They do not send them to China. They do not send them to the Islamic paradise their fathers have spent 45 years constructing at gunpoint in Tehran. They send them to UCLA. To George Washington. To Ohio.
The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is structural. The Islamic Republic’s legitimacy rests on the narrative that Western — and specifically American — civilization is corrupt, morally inferior, and hostile to Islam. That narrative has been the ideological foundation of the regime since 1979. It is preached in Iranian schools, broadcast on state television, and chanted in officially sanctioned street demonstrations.
The private behavior of the ruling class tells a different story. When their own children need safety, opportunity, and quality of life, they look in exactly one direction.
There is one additional layer to this story that your readers will recognize immediately. The same American university system that housed pro-Palestinian encampments in spring 2024 — where students called for the destruction of Israel and administrators struggled to respond — is the system now employing individuals with documented ties to the regime that funds Hamas, armed Hezbollah, and just launched missiles at a Qatari gas terminal supplying Europe’s energy.
The campuses that couldn’t bring themselves to condemn Hamas are the campuses where Iran’s ruling class feels comfortable sending their families. That is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of a decade of ideological drift in American higher education that made elite universities simultaneously hostile to Israel and hospitable to the networks that want it destroyed.
The missiles Iran fired at Qatar this week were built with money the regime didn’t spend on its own citizens’ education or its children’s futures. Those children are here. At our schools. On our faculty pages.
Worth knowing.
