For good jobs and education, they come to the “Great Satan”?

There is a particular kind of hypocrisy that does not merely offend—it exposes an entire ideology as a calculated lie.

Iran’s ruling Shiite clerics and regime officials have spent decades thundering against America as the “Great Satan,” enforcing suffocating Islamic restrictions on their own people, and exporting terrorism across the Middle East in the name of Shiite Islam’s supposedly divine mission. Yet while ordinary Iranians suffer under crippling sanctions, restricted travel, and brutal repression, a remarkable number of the children and relatives of these Muslim elites are quietly living, studying, and thriving in the very country their fathers curse.

The hypocritical contradiction isn’t subtle. It is shocking, and the Iranian people have noticed.

Consider the late Ali Larijani. Few figures in Iran carried a longer or louder record of anti-American venom. As former speaker of Parliament, nuclear negotiator, and secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council—one of the regime’s most powerful security posts with direct access to Supreme Leader Khamenei—Larijani spent decades denouncing the United States as the “Great Satan” and presenting himself as a pillar of revolutionary Islamic purity. He was killed in an Israeli airstrike on March 17. Yet his daughter, Fatemeh Ardeshir Larijani, moved to the United States around 2017, completed medical training at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center in Ohio, earned a Master of Science in clinical research, became board-certified in internal medicine and oncology, and later served as an assistant professor at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta (until her dismissal in January). She received a U.S. green card in 2021. Larijani also had two nephews living in Britain and Canada.

How does a man who filled stadiums with anti-American rage send his daughter to build her career in the very country he cursed?

The answer is simple: The Shiite rhetoric was for the nonelite masses, while the green card was for the elites, and especially their offspring.

Larijani is far from alone. The pattern runs deep and wide across the ruling class, as senior regime figures maintain close family ties to the West they routinely denounce. Mohammad-Javad Larijani, adviser to Supreme Leader Khamenei, has a son teaching at Glasgow Caledonian University in Britain and another son directing operations at the Royal Bank of Canada in Vancouver. Former President Hassan Rouhani has a niece overseeing Middle East financial flows at Deutsche Bank in London. Masoumeh Ebtekar, former vice president and English-speaking spokesperson for the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage-takers, has a son working as an associate professor at an academic institution in Los Angeles. Mohammad Javad Zarif, the regime’s longtime foreign minister, has a son reportedly living in a luxury Manhattan apartment. Even grandchildren of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution’s founder, have settled in Canada.

Estimates from within the IRGC place the total number of such regime-connected family members living in the West at around 4,000 as of 2024.

Four thousand. Let that sink in.

This is not a few isolated cases of families drifting westward. This is a systematic, deliberate pattern in which Iran’s ruling elite preaches Muslim martyrdom, Islamic sacrifice, and anti-Western purity to the population while quietly securing the best the West has to offer for their own bloodlines. The Islamic rhetoric maintains domestic control and keeps the revolutionary base loyal, whereas the Western passport, education, and employment are the actual inheritance passed down through regime families.

This is Shiite hypocrisy. Consider that ordinary Iranians face restricted travel, economic devastation, and imprisonment for dissent. The rules of the Islamic Republic apply to everyone except the people who make them. This is not Shiite Islam, but Shiite propaganda in a theater display.

These leaders don’t genuinely believe the Islam they enforce. They wield it as a tool of political control while privately exempting themselves and their families from its demands.

Iranian Muslims see through this hypocrisy. During recent waves of protest, public anger over this hypocrisy has erupted with striking force. Petitions demanding deportations and visa reviews have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. One petition specifically targeting Fatemeh Larijani drew over 150,000 signatories, ultimately contributing to the end of her position at Emory University in January.

The Iranian street understands perfectly what the regime’s apologists in Western academic and media circles prefer to obscure: The Muslims who built this theocracy never intended to live under it.

For Americans, the lesson cuts in a different direction. The United States has been welcoming and educating the children of the very officials who fund terrorism, arm proxy militias, and chant for America’s destruction—often on visas and with resources connected to the Iranian state. Elite universities have attracted them. The Trump administration’s current review of immigration statuses for these family members is long overdue and entirely warranted. There is no principled argument for extending American opportunity to the privileged offspring of a regime actively at war with American interests and values.

Iran’s ruling clerics built a fake revolution on the promise of Islamic purity and Shiite resistance against Western corruption. Decades later, their children hold American green cards, British jobs, and Canadian positions. The “Great Satan,” it turns out, has very good career opportunities. Shiite leaders have known so all along.