The Islamic regime has embraced pro-Hamas university student protesters in the U.S. and is offering scholarships to those who have been expelled or are facing harsh academic discipline.

Khamenei’s glee at the damage that his Hamas war is causing to the international reputations of the U.S. and Israel is predictable.  His regime has been a major financier and purveyor of every imaginable armament to Iran’s proxy groups in Iraq, Hezb’allah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  These groups and individuals support Tehran’s obsession with eliminating the U.S. and its ally Israel from any sphere of influence in the Middle East.  In the commission of this act, they actively jail, torture, and execute any citizen or member of their community who dares to deviate.

Tehran is not the only one using the tragedies of this conflict to cover up its own horrific report card of oppression and carnage.  Hamas had a firm grip on Gaza from 2007 until late October.  Under their rule, summary executions of Palestinian opponents, repression, the criminalization of same-sex relations, and rampant human and civil rights violations have occurred.

Rebels without a clue

The neo-left students have paradoxically embraced the Khomeinist regime’s “theological” objectives, parroting their prefabricated slogans and sporting the obligatory keffiyehs — sold on Amazon for anywhere from $9.99 to $30.

Spurning all thoughtful debate, claiming that Palestinians are incapable of speaking for themselves, these “disciples” have appointed themselves as the voice and arbiters of the “oppressed,” and anyone who tells them otherwise is an enemy.  They call it freedom of speech, their human and civil rights.  However, they support the regime that bans their fellow students in Iran from higher education and suppresses those same rights.  And it’s not as though these protesters have no information to read about.  One has to wonder what these expensive universities teach these students, because they show no signs of a spirit of free inquiry.

Khymani James‘s comment that “Zionists don’t deserve to live“ is music to Tehran’s ears, but student-protesters may find that the Islamic regime’s officials are less supportive in other respects.

The broader concerns of these students, things like LGBT rights, the environment, and every other issue that they not only speak about, but use as a platform to act out on, are precisely the things that Hamas and the regime in Tehran oppose and downright violate.

The problem is that their zeal has been misappropriated by academicians who have been strategically installed at universities throughout the West — specifically the U.S. and Canada — to surreptitiously indoctrinate students.

Pay to play

The simple truth is that plenty of Ivy League, Big Ten, and other universities have practically put their faculty positions up for sale.  So, over several decades, the Islamic regime has poured plenty of money into various universities to place its own handpicked people in key faculty positions.  Those people then facilitate access for some of Tehran’s most objectionable elements to universities like Columbia.

Now, however, members of the Iranian opposition in the U.S. are working overtime to expose several of Tehran’s operatives in universities.

The dichotomy

The regime in Tehran goes out of its way to pretend that the protests in the West are somehow worse than or akin to the protests in Iran.  The main difference is what happens to the arrested students after the regime carts them off.

Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Tehran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shared a cartoon on X featuring police removing a teenage protester dressed as the Statue of Liberty.  He wrote, “Imprisonment of #freedom in the U.S.A.”  Meanwhile, Iran Human Rights, a nonprofit that monitors executions in Iran, reported that in 2023, there were officially 834 executions, an increase of 43% from the year before.  Amnesty International has reported higher numbers.

The morality police are on a rampage, attacking girls and women who dress without a proper head covering or present themselves “immodestly” on the streets.  The methods that Khamenei’s security forces use to suppress protests in Iran includes killing hundreds and arresting thousands.  For a while, the world was outraged at the sight of women and girls getting arrested, beaten, and even killed, for refusing to dress the way a regime of hoary religious fundamentalist men consider appropriate.

Iran is particularly prone to contradictions, such as executing homosexuals while denying that there are any homosexuals in Iran and objecting to the treatment of protesters in the West while jailing, beating, and killing protesters on its own soil.

Last week, a scandalous account emerged of how 16-year-old female protester Nika Shakarami had been targeted and what was done to her following her arrest.  The Khomeinist regime has typically denied all responsibility.  The BBC produced a comprehensive video that recounts the entire story.

Though the Khomeinist regime’s modus operandi is far from underreported, generation after generation of Western and specifically American students are unable to find the moral imperative to take the exact type of action they have taken for “Free Palestine” and “Destroy Israel,” for their fellow Iranian students.

They mindlessly chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; “Death to America”; and “Death to Israel,” thinking that they must annihilate one for the other to prevail, an extremist proclivity specific to dictatorships.  Meanwhile, in Iran, the same generation chant: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.”  And their disdain for the regime’s proxy wars and the puppet terror organizations is once again clarified by open defiance on social media.

American Gen Z “snowflakes” vs. Iranian Gen Z “valiants”

Grit and gumption versus ignorance and pretension.  Patriotism versus treason.  The rebels without a clue in U.S. universities bolster the message of regimes that oppress their own in their own countries.

In the U.S., activism and protests have become an obligatory vehicle for university students to bare their rage and entitlement.  Armed with fictitious data and pseudo-facts, protesting has become a gimmick to bloviate about hating their country, hypocritically screaming racist remarks at other races and creeds, going on cultural imperialist rants, and generally haranguing anyone who does not go along with their bullying.

Iranian Gen Z are on the ball and know exactly what would happen to them if caught, but they bravely step up and join demonstrations on the streets of Iran.  Anyone who has bothered to read anything about prisons in Iran knows that such detentions often become a nightmare not only for the student-prisoners, but also for their families.  If the student is lucky, in short, he is prohibited from continuing his education, as decreed by the courts.  If not, the nightmare maze of the sharia courts, the whims of the mullah judges, beatings, endless horrific interrogations, and long and psychologically exacting solitary confinements at the hands of some of the most vicious guards begin.

All this was admitted by one of the regime’s mullahs, Hossein Mortazavi Zanjani, who headed up some of the most horrific prisons during the early years of the revolution.  As reports, stats, and data regarding the regime’s crimes against humanity come out year after year, the Khomeinist regime has never rolled back its human and civil rights violations.  If anything, it has doubled down on the abuse, continuing the never-ending cycle of Islamist injustice.

However, the power of the underground counterculture has generated a conscious and interconnected youth in Iran who are thirsty for freedom and change.

The personal accounts of young protesters killed for speaking out against the regime, combined with the influence of the Iranian underground counterculture on generations of Iranians desperate to get out from under dictatorship, helps illuminates the motivations of those who keep returning to the streets.  The dissenting voices and protests are not going away, and the regime’s leaders are uncertain how to extinguish the flame.

To that end, at every turn and every uptick of protests, the regime doubles down on every level of violence and arrests.  At present, three of the most beloved musicians and icons of counterculture, Shervin Hajipour, Amir Tataloo, and Toomaj Salehi, are squarely in the regime’s crosshairs.  Shervin, who received the honorary Grammy Award in 2023 for his song “Barayeh,” has been sentenced to prison.  Singer and rapper Amir Tataloo is on trial for his powerful lyrics that expose life under “the Shia Mafia.”  And rapper Toomaj Salehi has been sentenced to death for the lyrics of his song about the murder of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini.  And of course, the security forces have no compunction arresting students protesting the death sentence handed down to Toomaj.

A year abroad

If a picture is worth a thousand words, an experience is worth a million.  Let the American student-protesters try a year protesting in Iran.  This could be the single most life-changing cultural and academic experience of their lives.  The question is, would any of these demonstrators put their money where their mouth is and take the offer?

Image: Chickenonline via Pixabay, Pixabay License.