Political activist and human rights advocate
The privileged children of Iran’s ruling elite are building futures overseas that their parents have withheld from millions of Iranians for almost half a century.
Every society has its elite. But few countries exhibit as stark a divide between rulers and ruled as the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The leadership in Tehran still insists that the system built after the 1979 revolution is righteous, independent, and morally superior to the West. They proclaim that Iran is self-sufficient and culturally immune to foreign influence. They demand that ordinary citizens remain loyal, endure hardship, and treat isolation as virtue.
And yet, when it comes to their own families, the narrative implodes.
The offspring of Iran’s most powerful political, military, and clerical figures overwhelmingly choose to live somewhere else—most often in the United States, Canada, Europe or Australia. They study at Western universities, work in Western corporations, and enjoy Western freedoms.
This is neither accident nor anomaly. It is a pattern so consistent that Iranians have given it a name: the diaspora of privilege.
A list that goes on and on
Consider the Larijani family, long central to the architecture of the Islamic Republic. Ali Larijani—head of state television, nuclear negotiator, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and a twelve-year speaker of parliament—has spent years warning the public about the dangers of American influence.
Yet his daughter, a medical doctor, lives and practices in Ohio. She built a life in the very country her father depicts as an existential threat.
Or take Yahya Rahim-Safavi, former commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guard and one of the supreme leader’s closest advisers—who helped define the concept of “cultural resistance” and oversaw enforcement of compulsory hijab.
His daughter now lives freely in Australia, enjoying precisely the choices her father spent decades denying Iranian women.
Even families associated with the Islamic Republic’s “moderate” or “reformist” wings follow the same path.
The two daughters of former president Mohammad Khatami pursued higher education and lived for extended periods abroad.
So did a niece of former president Hassan Rouhani—herself the daughter of a presidential aide and senior nuclear negotiator. Factional differences vanish when opportunity abroad beckons.
The contradiction repeats. Masoumeh Ebtekar, one of the spokespeople of the 1979 hostage-takers, spent years justifying the takeover of the US Embassy. Decades later, she sent her son to study in Los Angeles—hardly the den of decadence and corruption described in her generation’s propaganda.
The Nobakht siblings, both accomplished physicians in top American institutions, followed a similar path. Their father and uncle held senior roles shaping Iran’s budgetary and economic policies—policies that left Iranian hospitals under-funded and understaffed. Yet their children built world-class medical careers abroad, in systems defined by stability and scientific freedom.
Even the grandchildren of Iran’s most senior clerics are part of the same exodus.
Zahra Takhshid, granddaughter of late Ayatollah Mohammadreza Mahdavi-Kani—one-time head of the Assembly of Experts and custodian of the regime’s ideological purity—now teaches law at an American university.
Her work focuses on rights, freedoms, and digital media: topics that would collide instantly with state censorship at home.
A transactional exodus
Taken together, these examples expose a political truth the regime cannot conceal: Iran’s rulers do not trust the system they impose on the public.
If they did, their children would stay—study in its universities, rely on its hospitals, and build their futures in the society their parents govern. But they don’t. They leave, quietly and steadily.
This exodus is not ideological. It is transactional. When you are connected to power, the world is your oyster.
While ordinary Iranians face sanctions, inflation, unemployment and severe limits on travel and opportunity, the children of high-ranking officials glide past these barriers. Western passports, long-term visas, elite degrees and high-paying jobs become accessible through money, influence and political insulation.
This is not the diaspora produced by repression or economic collapse—the path millions of ordinary Iranians have taken out of necessity. This is something else entirely: a ruling-class diaspora born of privilege and contradiction.
Louder than words
The noble-born are of course fully entitled to live wherever they wish and pursue the futures they desire. But their choices, their quiet escape, speaks louder than their parents’ slogans.
When the sons and daughters of ministers, generals, parliament leaders and revolutionary icons choose Los Angeles over Tehran, Cleveland over Qom, Melbourne over Mashhad, and Washington over Isfahan, they deliver a verdict more powerful than any opposition manifesto: The system is not good enough, not even for its architects.
The Islamic Republic demands loyalty from the public, but its own heirs refuse to live under the conditions created for everyone else. This is the heart of the hypocrisy: restriction is mandatory for ordinary Iranians, freedom is hereditary for the elite.
A government whose children flee its ideology cannot claim legitimacy. A revolution abandoned by its heirs cannot claim success. And a system that exports its privileged offspring to the West while confining its own people at home is not a model—it is a contradiction waiting to collapse under the weight of its own lies.
Six years ago, on a cold, rainy November night, the price of gasoline in Iran tripled at midnight. By morning, the streets were burning. The state would later compress that nationwide protests into a bureaucratic phrase, “the gasoline protests,” yet inside Iran it endures as something far more elemental, a breaking point, the moment a long-strained relationship between rulers and ruled finally gave way.
An overnight decree, issued without warning, landed on a society already thinned by corruption, sanctions, and the slow corrosion of trust. Gasoline was not merely fuel; it was the last fragile order of an ordinary life.
By dawn on November 15, unrest had spread through more than a hundred cities. The slogans outgrew the price hike almost instantly. Within hours, the government offered not explanation but silence, plunging the country into a nationwide internet blackout that severed families, stifled communication, and obscured what would unfold in the dark.
Inside that manufactured quiet, the killing quickened. Snipers appeared on rooftops. Live rounds struck torsos and heads. Amnesty International confirmed at least 304 deaths; internal figures passed abroad placed the toll far higher, closer to fifteen hundred. Leaked hospital logs, morgue records, and satellite images of hurried burial sites supported the higher count. No official list of the dead has ever been released, but the names that remain are the ones families refused to let vanish.
The Program
On my Persian-language call-in show, “The Program,” broadcast from Iran International, a Persian-language satellite television channel, two mothers recently spoke to a worldwide audience. Their voices — steady, unadorned — carried the weight of those missing lists, two fragments of a record the state has never acknowledged.
One mother introduced herself not with biography but with loss: “I am the mother of Navid Behboudi. Twenty-three years old. Born in 1998. They killed my child.”
Another spoke with the same stripped-down clarity: “I am Mahboubeh Ramazani, the mother of Pejman Gholipour. My son was eighteen. Born in 1998. They killed him because of the price of gasoline.”
Neither woman had sought confrontation with the state. They wanted what any parent wants — a future for their children, a degree, a job, the possibility of a wedding. Instead, they entered a world of interrogations and quiet threats designed to smother even private grief. Cameras now watch over their children’s graves. Intelligence agents monitor who comes to mourn. In Iran, even grief carries a political charge.
The mothers speak with a precision that feels almost liturgical, as though exactness might preserve what the state has tried to erase.
One recounts the final hours of her son’s life: “At 7:30, I called him. My Pejman was still breathing. At 8:20, they shot my son.”
His clothes still hang untouched behind his bedroom door. “When I go out,” she said, “and my child comes home, he will look for his clothes.” She speaks in the present tense. Grief has its own grammar.
The other mother remembered the moment she saw her son’s body. She had once imagined seeing him in wedding clothes. Instead, she saw him prepared for burial. “I asked him, Navid, open your eyes and look at me,” she said. “He never opened his eyes.”
The machinery of silence
What followed the killings was a choreography of pressure and containment. Families were summoned to Kahrizak, a notorious detention center long synonymous in Iran with torture and coerced confessions. Officials demanded written pledges: no public grief, no interviews, no large funerals.
Even the burial was not theirs to decide. “They told us we had no right to choose where to bury him,” one mother said.
Another recalled being instructed: “Do not cry. Do not gather people. Go home.”
Many families discovered cameras mounted above the graves. “Not just my son’s,” a mother told me. “All of them.” She described visiting the cemetery on her son’s birthday, arriving at 10:30 a.m. and staying until nine at night. “They locked the doors,” she said. “No one was allowed in. We were not allowed to mourn.”
This system is built not only to punish dissent but to prevent solidarity. Silence becomes ritual. Mourning becomes a private burden, watched and circumscribed.
Inside Iran, no independent investigation has ever been allowed. The same institutions implicated in the killings oversee the judiciary. But abroad, a coalition of rights groups convened the Aban Tribunal in London, a people’s court modeled on historical international inquiries. After reviewing hundreds of pieces of evidence, the panel concluded that Islamic republic authorities had committed crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and sexual violence.
The judgment has no legal force, but for families denied even the vocabulary of justice, the act of naming the crime offered its own narrow, necessary recognition.
The mothers of Aban
The mothers of Aban — Aban being the Iranian month that corresponds roughly to November — have never let November end. Each year, as the month approaches, they begin a ritual that resists the state’s enforced forgetting.
“Today my son was alive,” they tell one another. “Tomorrow he was still alive.” They measure the month not by dates but by the life still present before the gunshots.
One mother described the conversations she continues to hold with her son: “I tell him, Pejman, do you know what happened that day? Maybe we were not careful. Maybe we lost you by mistake.”
She knows precisely who fired the bullets, but maternal instinct searches for any version of the story in which the ending might be undone. “I still cannot accept that he is gone,” she said. “I still cannot accept that he will not walk through that door.”
Amid the devastation, a narrow line of resolve endures. Not hope for happiness — “I will never be happy again,” one mother told me — but hope for a future in which no parent is ordered not to cry at a grave.
“I hope our voice reaches the world,” she said. “We have not lived for five years. Our life is black. Full of tears.”
Their plea is disarmingly simple: that their children not disappear into the silence the state demands, that remembering become a form of resistance, that the world not look away.
The state tried to bury the victims of November 2019 twice — once in the ground and once in memory. The mothers refuse the second burial.
“This government is even afraid of our children’s graves,” one of them said. “If they fear the graves, imagine how afraid they are of the living.”
Holding a candle in the cold November rain
The internet can be shut down. Protests can be crushed. Cemeteries can be lined with cameras. But on a November night, a mother can speak her son’s name into a static-filled line on “The Program,” and a country can still hear its echo.
That night’s show was heavy for all of us on The Program. When I finally walked home through the rain, the city felt emptied out, as if carrying the weight of those two voices. By the time I reached my door, the rain had stopped. I took my dog outside for a walk, put on my headphones, and, almost without thinking, whispered into the dark:
“Nothing lasts forever, not even cold November rain.”
