The Blood Price Paid by Ordinary Iranians
In September 2022, Iran’s morality police beat 22-year-old Mahsa Amini to death for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly.
Her murder ignited the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising. The regime responded with bullets, batons, torture, and mass arrests. Young women such as Nika Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh, and Hadis Najafi became symbols of a generation punished for demanding the most basic human dignity.
The brutality did not end there.
Economic collapse, corruption, water shortages, and years of repression triggered further unrest in late 2025 and early 2026. Once again, Iranian youth demanding bread, water, and freedom were met with overwhelming force. For decades, the Islamic Republic demanded sacrifice from ordinary Iranians while offering privilege, protection, and escape routes to the ruling elite.
One Rule for the People. Another for the Elite.
For 47 years, the regime has preached hatred of the West while presenting itself as the defender of Islamic morality and anti-Western resistance.
But there is one rule for ordinary Iranians — and another for the families of the powerful. While young Iranians die in the streets, the children of regime officials study, work, and build lives in the very countries their fathers publicly condemn as immoral and corrupt. The Islamic Republic tells millions of Iranians that the West is evil.
Its own elite clearly disagree.
Ali Larijani’s daughter built an academic and medical career in the United States. Mohammad-Javad Larijani’s sons established successful careers in Britain and Canada. Masoumeh Ebtekar — the former spokesperson for the 1979 U.S. Embassy hostage takers and later vice president of Iran — saw her son pursue an academic career in California.
Across the Iranian elite, relatives of senior clerics, IRGC commanders, and political insiders have studied, worked, and settled in Britain, Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United States. Senior regime insiders have repeatedly been accused by Iranian dissidents and former officials of securing residency, educational opportunities, and financial pathways abroad for their families while ordinary Iranians faced repression, economic collapse, censorship, and morality police patrols at home.
Even relatives linked to the family of Ayatollah Khomeini have publicly embraced lifestyles and freedoms unavailable to many ordinary Iranian women. These are not isolated cases. This is the system itself.
“Islamic Rule for You, Not for Us”
The same ruling class that lectures young Iranians about martyrdom and resistance has spent decades ensuring that their own children would never have to live under the conditions imposed on everyone else.
Ordinary Iranians are told to resist the West. Elite families quietly move to it. Ordinary young men were sent into ideological wars and revolutionary campaigns. Elite children were sent to universities in London, Toronto, Sydney, and New York.
The regime spent decades teaching ordinary Iranians that sacrifice against the West was the highest virtue. Yet the sons and daughters of the ruling elite were rarely the ones expected to sacrifice. Their futures were protected abroad — in Western schools, Western cities, and Western institutions.
The children of ordinary Iranians faced censorship, collapsing economic prospects, morality police, and political persecution. The children of the elite received passports, visas, careers, property, and opportunity abroad.
The Islamic Republic condemns Western decadence publicly while privately treating the West as the safest and most desirable place on earth for its own families.
The Failure of the Islamic Republic
The Islamic Republic built its legitimacy on the claim that it represented moral resistance against the West. But the conduct of its own elite exposes the lie.
If the West is truly evil, why do so many children of the regime’s most powerful men choose to live there? Why are the universities, hospitals, banks, and freedoms of America, Britain, Canada, and Europe considered acceptable for the ruling class but forbidden in principle for ordinary Iranians?
The answer is simple.
The regime never truly believed its own slogans. Like authoritarian elites throughout history, it used ideology as a tool for controlling the population while privately benefiting from the very system it publicly denounced. Soviet commissars did it. Communist revolutionaries did it. Iran’s ruling clerics are doing it.
A Regime Losing Its Legitimacy
Millions of Iranians no longer believe the slogans. They see the corruption. They see the double standards. They see elite families living comfortably abroad while ordinary people are beaten, imprisoned, and killed at home.
The Islamic Republic spent decades teaching ordinary Iranians to hate the West while quietly choosing the West for their own children. When the time came to decide where their sons and daughters should study, work, build careers, and raise families, many of the regime’s most powerful figures did not choose Qom.
They chose America. They chose Britain. They chose Canada. They chose the very civilization they spent decades condemning. That may be the clearest possible verdict on the Islamic Republic itself.
