From Iran to America: What America Refuses to See

I left Iran when I was one year old, but Iran never left me.

My earliest memories are not of Tehran’s streets or the smell of saffron in my grandmother’s kitchen. They are of a family story that replayed itself at every milestone: we had a homeland, we lost it, and we rebuilt everything in America from scratch because Jews were no longer safe where we were born.

My mother fled first, clutching my brother and me as the Islamic Revolution swallowed the country whole. My father stayed behind, like so many educated, hopeful Iranians did, believing the uprising would pass. Our family had too much to lose: our community, our faith, our place in a proud Persian society that had once been modern and outward-looking. He couldn’t fathom that Iranians would allow violent ideologues and street thugs to take over and turn a civilization into a prison.

He was wrong. The world was wrong. And today, as Iran bleeds again, I fear America is still refusing to understand what is actually happening.

Iran is more than the Islamic Republic

Iran is not just “the Islamic Republic.” Iran is Cyrus the Great. Iran is the ancient idea that power can be restrained, that a ruler can protect minorities rather than crush them. The Cyrus Cylinder has long been held up as a symbol of religious tolerance and a government accountable to something beyond brute force. That is why what happened in 1979 was not merely a regime change. It was a civilizational hijacking.

By the grace of God, my father eventually escaped — through Turkey, then Greece, then Israel — on a fake passport, and reunited with us after two years of hardship. We had no assets. No safety net. Just a battered family and a determination to start again in the land of the free.

America did not ask us to erase who we were. It asked us to work.

My parents did whatever they had to do to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. My mother made one thing nonnegotiable: my brother and I would go to a Jewish day school. She worked as a preschool teacher. She helped Iranian immigrants translate English documents and fill out applications — because when you’ve fled tyranny, you recognize the sacredness of simple things: paperwork that leads to jobs, schools, stability and citizenship.

We loved this country because it didn’t discriminate against us for being Middle Eastern or Jewish. It taught us that minority rights were not a slogan — they were law.For most of my life, I believed America’s promises were sturdier than Iran’s.

For decades, the Islamic Republic has waged war on its own people. It controls bodies, speech, education, dress and thought. It arrests teenagers. It tortures. It executes. It forces “confessions.” It turns grief into a crime and truth into contraband.

And when Iranians rise up, again and again, the regime responds the only way totalitarian regimes respond: by making an example of the brave, so the rest will learn to be afraid.

The internet blackouts, the fear, the disappearances, the public hangings — these are not side stories. They are the system. A regime that must terrorize its citizens to survive has forfeited any claim to legitimacy.

And yet, too many in the West still talk about Iran as if it’s a normal government with normal grievances, instead of an occupying force sitting on the throat of a nation.

Why this matters to American parents

If you are a parent in America, you cannot afford to treat Iran as “foreign policy.”

Iran is the blueprint of what happens when religious extremism becomes state power: the family becomes subordinate to ideology, children are indoctrinated early, women become symbols to control and truth becomes punishable. The regime did not only steal Iran’s freedom. It stole Iran’s future.

This is why teaching our children matters.

We teach our children about the Holocaust because memory is armor.

We teach our children about slavery because truth is responsibility.

And we must teach our children about Iran because tyranny does not announce itself as tyranny. It arrives calling itself justice. It arrives claiming to protect the poor. It arrives promising morality. And then it builds prisons.

When our children are taught to romanticize “revolution,” we owe them the full sentence: revolutions can free nations, and revolutions can also hand nations to tyrants.

Teach them that compulsory hijab really is not “culture,” but coercion.

Teach them that morality police are not “tradition,” but terror.

Teach them that women do not need saving by clerics, women need freedom from clerics.

A brief word about what I saw in America

I didn’t expect to watch echoes of Iran in the United States, but I did.

When my daughter went to Columbia University, the shock of seeing Jewish students targeted for their identity was incomprehensible. She was threatened, bullied, and forced to take classes online for her own safety.

Despite the fear, she stood up. She testified before Congress and said, “We are not Jews with trembling knees,” drawing courage from the very family history that America once promised would never have to repeat itself here.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish life in the United States has been permanently altered. Many of us have felt something shift: that old message Jews have heard across centuries — your home is temporary. Like the sukkah, it is shelter, but not certainty.

And as we watch brave Iranians risk their lives for freedom from murderous clerics — facing gunfire, prison, humiliation, and blackout conditions — we are reminded again of our homeland and the pain we endured leaving 47 years ago. We know what it means when the world looks away.

The moral litmus test

Iran’s regime has slaughtered its own people for decades, and yet the world’s loudest “human rights” megaphones fall silent when the victims are Iranians. Where is the sustained outrage for Iranian girls beaten for refusing compulsory hijab? Where is the global insistence that Iranians deserve freedom, dignity and peace?

Silence because they are the ones who have been funding and fueling the hostile “pro-Palestinian” protests on our streets and campuses. 

We should have enough moral clarity to know that silence has a cost. Silence tells protesters they are alone. Silence tells our children that some lives are trending, and some lives are disposable.

A note I refuse to omit

Let me be clear: my quarrel is not with Muslims as people. My friends are Muslim. The Iranian Muslim people who oppose tyranny and want pluralism and peace are not fanatic Muslims.

My quarrel is with Islamist totalitarianism: the ideology that turned my birthplace into a surveillance state, weaponized religion to sanctify repression and exports terrorism through proxy forces while its own people are starved of freedom.

If Americans cannot distinguish between faith and theocratic authoritarianism, we will keep losing morally, culturally and politically.

What we must do now

America does not need more slogans. It needs moral clarity and action.

1. Say the truth plainly: The Islamic Republic is not “misunderstood.” It is a totalitarian regime that survives through violence.

2. Stand with Iranian dissidents and elevate their voices and impose real consequences for executions and repression.

3. Teach our children early what tyranny looks like, how propaganda works, and why freedom requires courage.

4. Refuse selective human rights. If a movement cannot condemn Iran’s brutality with the same intensity it condemns Israel’s so-called “genocide,” it is not a human rights movement. It is an ideology.

5. Practice gratitude with vigilance. America gave families like mine a second life. We must defend the values that made that possible.

A final word from a family that has seen this movie

I am an Iranian woman who became American because America once understood what tyranny looks like.

My family learned, the hard way, that when a theocratic regime consolidates power, it does not stop with one group. It eats institutions. It crushes dissent. It rewrites education. It turns neighbors into informants. It converts fear into a national language.

That is why I cannot watch the world stay silent while innocent Iranians risk their lives for the freedoms we enjoy every day.

To my fellow Americans: open your eyes. Teach your children. Do not outsource your moral clarity. Do not normalize what should never be normal.

We fled once. We rebuilt once.

We should not have to do it again.

Shirin Yadegar is an American Jewish Iranian journalist. She is the founder of www.lamommagazine.com.