An Iranian refugee's warning to American universities embracing foreign funding and radicalism

Imagine a University that fully embodied “America First.”

What would things have looked like if, the day following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee was not actively blaming the victims of Hamas’ terror attack?

Or Students for Justice in Palestine at George Washington University projecting “Glory to our martyrs,” on the side of the campus library was instead replaced with Israeli flags waving in solidarity after the attacks? 

If protesters at UNC Chapel Hill had never torn down the American flag to run up a Palestinian one, and mobs outside Washington, D.C.’s Union Station had never burned American flags and sprayed “Hamas is coming” across a national monument?

The movement that excused the massacre of Israelis did not stop there. It came for America’s flag next.

Demonstrators take part in an “Emergency Rally: Stand with Palestinians Under Siege in Gaza,” amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., Oct. 14, 2023. (Reuters)

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Maybe it’s just a university that keeps refusing to cash a check from Doha and refuses Qatari involvement in hiring faculty or shaping the curriculum.

This campus does not exist today, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t.

I fled a country that abandoned education in favor of radicalization. The Islamic Revolution did not start in mosques, but on campuses. Students marched for a revolution they believed they could control and influence, not one that the clerics would weaponize and use to plunge Iran into darkness.

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I was six when my family fled through the desert under burlap sacks while Iranian border police fired at us. I arrived in America speaking no English, and this country gave me everything: a public education, a medical degree, a career, a voice. I owe America a debt I can never repay. As a result, I take it personally when American universities produce something other than patriotic Americans.

It’s been three years since Hamas’ attacks, killing more than 1,200 innocent Israelis and abducting 251 to Gaza as hostages. On the three-year anniversary of the attacks, Columbia University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine hosted a protest with advertisements stating, “Glory to the martyrs, resistance until victory.”

In 2023, 34 Harvard groups held Israel “entirely responsible” for the slaughter of its own people before the bodies were counted, and a Cornell professor told a rally the attack was “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

Demonstrators gather on Cambridge Common to protest Harvard’s stance on the war in Gaza and show support for the Palestinian people, outside Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 25, 2025. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

Columbia University Apartheid Divest posted “Long live the global intifada!” None of these schools ever considered expulsion.

Meanwhile, cash from foreign nations continues to pour into universities across the country. US Department of Education data shows foreign sources have sent $67.6 billion to American universities since 1986.

The largest donor, Qatar, has invested $7.7 billion. This is the same Gulf monarchy that has hosted Hamas’ leadership since 2012. Investigations in President Donald Trump’s first term pushed universities to disclose more than $6.5 billion in foreign money they had failed to report.

The Columbia Intifada newspaper was handed out at a protest a the Ivy League university during the second anniversary of the Oct 7. Hamas attack on Israel. (Fox News)

In a June report, JINSA documented how Qatar uses financial levers to influence America’s campuses. Qatar presents its investment as a philanthropic initiative in American academic excellence abroad, funded not by the Qatar government but by the non-governmental Qatar Foundation.

JINSA explained, “A state that does not permit its own citizens the civil liberties it funds an American university to advocate for in America is not engaged in human rights philanthropy. It is purchasing the institutional vocabulary and academic prestige of American civil rights and deploying them in service of a political category that aligns with its foreign policy objectives.”

Dozens of George Washington University graduates wearing traditional Palestinian keffiyehs walk out during President Ellen Granberg’s commencement address on the National Mall. The protest called for a sanctuary campus, protection of free speech, and divestment from companies supporting Israel’s military operations in Gaza. (Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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Let’s imagine the alternative universities could embrace.

Imagine Harvard, which accepted $4.2 billion in foreign funds between 1986 and 2025, announcing it would refuse to accept funds from countries that bankroll terrorist organizations. Or if Columbia treated praising terror as harshly as cheating on an exam.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned foreign students on visas, “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist.”

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The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to say nearly anything they want, no matter how vile. A private university also has the right to decide that praising terrorists is incompatible with its campus culture.

Imagine what America would look like if universities held students to a standard above the current status quo. They would build microchips, improve infrastructure, and develop technological advances that ensure we, America, are the global leader we should be. That is what “America First” looks like on a campus: not a slogan, but an education that produces proud Americans.

Graduating students hold a sign reading “There Are No Universities Left in Gaza” during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., May 23, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

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This is what universities did for generations before they decided foreign money and fashionable radicalism mattered more than the country that built them. The Shah’s Iran had world-class universities too.

I watched what happened when they stopped being about education. I will not watch it happen to the country that saved my life.