Dr. Sheila Nazarian, an Iranian-Jewish physician, mother, and self-described “proud American,” delivered a deeply personal warning this week about the dangers of revolutionary movements that disguise themselves as liberation while ultimately delivering tyranny. Her testimony drew directly from her family’s own escape from Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and from what she describes as an unmistakable parallel unfolding today on American college campuses.

Nazarian recounted how, in 1985, her mother took her and her sister to a bazaar in Iran where they were hidden in the back of a covered truck, smuggled toward the Pakistani border, and awakened in the desert by gunshots as border police fired on the group. After weeks of flight through Pakistan and a stay in Vienna, the family legally entered the United States. It is a story, she said, that grounds everything she has to say about revolution — not in theory, but in lived experience.

At the center of Nazarian’s testimony is the 1979 coalition that toppled the Shah of Iran — an alliance, she said, between Islamists seeking religious rule and Marxists and socialists seeking secular revolution. The two factions agreed on almost nothing, she noted: leftists championed women’s liberation while Islamists sought to control how women dressed and behaved; leftists spoke of sexual freedom while Islamists would go on to build a regime that persecuted gay people. Their only shared ground, she said, was hostility toward the Shah, Israel, and the United States.

According to Nazarian, the Iranian left believed it was using the Islamists as a tool to bring down the existing order, assuming it would help lead the country afterward. Instead, once the Shah fell, the Islamists turned on their former allies — purging students, imprisoning professors and intellectuals, and shuttering universities that had helped fuel the uprising.

Nazarian argued that a similar dynamic is visible today at American universities, where she says radical Islamist, Marxist, socialist, and other activist movements have found common cause largely through shared opposition to Israel, the United States, and capitalism — despite holding starkly incompatible values.

She urged young activists who romanticize groups such as Hamas, or embrace socialist ideology, to reckon honestly with the historical record of such movements — particularly their treatment of women, LGBTQ+ people, and religious and ethnic minorities. The Iranian revolution, she said, should be studied on college campuses as a cautionary tale rather than overlooked in favor of what she called modern “indoctrination camps.”

Nazarian warned that revolutionary movements rarely announce their true intentions at the outset. Instead, they offer promises of justice, equality, and free public goods — healthcare, education, housing — that ultimately require someone to pay. That payment, she said, comes first through taxation, then through restrictions on personal freedom, speech, and eventually liberty itself.

She pointed to the ongoing oppression of women in Iran — including mandatory hijab laws she described as daily symbols of state control — as evidence of how revolutions that promise liberation can instead produce systemic repression that persists across generations. Nearly five decades after 1979, she noted, Iranian women are still fighting for rights their grandmothers once held.

Nazarian also recounted the story of a 17-year-old Jewish girl in Iran, imprisoned for years after being tricked into distributing pamphlets for a Marxist student group, as an illustration of the human toll such regimes exact on the very people who once supported revolutionary change.

Nazarian framed America and Israel as sharing a common foundation: the primacy of the individual over the state, religious freedom, gender equality, free speech, and democratic governance. It is precisely these values, she argued, that make both nations targets of ideologies built on control and repression.

She cautioned that hostility toward Jewish communities and the Jewish state often functions as an early warning sign for broader ideological extremism, urging vigilance whenever movements grow fixated on opposing Israel or excuse antisemitic rhetoric and violence.

Nazarian closed her remarks with a direct appeal: that Americans not form alliances with those who reject their core values simply because of a shared adversary, and that they resist trading freedom for the promise of free goods and services. Revolution, she said, must never be confused with liberation.

Her testimony, delivered with visible emotion, closed with a plea for historical literacy and vigilance: “I escaped one revolution. I will not stay silent while I watch people trying to bring another one here.”

AMMWEC Welcomes His Beatitude Archbishop Melchizedek to the National Coalition Conference

AMMWEC is honored to welcome His Beatitude Archbishop Melchizedek, North America Metropolitan of the Greek Palestinian Orthodox Church, to AMMWEC’s National Coalition Conference on Antisemitism & Hate at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

His presence reflects our shared commitment to promoting unity, mutual respect, and standing together against antisemitism and all forms of hate. We look forward to an inspiring day of meaningful dialogue and collaboration.

📅 July 13

📍 National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

🕗 8:00 AM