The Marandi Paradox: Selling Repression While Soaking in Free Speech
In an era where disinformation is dressed in academic regalia and genocidal regimes find their soft-spoken emissaries abroad, one man has emerged as the Islamic regime’s favored mouthpiece for Western consumption: Mohammad Marandi.
The ultimate Nepo-Baby of the Khomeinist regime, Marandi appears regularly on platforms like BBC, CNN with Christiane Amanpour, Al Jazeera, and most recently Piers Morgan’s show. He poses as an “academic” and “analyst,” but in reality, he is nothing more than a calculated propagandist—polished, English-speaking, and embedded deep in the Islamic regime’s machinery of narrative warfare.
Christiane Amanpour interviewing Mohammad Marandi
Born in 1966 in Richmond, Virginia, Marandi is the son of Alireza Marandi—a pediatrician with deep ties to the Islamic regime who later served as Iran’s Minister of Health and became Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s personal physician. The Marandi family returned to Iran in the early 1980s as the Khomeinist theocracy solidified its hold on Iranian society.
At the age of 13, following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, he returned with his family to Iran. With all international schools shut down by the new regime, Marandi was abruptly placed into the traditional Iranian school system, enrolling at Tehran’s highly conservative Alavi High School.
“Coming back to Iran, I didn’t speak Persian at all,” he has said in interviews, describing the language barrier as one of his greatest challenges during that period.
Despite his eventual alignment with the Islamic regime, Marandi has expressed nostalgic attachments to his American upbringing. In an interview with a U.S. outlet, he fondly recalled being an avid fan of the Dallas Cowboys during his childhood and spoke of missing the NFL after relocating to Iran. “When I was a kid,” he noted, “I felt more American than Iranian. Like everyone else at school, I pledged allegiance to the U.S. flag.”
Marandi’s fluency in English and his Western upbringing later became a tool for the regime. He has notably claimed that Western outlets were mistranslating Ahmadinejad’s remarks about Israel.
His insider access to the Islamic regime’s apparatus has long raised eyebrows. On several occasions, Marandi has appeared to act as a de facto state spokesman, revealing sensitive information ahead of official channels. For instance, during the 2019 tanker standoff, when no one had clear details, he publicly disclosed that the ship in question had been seized by the IRGC Navy—complete with its original captain and crew—while under U.S. military protection.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s former Foreign Minister and Marandi at JCPOA negotiations
Marandi's presence as part of Iran's nuclear negotiation team also ignited controversy. As someone with a documented background in the United States, and rumored dual citizenship, his role has been seen as emblematic of the regime’s double standards: while other dual nationals face imprisonment or exile, Marandi is granted privileged access to sensitive political arenas. He has publicly denied holding dual citizenship.
As a teenager, Mohammad Marandi volunteered for the Iran–Iraq War, a conflict that the regime used not only as a battleground but also as a crucible to forge ideological loyalists. Marandi has admitted to volunteering at a time when countless young boys were indoctrinated and deployed as human shields or martyrs, often in horrifying suicide missions under the banner of Shi’a martyrdom.
After the war, he studied English literature at the University of Tehran and later earned a PhD from the University of Birmingham in the UK. But instead of using his education to build bridges or foster mutual understanding, Marandi returned to Tehran to become the regime’s academic frontman. With tweed jackets and fluent English, he reinvented himself as a palatable, erudite defender of a regime that stones women, hangs protesters, and jails dissident students.
Marandi now serves as a professor of English literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran and co-founded the Institute for North American and European Studies. He formerly led the university’s North American Studies program and served as Deputy of International Affairs, though he was eventually removed, reportedly due to internal disputes.
But his role has never been confined to academia. He has been referred to as “Iran’s chief propagandist in English”—his job is not to inform, but to distort. He knows how to speak not just the language of the West, but its cultural dialect: invoking terms like “anti-imperialism,” “national sovereignty,” and “Western hypocrisy” to justify systemic brutality and smother dissent. He’s not a scholar; he’s a regime operator masquerading as one.
He routinely appears on global media platforms like PBS, RT, Channel 4, and Al Jazeera, portraying Iran’s oppressive apparatus as misunderstood and even admirable. He defends proxy militias such as Hezbollah and Hamas while downplaying Tehran’s long record of domestic repression and international terrorism.
Marandi operates with surgical precision. He frames mass executions as “security measures,” slanders exiled dissidents as “traitors,” and calls legitimate uprisings—like the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement—mere “riots.” During interviews, he praises Iran’s missile programs and drone attacks, boasting about their low cost and high efficiency in inflicting damage on Western-aligned states. He has even dismissed concerns about the 1988 massacre of political prisoners—one of the darkest chapters in Iran’s modern history—as exaggerated or justified.
Western journalists—often unwittingly—aid this campaign. By referring to him as “Professor,” they do more than grant him credibility; they validate a system that bars dissenting students from receiving an education. In Iran, protesting students are expelled, denied degrees, or banned from entering universities altogether. Among those who do manage to graduate, many are consigned to joblessness unless they pledge loyalty to the regime.
To call Marandi a “professor” is to mock the sanctity of academic life—it turns the university into an instrument of state repression.
Marandi has served as an advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiating teams under both Presidents Rouhani and Raisi. During those talks, he acted less like a diplomat and more like a mouthpiece, parroting regime talking points and rejecting Western red lines.
Marandi has repeatedly downplayed the significance of removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, claiming it was neither a precondition nor a central demand in Iran’s nuclear negotiations. Yet substantial evidence from 2021 and 2022 shows the opposite: the IRGC delisting was a key sticking point for Tehran and even caused talks to stall.
Multiple Iranian officials—including then–Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian—and state-affiliated media consistently underscored the regime’s insistence on the IRGC’s removal from the U.S. terror list. These statements flatly contradict Marandi’s revisionist framing.
He isn’t just spinning narratives; he’s shaping Iran’s posture on the world stage.
He has been described as one of the staunchest defenders of the Islamic regime’s “Axis of Resistance,” relentlessly attacking the West while portraying proxy forces in the Middle East as righteous and unstoppable. He has perfected the art of narrative warfare, recasting Iran’s brutal theocracy as a misunderstood victim and its militias as freedom fighters. He wields charm and cultural fluency as weapons, shielding the regime from scrutiny by flooding the media with confusion, deflection, and double-speak.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the Western media’s dangerous naivety better than Piers Morgan’s recent interview with Marandi. Morgan brought him on ostensibly to challenge him but ended up doing the regime a favor.
By theatrically cursing him out, Morgan handed Marandi two gifts a) a broader platform where millions who had never heard of him were introduced not as a regime loyalist, but as an articulate man with a seat at the table and b) the martyr optics. Morgan’s profanity allowed Marandi to appear calm and composed by contrast, casting himself as the victim of Western hysteria.
The regime couldn’t have scripted it better.
This wasn’t just a lapse in judgment—it was complicity. Every time a Western outlet gives Marandi a microphone, they help launder the regime’s crimes. They ignore the jailed filmmakers, tortured labor activists, and blinded students in favor of a regime insider who speaks the Queen’s English.
Why is Marandi elevated while the voices of real Iranians—those with scars and stories—are ignored? Because truth is inconvenient. And Marandi speaks from power.
Mohammad Marandi is not a commentator. He is an operator. His entire professional life has been dedicated to serving the Islamic regime—humanizing the inhuman, rationalizing the criminal, and distorting the truth.
It’s time to call him what he is: a charlatan in academic robes, a regime loyalist who speaks softly so the regime can kill loudly. A regime that executes women’s rights activists, poisons schoolgirls, and funds global terrorism doesn’t need a better PR strategy. It needs to be held accountable. Giving airtime to its elite apologists does not expose them—it empowers them.