Freeing Iran Will Fuel Prosperity

Plus, who funded one of Harvard’s worst programs?

The nattering nabobs of negativity over at the New York Times are trying to sell the idea that what Israel and America are doing about Iran ought to be a negative for the markets.

Let’s think about this. Estimates vary, but the status quo in Iran is that the country has GDP per capita of somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 or $5,000. You can get a higher estimate using purchasing power parity, but it’s still in poor shape, because of the combination of U.S. economic sanctions and a tyrannical government that spends money on terrorism, nuclear weapons, and religious fanaticism instead of on improving education, health care, and transportation for the people of Iran.

What’s better for U.S. companies and their profits in the medium and long term—if Iran limps along under sanctions, smuggling some petroleum products to China and drones to Russia? Or if Iran’s 90 million people are re-integrated into the world economy as American customers, channeling their technology knowhow for peaceful purposes rather than nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles?

Iran was once a prosperous country. The lyrics to the national anthem Ey Iran refer to the “bejeweled land”— “the stones of your mountains are jewels and pearls.”

Israel-based investor Michael Granoff has a wonderful article up describing his reaction at learning that Israel was attacking Iran:

What was my visceral reaction as I emerged, somewhat disoriented, from bed? It was not shock. It was not fear.

It was absolute elation.

Despite having four kids of military age, two in regular service and one in reserves, despite the certainty of ballistic missiles keeping us in and near our bomb shelter for an indeterminate amount of time, despite knowing—having already well understood—the costs of war from being in one for the better part of two years, I was simply elated. More than once that morning, with no one around, I pumped my fist and jumped for joy.

Only in the days that followed did I fully process that reaction: a decades-old burden had lifted from my shoulders. And, of course, not just from my shoulders, but from the shoulders of the State of Israel—from the shoulders of the Jewish people—indeed, from the shoulders of the civilized world.

The Iranians I talk to are full of similar anticipatory relief at the prospect that their country will soon be free of the brutal and rigid clerical regime that has imprisoned them since 1979. All the talk about the technical aspects of a possible attack on the nuclear site at Fordow is a bit of a sideshow, a distraction to the main event, which is that the Islamic Republic of Khamenei appears to be in its final days.

If things progress in that direction, it has the potential to be a joyful event comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of the captive nations of Eastern Europe. Compare the economies and streets of Poland or the Czech Republic or East Berlin today to their decrepitude under the Soviet boot. I recall being in Krakow, Poland, in 1993 and seeing, in backyards and alleyways and vacant lots, World War II rubble that still hadn’t been cleared because Communism, with its central planning and lack of incentives, was such a terrible system at generating prosperity and allocating resources. The potential to unleash prosperity in a post-ayatollah Iran is similar to that of post-Soviet eastern and central Europe.

People will say I’m being utopian or pollyannaish about this, or that Iran is likelier to end up in chaos like Iraq or Afghanistan, or dominated by its powerful neighbors Russia and China. China and Russia may indeed hope Iran fails, to prevent their own people from understanding the benefits of toppling a dictatorship. Turkey and Qatar may also meddle. But Iran’s path will be far clearer with Ayatollah Khamenei and his son and likely successor Mojtaba removed. It will then be up to the Iranian people to restore the nation’s reputation as a “bejeweled land.”

Who funded one of Harvard’s worst programs? In National Review, Stanley Kurtz takes a look at the Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program, which ran an annual trip to the Middle East that its staff described publicly in writing as having the purpose of “denoting the urgent need to dezionize Jewish consciousness.”

Kurtz’s article, headlined “Inside Harvard’s Indoctrination Factory,” moves the story ahead by exposing the program’s apparent funding:

One question that Harvard’s antisemitism report neither raises nor answers is where the Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life program — and its most controversial component, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative — came from in the first place. Who founded RPL and RCPI, and what was the intention of those founders? A partial answer is already public. The Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative was founded in 2018 as a merger of existing programs in the Divinity School and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The key personnel in that merger became core faculty in the Religion in Public Life program. And the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative formed by that initial merger was funded by Ramez Sousou and his wife Tiziana.

Who is Ramez Sousou? According to his biography at the U.S./Middle East Project (USMEP) and other sources, Sousou was co-CEO of Soros Private Equity Partners and a member of the Management Committee of Soros Fund Management. Sousou then left to found TowerBrook Capital Partners…. Sousou also has a strong interest in Palestine. According to his biography at USMEP, Sousou is the chairman of the steering committees of the Gaza Health Alliance and Teach for Palestine. …Critics of Harvard’s antisemitism report often complain that it is merely the product of pressure from billionaires. Well, it would seem that there is more than one kind of billionaire.

The frequent framing of the Harvard story as defending Harvard’s independence and academic freedom against bullying Jewish billionaires and Trump administration cretins becomes far less credible once one realizes that frequently there is some donor or foreign government with an ideological agenda behind whatever pernicious program it is that the Jewish billionaires or Trump administration cretins are trying to rein in. Sousou, who appears to be based in London and may not even be a U.S. person, is just one of many examples. I had a letter in the January-February 2025 issue of Harvard Magazine about this:

The Harvard Gazette reported in 2005 a $20-million gift from a Saudi prince for “the creation of a University-wide program on Islamic studies.” In 2008 the Gazette reported a $2-million gift from a Qatari sheikh. In 2011, a subsidiary of the Qatar Foundation “commissioned Harvard University to undertake a multi-year research study to establish a holistic framework by which to document, analyze, and decipher the principles of urban sustainability among selected case-study cities in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Iran, and Iraq.” In 2012 Harvard Law School announced that the Qatar Foundation had become “a leading sponsor” of the Institute for Global Law and Policy. The Crimson reported in 2023 that Harvard had disclosed $4,387,575 from Saudi Arabia, $3,305,984 from Qatar, and $1 million from Kuwait for a period of January 2022 to April 2023. In November 2018, the Qatar Foundation’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University announced a “groundbreaking” agreement with edX, then jointly owned by Harvard and MIT, to be the first Middle Eastern university to provide courses through the online platform.

When the only government influence Harvard is courageously resisting is that of the American government once Republicans got elected, it raises the question of whether what Harvard is really resisting is the government influence or the substance of what one particular government, the American one, is requesting. Or maybe it’s just about the fact that money is being subtracted (or threatened to be subtracted) rather than added.

Recent work: “From Iran Nukes to Europe-Israel Diplomacy, New York Times Can’t or Won’t Get the Context Right,” is the headline over my most recent piece for the Algemeiner. Check it out over at the (no paywall) Algemeiner if you are interested. It begins, “The New York Times came in with a big editorial denouncing antisemitism and infuriating the Jew-hating readers who populate its comment section — but its news pages keep spreading falsehoods about Israel.”