October 16, 2014 | Business Insider
Why It Doesn’t Really Matter That So Many Iranian Leaders Have Been Educated In The US
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Javad Zarif, Iran's California State University-educated Foreign Minister, lived in the US longer than just about any other high-ranking Iranian regime official. As Ali Alfoneh and Reuel Marc Gerecht recalled in an essay in The New Republic, Zarif wrote in a recent Persian-language memoir that he cut himself off from American life as much as possible when he was living in the country:
“Apart from a single visit to a professor’s home, where, out of fear of religious dietary restrictions, he did not touch anything but the salad, Zarif recalls that he never set foot in a residence of a non-Muslim American family in the course of more than twenty-four years in the United States. The couple seem to have shared a total disinterest in American society. Zarif admits that they “never learned the name of spices in English” since they did not, either then or later, socialize with Americans.”
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