On Friday last week, as American bombs fell within earshot of Ferdowsi Square, Iran staged one of those spectacles of performative defiance that authoritarian regimes produce with the instinctive fluency of a body producing antibodies – not because they believe it will change the trajectory of the war, but because the theater itself is the strategy, and the audience is not Washington but the domestic population whose compliance requires the continuous manufacture of courage from the safe side of a podium.

As American and Israeli ordnance continued to redesign Iran’s military geography, the Islamic Republic’s surviving officialdom took to the streets of Tehran for al-Quds Day, marching with the studied nonchalance of men who believe God and state television make for adequate body armor. President Masoud Pezeshkian waded into the crowd as if strolling through a bazaar, not a war zone. Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, strolled the streets of Tehran taking selfies. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi addressed supporters while explosions reportedly struck areas adjacent to the march.

The imagery was broadcast on state television with the production values of a propaganda ministry that has been rehearsing this particular genre of political choreography since 1979: leaders among the people, unbowed, unchained, unafraid. The chants were the same ones that have echoed through Iranian streets for 47 years – “Death to America,” “Death to Israel” – recited with the mechanical rhythm of a congregation that no longer hears the words but cannot stop the incantation because stopping would require confronting the silence underneath.

I watched this theater and thought immediately of Baghdad, April 4, 2003 – Saddam Hussein in military fatigues, walking through the Mansour district, waving to crowds, kissing children, projecting the image of a commander-in-chief so supremely confident in his own invincibility that he could stroll through a capital city under imminent siege. On April 9, as American tanks were already grinding through Baghdad’s outer districts, Saddam emerged into the Al-A’zamiyah neighborhood, standing atop a pickup truck near the Abu Hanifa mosque, embracing strangers, and waving to crowds from a car hood. His information minister, the tragicomic Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf – “Baghdad Bob” – was simultaneously assuring reporters that no American troops existed within a hundred miles of the capital. A bronze statue of him in Firdos Square fell that same afternoon. It was pulled down by a chain attached to an American armored vehicle. Eight months later, the man who had once waved to adoring crowds was extracted from a spider hole near Tikrit – bearded, disheveled, defeated, blinking at the flashlight of a US soldier, and stripped of every pretension he had ever manufactured.

The Iranian leadership now seems to be plagiarizing from the same doomed script, deluding themselves into believing that spectacle means survival. The theater of defiance is the last art form a dying regime perfects – not because it works, but because the alternative is silence, and silence is the one thing an authoritarian system cannot survive, because the moment the spectacle stops, the population begins to calculate.

Then came the exchange that distilled the entire war’s moral absurdity into a single social media volley. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a Pentagon briefing on Day 13 of Operation Epic Fury, declared that Iran’s leadership was “desperate and hiding” underground, adding with characteristic subtlety: “That’s what rats do.” Larijani’s retort arrived within hours, dripping with the practiced indignation of a theocrat who believes his rhetorical jabs constitute strategic victories: “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!” Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf piled on: “The fate of dear Iran will be determined solely by the proud Iranian nation, not by Epstein’s gang.”

The Epstein reference was designed to wound, and in the shallow waters of social media point-scoring, it landed as though the Islamic Republic occupies some moral high ground from which to lecture anyone about the exploitation of children and women. But Larijani, in his eagerness to weaponize an American scandal, committed the catastrophic error of invoking precisely the terrain on which the Islamic Republic is most grotesquely, most comprehensively, most indefensibly vulnerable. Because if Epstein’s island was a crime – and it was – it was a crime that was investigated, prosecuted, exposed by a free press, adjudicated in open court, and resulted in the criminal conviction and imprisonment of its perpetrator and the public naming of its participants. The system that produced Epstein also produced the mechanism that destroyed him. It was ugly. It was slow. It was imperfect. But it functioned. Now consider what the Islamic Republic offers as its alternative moral framework.

Under Iranian law – not custom, not tradition, but codified, state-enforced, Sharia-derived statute – the legal marriage age for girls is 13 (Civil Code, under Article 1041). With a father’s permission and a judge’s approval, there is no minimum age at all. The Iran Statistical Center recorded 9,753 marriages of girls aged 10 to 14 in a single three-month period in 2021 – the highest quarterly figure on record. And between 2021 and 2022, at least 27,448 marriages of girls under 15 were officially registered. Many of these child brides soon became mothers; that year, 1,390 girls under 15 gave birth. Each year, an average of about 1,450 babies are born to married girls under the age of 15 in Iran. These are the registered marriages. Unregistered marriages, particularly in rural areas, push the real figure into territories that no government office has the courage or the interest to quantify.

And then there is sigheh – the institution of temporary “pleasure” marriage, a practice exclusive to Twelver Shia jurisprudence, in which a man and a woman contract a marriage for a fixed duration ranging from one hour to ninety-nine years in exchange for an agreed-upon sum of money paid to the woman. A man may enter into an unlimited number of simultaneous temporary marriages. A woman may have only one. Registration is not required unless a child is conceived. The woman has no right to inheritance, no claim to alimony, and no legal recourse if abandoned, abused, or exploited. The minimum age for girls in sigheh is the same as for permanent marriage – 13, or younger with paternal and judicial consent.

Telegram channels in Iran openly advertise temporary marriages for fixed fees, offering arrangements “from one hour to longer terms.” In the pilgrimage cities of Mashhad and Qom – the holiest sites in Iranian Shia Islam – the sex trade operates under the legal cover of sigheh so openly that even regime-aligned clerics have publicly denounced the practice as institutionalized prostitution wearing a religious mask. Girls Not Brides, the global partnership to end child marriage, has documented that sigheh is routinely used to circumvent Islamic restrictions on sex outside wedlock involving minors.

This is not Epstein’s island. This is Epstein’s 1,648,195 square kilometers “island” with a fatwa – state-sanctioned, religiously legitimized, legally codified, and operating not in the shadows of a Caribbean estate but in broad daylight, in the holy cities of a theocratic republic, under the protection of a jurisprudential system that has decided that a 13-year-old girl contracted to a man for one hour in exchange for money is not exploitation but marriage, not trafficking but tradition, not a crime but a sacrament.

When Epstein happened, the American system – for all its systemic failures and delays – mobilized: the FBI investigated, the Southern District of New York prosecuted, journalists from the Miami Herald exposed, and the perpetrator died in a federal detention facility awaiting trial. When sigheh happens in Iran, the state does not investigate. The state facilitates. The clerical establishment does not condemn. It issues the religious ruling that makes it permissible. The judiciary does not prosecute. It provides the legal framework that makes it enforceable. The exploitation of minors in Iran is not a scandal that the system failed to prevent – it is a feature that the system was designed to produce.

So when Ali Larijani – a man who serves a regime that permits the marriage of nine-year-old girls, that has legalized a form of temporary sexual contract indistinguishable from prostitution except for the recitation of a religious formula, that recorded nearly ten thousand child marriages of girls aged 10 to 14 in a single quarter, and that hangs women for removing their headscarves while sanctioning one-hour marriages for cash in the shadow of Imam Reza’s shrine – when this man invokes Jeffrey Epstein as evidence of American moral decay, the irony does not merely cut. It eviscerates. Because Larijani is not pointing at America’s failure. He is pointing at America’s accountability – the very concept his regime has spent 47 years ensuring will never exist within its own borders.

A former IRGC officer and a man who publicly called on security forces to crush peaceful protesters and advocated violence against Americans, Ali Larijani apparently saw no moral contradiction in parking his daughter, Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, at Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta, where she built a career as an oncologist on American soil, under American law, treating American patients. The regime’s men chant death to America by day and mail their children’s résumés there by night. Emory fired her in January 2026.

The Quds Day march will end. The chants will fade. The state television cameras will store their footage for the archives. And nothing – not the selfies with Pezeshkian, not the stroll past the bomb craters, not the Epstein jab, not the theatrical defiance of a regime performing courage while its Supreme Leader hides with alleged disfiguring wounds – none of it will alter the fundamental arithmetic of a war that has already destroyed Iran’s air defenses, killed 40 of its senior commanders, and exposed the Islamic Republic as a system that can mobilize crowds for a march but cannot protect its own capital from the aircraft flying above it. Saddam walked the streets of Baghdad too. The hole in the ground came later.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)