Did Federal Reserve Employ Khamenei Thug?
Mahdi Ansari, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, appears to have served as the leader of the student chapter of the Basij at Sharif University in Tehran.
By
Susannah Johnston
November 4, 2022
As activists outraged over the killing of Mahsa Amini continue to protest against the Iranian regime, dissidents in the United States complain that a member of an Iranian paramilitary organization now lives, works, and studies in Minnesota. The student in question, Mahdi Ansari, appears to have been a student leader of the Basij, a paramilitary organization currently attacking people in cities throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran.
According to one Iranian news outlet, Ansari called America “evil” and Westerners “bullies,” while attending college in Tehran. None of this stopped Ansari from getting a visa to study at the University of Minnesota, where he is currenlty a Ph.D. candidate, nor did it stop him from working at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis for a year.
The story broke in early October, when Iranian dissidents reported on Twitter that Ansari headed the Basij at Sharif University in Tehran, and is now a graduate student studying economics at the University of Minnesota. One dissident claimed in a photo-laden Tweet that Ansari “met with Khamenei for the last time in 2017 along with other members of Sharif’s Basij,” before traveling to the U.S. the same year.
https://islamism.news/2022/11/04/did-federal-reserve-employ-khamenei-thug/
