Professor Mohammad Marandi of Tehran University made a defiant and personal declaration of solidarity with the Iranian people during a charged exchange on Piers Morgan Uncensored, refusing host Piers Morgan’s invitation to travel to London for a debate while the city of Tehran remained under active air strikes, and turning the challenge back on Morgan with the observation that it was Morgan, not Marandi, who had never visited the country at the centre of the conflict.
“I prefer to stay in Tehran under air strikes to stand up for my people,” Marandi said. “I’ve been to your country before, but you’ve never been here.” The remark came in the context of a sustained and combative exchange in which Morgan had repeatedly challenged Marandi’s credibility as an independent voice, pointing to what Morgan described as Marandi’s consistent refusal to level any criticism whatsoever at the Iranian government, and arguing that this silence was itself evidence of the regime’s suppression of free expression.
Morgan had pressed Marandi on the Iranian government’s treatment of Christian minorities, citing the 2026 World Report published by Human Rights Watch, which documented systemic discrimination against Christians and other religious minorities in Iran and noted a significant wave of arrests targeting Christian communities in the wake of regional conflicts in mid-2025, often based on unfounded accusations of connection with Israel. The report had come into sharp focus in the context of the Iranian president’s public statement expressing solidarity with Pope Leo following Trump’s attacks — a statement Morgan suggested sat incongruously alongside the documented domestic treatment of Iranian Christians.
Marandi rejected both the substance of the Human Rights Watch findings and the implication behind Morgan’s line of questioning, challenging the organisation’s funding sources and asserting that Christians in Iran held parliamentary representation, that churches and synagogues in Tehran operated without police protection because they faced no threat, and that it was Israeli military action in Lebanon, not Iranian domestic policy, that was genuinely endangering Christian communities in the region. Read_More…