Iranian citizen, Mohammad Jafer Mahallati, who was placed on “indefinite administrative leave” from his tenured post followed years of campaigning from Iranian American activists who sought to hold Mahallati accountable for crimes against humanity.
NY Post Mahallati, who has called for the elimination of Israel and backed the murderous fatwa against Salman Rushdie, is also accused of sexual harassment in a lawsuit stemming from his alleged ‘sex-for-grades’ program.
Oberlin College is currently being investigated by the federal Department of Education after a complaint that it abused the civil rights of Jewish students by allowing Mahallati to speak in favor of Hamas and give credit for writing anti-Israel screeds.
The move by Oberlin to suspend Mahallati, 71, comes amid mounting fury at colleges’ failure to grapple with antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by terrorist group Hamas.
Mahallati’s suspension came after court papers revealed that when he was an adjunct professor at Columbia University, he had been accused of giving a graduate student 11 years his junior good grades in return for sex.
The papers, given to The Post by the Middle East Forum, showed that Columbia and Mahallati had both been sued by the woman, who The Post is not naming, accusing him of allegedly worked to damage her reputation and academic future after she reported his alleged sexual abuse to school authorities.
At Oberlin, Mahallati became the subject of a federal probe this fall when the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights revealed that it was investigating a complaint that he taught students “support for Hamas and terrorism” as part of a larger probe into anti-Semitism on Oberlin’s campus.”
The probe, which was opened on September 29, was prompted by a complaint filed in 2019 by Oberlin College graduate Melissa Landa, who sent the department a dossier of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incidents between 2014 and 2017, including that Mahallati told his classes in 2016 that “Israel is a colonialist state” and “an apartheid state.”
The Alliance Against Islamic Republic of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA), a group of Iranian anti-regime activists whose family members were executed by the Islamic Republic, were instrumental in securing Mahallati’s ouster and helped bring to light the professor’s alleged sexual misconduct. AAIRIA was part of a three-year campaign to hold Mahallati accountable for covering up Iran’s mass murder of 5,000 political prisoners in 1988 when he was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.
It said in a statement: “This action comes as a result of tireless advocacy and stark revelations about Mahallati’s involvement in covering up human rights abuses and his antisemitic rhetoric.”
I can’t imagine spending $40,000 to take this dude’s worthless courses.
For once the leftist liberal educational institution has taken the right call! There has got to be more such ousting from other institutions before it dawns on these creatures that they cannot take refugee under the First Amendment for calling for genocide of a race!
It is good to see people rise up and take action. It seems too often that people, even the persecuted, take it on the chin instead of dealing with the situation.