Mick Hartley

I know – who would have thought? In the US, too. We're at Oberlin College:

One of the country’s most liberal colleges is being investigated over allegations it allowed antisemitism to breed on campus including having a professor of peace studies who has called for the elimination of Israel and the death of Salman Rushdie.

Yes it's peace studies, but not as we know it.

The probe, which was opened on September 29, was prompted by a complaint filed in 2019 by Oberlin College graduate Melissa Landa, who founded the Alliance for Israel to counter the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign targeting Israel and hostility toward Jewish students at the school. Landa, who graduated from Oberlin in 1986, is president of the Oberlin Chapter of Alums for Campus Fairness, a non-profit that works to end antisemitism.

She sent the department a dossier of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incidents between 2014 and 2017— and four years later, it finally acted….

The dossier focuses on tenured peace studies and religion professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who has called himself “professor of peace” but who is accused of supporting Hamas and giving students credit for writing anti-Israel blogs.

It alleges Mahallati told his classes in 2016 that “Israel is a colonialist state” and “Israel is an apartheid state.”

Mahallati, 71, has also taught at Columbia, Georgetown and Princeton. Before becoming an Oberlin professor, he was Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations where he was accused of defending the fatwa, or Islamic decree, issued by Khomeini to murder novelist Salman Rushdie.

“I think all Islamic countries agree with Iran,” he told Reuters in 1989, Fox News reported. All Islamic nations and countries agree with Iran that any blasphemous statement against sacred figures should be condemned.”…

The Oberlin professor has also been accused of helping the Iranian government cover up the massacre of thousands of jailed political opponents in 1988, according to a February report by Amnesty International by calling the murders “misinformation” and “political propaganda” at the UN.

While working as a diplomat for Iran, he claimed it was “a religious obligation” for Muslims to “liberate” Palestine from “Zionist usurpers.”

He's taught at Columbia, Georgetown and Princeton? Well of course he has. 

As Jerry Coyne's documented, Oberlin has had its share of problems recently – including the case, which I posted about a few months back, when a lacrosse coach was subjected to Maoist-style interrogation for daring to share a social media post in support of women’s sports and female athletes. Maybe that explains their four-year delay in getting round to looking into the case of the rabidly antisemitic peace studies professor. Either that, or he fitted right in.