Oberlin College’s “professor of peace” is responsible for obscuring and minimizing state-sponsored mass murder. Where is the media and academia’s outrage?
In the summer of 1988, Iran’s notorious“Death Commission” executed at least 5,000 political dissidents.
Sentenced in sham trials, the prisoners were interrogated with a series of arbitrary questions about their religious or political beliefs and then massacred. Many of those killed were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman treatment before their slaughter.
One of the chief organizers of this egregious atrocity was Mohammad Jafar Mahallati. As the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mahallati was a decisive architect of the regime’s efforts to erase the 1988 mass slaughter from the conscious of the international community and shield those responsible from accountability.
Today, Mahallati sits in a plum, tenured position at Ohio’s Oberlin College as the Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies. In fact, Oberlin dubbed the mass murder propagandist“the professor of peace.”
Mahallati, for his part, has denied the existence of the extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances. He has called U.N. reports “nothing but propaganda” and the U.N. resolution on the issue “fake information.”
Amnesty International, leading human rights experts and international jurists, have concurred with the U.N.'s findings. Oberlin College said it could find “no evidence of wrongdoing.”
Shutting down further discord, Oberlin President Carmen Twillie Ambar blocked onTwitter a former Iranian hostage, the sister of one of the 1988 massacre victims and a former government official who raised the issue in a recent opinion column in the Washington Examiner.
Meanwhile, conservatives are consistentlybarred from speaking on college campuses or, if they are permitted, the events are often shouted down or speakers accosted.
When American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers spoke at an Oberlin College Republican event, she was met with outrage and protests. Oberlin issued “trigger warnings” and created “safe spaces” for students who felt offended by her lectures on feminism.
So why is a human rights abuser lauded and awarded cushy gigs while those who dare not tow the leftist line are castigated and exiled from American academic institutions? Simple. Orchestrating the murder and coverup of thousands of people does not violate the woke playbook. Adherence to woke doctrine is now valued over human life.
In Dave Chapelle’s latest standup special, he pontificates on the recent cancellation of “Levitating” singer DaBaby for homophobic remarks made during a July performance. Never mind that DaBaby fatally shot a man in a 2018 Walmart brawl.
By today’s woke standard, killing another human does not bar you from Grammy nominations or multiplatinum records — making homophobic remarks will.
Why do we extend grace to those who kill or cover up killings, but not to those who deviate from the mercurial moral discourse of the moment? Obeying woke doctrine is paramount, even to human life.
If the same outrage mob that targeted Hoff Sommer and her feminist talk would voice a shred of outrage over Mahallati’s culpability in state-sponsored mass murder, perhaps then there would be a vestige of justice for the families of the 5,000 killed.
It’s past time for our media and academic institutions to recalibrate their value systems.
