UANI Applauds Oberlin For Placing Mahallati on “Indefinite Leave”

(New York, N.Y.) — United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) CEO Ambassador Mark D. Wallace issued the following statement today after the news that Oberlin College has placed Iran’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, on indefinite leave from his position as a professor. UANI launched a public campaign and wrote to Oberlin College’s leadership in 2021, urging it to terminate Mahallati’s employment.

“While it has taken two and a half years to reach this obvious decision, we nonetheless commend Oberlin College for finally firing Mahallati. UANI previously urged Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar to dismiss Mahallati – the so-called “Professor of Peace” – from his position on the faculty due to his involvement in covering up gross regime-perpetrated human rights abuses, including the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners, in Iran during the 1980s.

“Oberlin College should have never hired Mahallati in the first place. His employment at other prestigious U.S. universities, such as Columbia University, is equally concerning. It also speaks to the malevolent pervasiveness of foreign campaigns by hostile powers like Iran and Qatar in American higher education today, and the attendant climate of impunity.

“UANI now calls once again on Princeton University to terminate the employment of Hossein Mousavian, another regime agent and Iran’s former ambassador to Germany, who presided over the Islamic Republic’s embassy – which served as the planning headquarters for assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Berlin in 1992. Elite institutions should never employ Mousavian and others with such bloodstained records in the United States.”

To read UANI’s letter to Oberlin College about Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, please click here.

To read UANI’s letter to Princeton University about Hossein Mousavian, please click here.