| On December 12, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi joined other Iranian civil rights leaders in sending a letter to Oberlin College asking administrators to “authorize a third party to conduct a transparent investigation of the allegations against Mr. Mahallati,” the Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies.
Mahallati, dubbed the "Professor of Peace" by Oberlin College, served as Iran Ambassador to the United Nations from 1987-1989. This was during a particularly dark period of the Islamic Republic’s history, when the clerical regime arrested and summarily executed thousands of citizens. Estimates range between at least 3,800 to 30,000 killed, including political prisoners and innocents caught up in the regime’s fanatical purge.
Records from this period indicate that Mahallati went to great lengths to hide the regime’s atrocities, referring to reports of arbitrary executions as “fake information” and enemy propaganda from a “terrorist organization from Iraq.” He told a U.N. Special Representative for the Commission on Human Rights that the deaths were attributed to “battlefield killings.”
Following calls for Mahallati’s termination from surviving victims and family members, Oberlin College initiated an investigation, inexplicably concluding in October 2021 that the professor had no knowledge of the 1988 massacre. School investigators even determined that Mahallati is not an anti-Semite, despite his 1989 U.N. speech calling for a global jihad against Israel, because he did not continue calling for Israel’s destruction throughout his academic career.
In their letter to Oberlin College President Carmen Twillie Ambar, Ebadi and her co-signers rejected the college’s initial “secretive investigation,” calling it “an exercise in whitewashing a controversy rather than an attempt to arrive at the truth.” Join them by clicking the “Take Action” button and calling for a new inquiry that is open, independent, and comprehensive. | 
