Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillett.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And this week we'll be

talking about the scandal at Oberlin College, the private liberal arts college in the Ohio town of the same name.

But it's probably not the same scandal that you're thinking of.

Many of you will remember that Oberlin became internationally infamous in the late 2010s,

when the college's administrators defamed the owners of a local family-run bakery,

but my guest today won't be talking about that Oberlin scandal, but rather a completely separate scandal involving a former professor of religion named Mohammed Jaffir Mahalati. I say former because in November 2023, Mahalati was placed on indefinite administrative leave for likely reasons that you'll be hearing about from my guest, Roya Hakakian.

Roya, as regular readers of Quilat Will Know, is the author of an August 8 article entitled

The Professor, His Nemesis, and a Scandal at Oberlin, which not only chronicles

the dark past of Mahalapi, but also provides a lesson on modern Iranian history that's necessary to appreciate the saga of the man's rise and fall.

That story began in the 1980s when Mahalati, the son of a powerful Iranian cleric,

became Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, where he served as an international apologist for the tyrannical Islamist regime that had come to

power in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

This was a period during which Iran was fighting a brutal war against neighboring Iraq.

As Roya discusses in her article, Iran also was waging a murderous campaign against anti-regime

elements within the Iranian population.

Especially a group called The People's Moja-hadine Organization of Iraq, a dissident group that had allied itself with

Saddam Hussein's Iraq as part of its failed campaign to topple Ayatollah Kameeni. In the last months of the Iran-Iraq war in particular,

the Iranian government engaged in a brutal campaign of a dissident suppression

...