Ali Akbar Alikhani is a famous professor at the University of Tehran. He has written and edited fifteen academic books. Alikhani can now add “visiting scholar” at Harvard University to his curriculum vitae.
The US university hired him to work at a project focused on the “peaceful coexistence in Islam”. But as revealed by the Washington Free Beacon, Alikhani’s previous work has shown that the professor is not exactly peaceful about Israel and Judaism.
The Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran, where Alikhani teaches, is closely linked to the Iranian regime that has threatened Israel with destruction.
Alikhani has published a book entitled “The Jewish Threat - danger for Christianity and Islam”, where he provides “practical solutions” to Judaism and Zionism. Alikhani defined Israel “a country that from its inception was based on force, coercion and oppression of others”. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazi regime, could not have said it better. Rosenberg, in fact, wrote about “the threat posed by the Jew”.
It is not the first case of infiltration of the Iranian regime in American universities. In January 2010, the Tehran regime announced a boycott of Yale because of the presence of an Anti-Semitism Studies Center. The Iranian government labeled Yale as “subversive”, stating that any contact between Yale and Iranian citizens was “illegal and prohibited”. Professor Walter Reich, who teaches at George Washington University and directed the Holocaust Museum in Washington, wrote that “Yale has killed the best American institute for the study of anti-Semitism” because its “criticism of Arab and Iranian anti-Semitism” was opposed. The center, in fact, was then closed.
As CAMERA has explained (“Iranian Agent Hides in Washington Post as U.S. Prof,” Sept. 8, 2015), Seyed Hossein Mousavian, currently a “research scholar” at Princeton University, was previously Iran’s ambassador to Berlin in 1992 when Iranian agents assassinated dissident Iranian Kurdish leaders in a restaurant.
The Sunni Arab countries are not the only benefactors of American universities. The Iranian regime has done the same thing massively through the Alavi Foundation of New York. The Washington Post revealed that the Foundation promotes Tehran’s views on world affairs. 30 universities in North America have received funding from this Iranian foundation.
Among these is Harvard, where the Iranian foundation has supported programs both at Harvard College and at the Harvard Law School. Harvard received $345,000 from the Iranian foundation, including $40,000 at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 2011. This is the center that offered the chair to Professor Alikhani. No surprises here.
The goal of this foundation is to “offer Persian language courses and Islamic culture with a focus on Shiite studies”. They forgot to mention the call for the destruction of Israel and the proposals for a “solution” to the Jewish threat. Including the terrorist attack in which four Israelis were just killed in Tel Aviv’s Max Brenner restaurant.
