On March 15, 2026, two weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran’s regime, University of Chicago professor Alireza Doostdar told his followers on X that he was reading Yahya Sinwar’s prison novel The Thorn and the Carnation for his course “Liberatory Violence” and found it “remarkable how good it is as sociological commentary.” In May he confirmed his students had read “Cesaire and Fanon and Zohra Drif and James Yaki Sayles and Leila Khaled and Yahya Sinwar among others.”
His March 2026 flyer casts the Palestinian case as a struggle against “Zionist settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.”
An associate professor of Islamic Studies in the Divinity School and winner of the Middle East Studies Association’s 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award, he directed UChicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), a Title VI National Resource Center supported by U.S. Department of Education grants, from at least September 2024 through December 2025. His syllabus, scholarship, and commentary follow one pattern: America and Israel cast as the moral evil of the region, Iran’s regime cast as its resistance, and violence against civilians taught as “liberatory.”
Both syllabi he posted open with the premise that liberation struggles “have often incorporated violent tactics, even against noncombatants” and promise attention to “criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.” His March 2026 flyer casts the Palestinian case as a struggle against “Zionist settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.”
The reading list answers that question from one side. Zohra Drif planted the 1956 Milk Bar bomb in Algiers that killed three civilians. Leila Khaled hijacked TWA Flight 840 for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in 1969. James Sayles was serving consecutive 100-to-200-year sentences for two murders committed during a 1971 armed robbery. Sinwar planned October 7. A course that weighs the ethics of force through people who chose to bomb an ice cream parlor, hijack an airliner, and massacre festivalgoers is not neutral inquiry. He promoted it in reply to a doctoral student who had called the “white settler” charge against Jews “a bigoted libel”: “Anthropologist here. Looking forward to re-teaching this popular class in a couple weeks.”
Doostdar’s next book studies Satan in Iranian theology since 1979. In a December 2025 University of Exeter lecture he argued that reading the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s branding of the United States as the “Great Satan” as “just demonization” loses “the aspect of moral criticism that he was engaged in.” He did note that Khomeini ignored advisers who opposed the 1988 prison massacres.
During the 2026 war, his posts supplied the moral criticism without the theology. The United States became “the f***ing United States of Murder and Genocide” (July 15), “the child-killing empire” (August 1), “the American bandit empire” (June 13), and an “empire of sadists, psychopaths, and predators” (September 1). Iranians killed by U.S. strikes were “annihilated by your criminal, murderous government and military.”
On April 3, an American mother asked for prayers for two downed F-15 pilots, adding that her son is a fighter pilot and she had no word from his unit. Doostdar quoted her: “Teach your sons and daughters not to fight imperial wars.”
The contempt extends to Americans in uniform. On April 3, an American mother asked for prayers for two downed F-15 pilots, adding that her son is a fighter pilot and she had no word from his unit. Doostdar quoted her: “Teach your sons and daughters not to fight imperial wars.” When oil futures passed $112 a barrel on March 8, he posted the chart with “Beautiful. Fly little birdy. Fly,” and, in Persian, bish bad, “may it rise further.” Defending “USsraeli” strikes on Iranian universities, he wrote on March 29, means “US universities are fair game.”
On Israel, Doostdar uses the regime’s terms: Zionism is “a blight on humanity,” and a commentator who lamented an Iranian cluster-munition strike on Tel Aviv was ignoring cities “the Zionist entity has destroyed,” because “Jewish supremacy requires denying the slightest hint of reciprocity.” In June 2025 he wrote that “the best and only hope for peace is the power and durability of Iranian missiles,” a post reported by Campus Reform and later cited by the ADL that no longer appears in his X archive. In August 2026 he described the Islamic Republic as “both (truly) anti-imperialist and repressive” and framed the task as “how to be in solidarity” with it.
In a May 2024 BBC Persian interview, as translated for the Washington Free Beacon, Doostdar called claims of foreign interference in campus protests “ridiculous,” an allegation “made by authoritarian states.” Two months later, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated that actors tied to Iran’s government were “posing as activists online” to exploit the Gaza protests.
The dismissal is hard to square with his family’s history. In 2018 the FBI arrested his brother, Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, who pleaded guilty in October 2019 to acting as an agent of Iran’s government without notifying the attorney general and was sentenced to 38 months. The criminal complaint described him photographing UChicago’s Hillel center and the Rohr Chabad Center. Alireza Doostdar has never been accused of a role in that case and declined to comment on it in 2018; he did not respond to the Free Beacon in 2024. The point is narrower: a scholar whose brother pleaded guilty to acting as Tehran’s agent, and whom FBI agents watched photographing Jewish sites in Hyde Park, calls Iranian influence on campus an authoritarian fantasy.
Doostdar’s January 11, 2024, essay “Witnessing Genocide,” on the Divinity School’s Sightings site, cites “mounting evidence” that Israel “is deliberately killing” Palestinian journalists, centering Al Jazeera’s Wael Dahdouh and the death of his son Hamza. It appeared the day after the Israel Defense Forces released documents identifying Hamza Dahdouh as an operative in Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s electronic engineering unit and Mustafa Thuraya, killed with him, as a Hamas squad deputy commander. The essay does not mention the Israeli claims.
The question belongs to the university: why a federally supported Middle East center gave its directorship to a scholar who presents the practitioners of terrorism as theorists of liberation and describes his own country (he was born in California) as an empire of “sadists, psychopaths, and predators.”
The UChicago-hosted website of his Gaza “scholasticide” project says “well over 10,000” Gaza students “have been martyred”; the university’s Neubauer Collegium chose an expanded version as one of 10 faculty projects for 2026-27. Arrested at a November 2023 campus sit-in (charges were dropped), he told an encampment press conference in May 2024, “Our complicity as a university needs to end.”
None of this is hidden; he posts under his own name and links his syllabus. He is on leave for 2026-27; on September 30 he posted “greetings from Tehran.” His speech is protected, and UChicago’s Kalven Report binds the institution, not its faculty, to neutrality. The question belongs to the university: why a federally supported Middle East center gave its directorship to a scholar who presents the practitioners of terrorism as theorists of liberation and describes his own country (he was born in California) as an empire of “sadists, psychopaths, and predators.”
