In 2007 Mohammad Jafar Mahallati became a professor at Oberlin College, where he eventually obtained tenure and a named chair. Then, in November 2023, he disappeared from the school’s website, and his courses were removed from the catalogue without explanation. (It likely had something to do with attention from Congress over his ties to the Iranian regime.) Mahallati’s career was far from a typical academic trajectory, as Roya Hakakian explains:

Mahallati is the son of one of Iran’s most powerful ayatollahs, and in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution, he claimed his place among the new ruling elite. Although he had no academic experience, Mahallati assumed the chairmanship of the economics department at Kerman University when he was just twenty-six. And although he had never been in politics or held a government position, shortly thereafter, he briefly became the governor of the county of Jiroft. It took several other career test-drives before he entered Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1981.

In 1987, he finally found the international spotlight when he was named ambassador to the United Nations; but, there too, his tenure ended abruptly less than two years later. The circumstances of his departure remain murky. Thereafter, he refashioned himself as an academic, and wandered from one Ivy League institution to the next as a visiting fellow.

While serving at the UN, he defended the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the persecution of the Baha’i, and a massacre of dissidents, while railing against the “Zionist entity.” Yet none of these entirely public statements held him back, or prevented him from marketing himself as an exotic foreign intellectual who shared the Western desire for peace and international harmony:

Mahallati found America to be an unsuspecting place. The glamour of his diplomatic career followed him everywhere he went, but somehow the ignominy of the government he had served did not. . . . The notion that he had been a spokesman for a regime accused of gross violations of human rights and acts of terrorism did not seem to concern the people he met.

As Hakakian documents, his scholarly record was thin, his graduate-school career unimpressive, his teaching not especially rigorous, and he was more than once accused by students of sexual harassment. But none of this held him back. The content of his teaching in Oberlin’s religious-studies department, moreover, resembled less the academic study of Islam and more soft evangelism, or what one of his few skeptical colleagues called “old-fashioned religious apologetics.” In short, writes Hakakian, the “rules did not apply to Mahallati.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.