Fine Arts Building of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Photo: DXR/Wikimedia Commons

JNS.org – After over 13 months of silence about its academic cooperation with one of the world’s most virulently antisemitic universities, the Montreal-based McGill University told JNS that its research program with Tehran University is inactive.

“Currently, there is no active research program associated with the Tehran Branch [of McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies], and McGill has no formal partnership agreement with the University of Tehran,” McGill’s Media Relations Office said last week.

The regime-controlled University of Tehran is a hotbed of lethal antisemitism targeting Israel. During the period of McGill’s partnership, the Iranian university promoted the obliteration of Israel. In one example, a 2008 conference at the University of Tehran was titled “The Rise of Islam, Destruction of Israel,” the International Quran News Agency reported.

The Professors’ Basij Organization at the university issued a statement, published by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-managed Fars News Agency, stating that the professors will do everything possible to bring about the “destruction of the infamous Zionist regime.”

Iranian regime cleric and former Vice President Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari announced on the campus of the University of Tehran on Al-Quds Day in 2022 that “There won’t be any place for the Zionist regime in the world future.”

Al-Quds Day, held on the third Friday of Ramadan, is an annual regime-sponsored event across Iran and internationally that calls for the destruction of Israel.

Sheina Vojoudi, an associate fellow for the Gold Institute for International Strategy, told JNS, “Islamic Republic universities never respect other religions and discriminate against them. And, of course, the antisemitic Al-Quds rally will never be stopped at the universities under the Islamic Republic.”

University of Tehran Professor Mohammad Sadegh Koushki endorsed the call to assassinate of Salman Rushdie in August 2022, following regime supporter Hadi Matar’s attempt to kill Rushdie in upstate New York.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated an Iranian television interview with Koushki, in which he defended the February 1989 fatwa to kill Rushdie. Islamic Republic founder Ruhollah Khomeini “had the wisdom to issue this verdict back then, so that such a thing would never repeat itself,” the professor said.

Koushki also said that Rushdie was a “dead man walking.”

The Islamic Republic has imprisoned McGill alumnus Niloufar Bayani, a wildlife conservationist, for more than five years and counting based on trumped-up espionage charges. She was arrested in January 2018 and is serving a 10-year sentence.

McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies received $270,000 in donations between 2004 and 2010 from the Iranian regime-controlled U.S.-based Alavi Foundation. In November 2009, U.S. federal prosecutors seized the foundation’s assets, including the Piaget Building, a 36-story office tower in New York, due to links to the Iranian government, citing violation of sanctions against Tehran.

Oberlin College professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati received his Ph.D. from McGill in 2006. JNS has reported on protests against Mahallati for his role in the cover-up of the massacre of 5,000 Iranian political prisoners during his time as ambassador to the U.N. from 1987 to 1989.