A lecturer in the US praised Khamenei – and was fired

Shirin Saidi, a lecturer from the University of Arkansas in the United States who praised the leader of Iran Ali Khamenei and expressed support for the Iranian police, was dismissed from her position in recent days and is now also the focus of an investigation on suspicion of academic fraud.

Saidi, who served as the director of the Middle East Studies Center at the university, was removed from her position last week, after it became clear that she used an official document of the university to write a letter of support for Hamid Nouri, who was convicted in 2022 in a Swedish court of ordering the execution of thousands of political prisoners in Prison 7 in Tehran in 1988. Last year, Nouri was released from prison in Sweden as part of a deal between the countries, and was honored by kings in Tehran

At the same time, media outlets in the US reported that Sa’idi’s doctoral thesis from 2022 is also under review. It is a dissertation entitled “Women and the Islamic Republic: How a Defined Citizenship Shapes the Iranian State”, published by Cambridge University Press. According to reports, the review deals with allegations of forgery and the use of materials without authorization.

An Iranian activist group in exile in the United States has claimed to have uncovered patterns of abuse of survivor testimonies, as well as claims of unauthorized interviews with former political prisoners. One of them is Miriam Nouri, a writer living in Germany, who claimed that Saidi used parts of her memoir “In Search of Freedom” without her permission, neither in writing nor orally.

Nouri said that she was surprised by the strength of the falsification and dishonesty that she claims were exposed at work, as quoted in the New York Post. According to her, she herself was imprisoned in 1985 when she was pregnant, and had to give birth to her son while she was in prison. She also addressed Cambridge Publishing in an official letter of complaint. The publisher’s spokesperson confirmed that the claims are being investigated and that they are serious allegations.

Saidi caused a stir on social networks, after in the posts she published in November on the X network, she praised the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, and even wrote a prayer for his safety. In one of the posts she stated that he is the leader “who preserved the integrity of Iran” during the war with Israel, referring to the Hamas massacre on October 7. In other posts she called Israel a “state of terror” and a “state of genocide”.

After the affair was published, Saidi claimed in a long video that the university violated her freedom of expression. According to her, the decision to remove her from her administrative position was due to what she called “the Zionist lobby’s playbook”. At the same time, media in Iran covered the case and claimed, falsely, that she was removed from her position as the head of the department for Middle Eastern studies only because of her quote about Israel.