1. Counterterrorism: (noun) The activities carried out to prevent or respond to terrorism.

2. Misdiagnoses: (verb) To make an incorrect diagnosis or identification of a problem.

3. Suspends: (verb) Temporarily prevent from continuing or being in force.

4. Mass Killings: (noun) The act of deliberately causing the death of a large number of people.

5. Activist: (noun) A person who campaigns to bring about political or social change.

6. Coalition: (noun) An alliance or partnership, especially a temporary one formed for a common purpose.

7. Proxies: (noun) A person authorized to act on behalf of another; in this context, groups or individuals acting on behalf of a larger entity.

8. Defiantly: (adverb) In a manner showing resistance or disobedience.

9. Multinational: (adjective) Involving or consisting of more than two countries.

10. Maritime: (adjective) Connected with the sea or navigation on the sea.

11. Houthi: (noun) A member or supporter of a rebel group in Yemen.

12. Salient: (adjective) Most noticeable or important.

13. Artery: (noun) A major transit route or channel.

14. Escalating: (verb) Increasing rapidly in intensity or seriousness.

15. Deter: (verb) To discourage someone from doing something by instilling doubt or fear of the consequences.

16. Sophisticated: (adjective) Highly developed and complex.

17. Puppet Master: (noun) Someone who controls events or people, often from behind the scenes.

18. Diagnoses: (noun) The identification of the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms.

19. Lashing Out: (verb phrase) To express anger or criticism.

20. Atrocities: (noun) Extremely wicked or cruel acts.

The US launches a security mission with allies in the Red Sea after weeks of attacks on commercial vessels by Yemen’s Iran backed Houthis. A former U. S. Counterterrorism official gives us his reaction to the move. It’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a solution that misdiagnoses the problem. A us college suspends an iranian professor who served as iranian ambassador to the UN in the 1980s when his government committed mass killings of prisoners. An iranian american activist who lost a brother in those killings tells us the suspension is not enough. We want to make sure that he doesn’t receive any pension. We want to make sure that Oberlin College creates a memorial in the memory of our Poland loved ones and why iranian security forces are shooting at Kurds who carry heavy goods across the border from Iraq. From the voice of America, this is flashpoint Iran good morning. I’m Michael Lippin in Washington. The Biden administration says it has formed a new coalition of nations to protect commercial shipping from missile and drone attacks by Iran’s Houthi proxies in the Red Sea, a major transit route for international trade. U. S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the launch of Operation Prosperity Guardian on Tuesday while visiting Bahrain. U. S. Officials said the coalition includes Bahrain, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain, among other nations. They said Yemen’s Houthis have targeted ten merchant vessels linked to at least 35 nations in the Red Sea over the past month. In recent days, several shipping companies said they were stopping their vessels from transiting the Red Sea due to the attacks and sending them instead around the southern tip of Africa, a costly and lengthy detour. Austin spoke out on the Houthi attacks while visiting Israel on Monday. These attacks are reckless, dangerous, and they violate international law, and so we’re taking action to build an international coalition to address this threat. He also elaborated on the mission of that coalition. So in the Red Sea, we’re leading a multinational maritime task force to uphold the bedrock principle of freedom of navigation. Iran’s support for hootie attacks on commercial vessels must stop. Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdel Salam responded defiantly to the new coalition on the x platform. He wrote that it will not stop the Houthis from continuing operations in support of Gaza, stronghold of another iranian proxy, the Hamas terror group that is fighting a two month long war with Israel. Ambassador Nathan Sales is a former U. S. Counterterrorism official and a Middle east researcher at the Atlantic Council. I asked him by phone Tuesday how he assesses the Houthi threat to regional security. This is a very serious threat. If you simply look at the numbers, I think since the middle of October, we’ve seen over 100 attacks by iranian terror proxies in Iraq on american forces and american diplomats in the region. Add to that, I think we’re now over 100 attacks by the Houthis on commercial shipping. This isn’t just some sort of abstract threat. The Red Sea, where a lot of these attacks are taking place, is an absolutely vital artery of global commerce. I believe 10% of the world’s oil goes through the Red Sea. 12% of the world’s shipped goods transit the Red Sea. Imagine what happens to prices. Imagine what happens to the availability of goods that we all take for granted if the Houthis succeed in taking that corridor offline. Well, one thing I was wondering is, with Iran, having been a longtime supporter of the Houthis, are there any recent indications of some kind of direct iranian support for what the Houthis are doing, whether it be actually providing the weapons the Houthis are using or some kind of instructions to do what they’re doing? Are you aware of anything? Well, it’s hard to say based on what sorts of intelligence information government officials might be privy to. We and the public don’t have access to that. But we do have eyes to see, and what we can see is what appears to be a coordinated offensive across a number of different theaters in the region where iranian proxies are all lashing out simultaneously. That can’t be a coincidence. And the other thing that we can see with our bare eyes is the fact that the weapons the Houthis are using in these attacks on commercial shipping, they’re all iranian origin. Whether you’re talking about drones, whether you’re talking about ballistic missiles that have been used to target ships, the Houthis, they are not overseeing a sophisticated and high tech economy. Right. They don’t have the capability to produce this stuff on their own, but for iranian supply. So it’s pretty obvious that the puppet master here that’s pulling the strings is Tehran. Defense Secretary Austin has announced a multilateral initiative called Operation Prosperity Guardian to try to better protect commercial vessels as they transit through the area, through the Babel Mondeb Strait. What is your view of the effectiveness of this kind of measure? So it’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a solution that misdiagnoses the problem. The problem here is not that the United States lacks the capability to respond forcefully to protect our soldiers, to protect our diplomats, to protect the commerce on which the american economy and the global economy depends. That’s not the problem. We have two carrier groups on station right now. We have enormous capabilities to find where the Houthis are, to find their weapons depots, their launch sites, and to take them off the battlefield. The problem is the White House has not shown that it has the will to use those tools. So I think it’s fine as far as it goes to develop a coalition. I’m actually not sure what it adds to the other two coalitions that we have in the region dedicated to policing the seas and ensuring the free flow of commerce for the benefit of american consumers. I guess three is better than two if you’re at the Pentagon. But the problem here is not going to be solved by some pat ourselves on the back naval coalition when we already have two of them in the region. The problem here is the White House is afraid of escalating, and therefore we’re allowing the Houthis to deter us from taking decisive action to protect ourselves and to protect our economy. Well, when it comes to the idea of the US retaliating directly against the Houthis, do you think there are any legitimate concerns about what might unfold the kind of escalation that could happen if the US were to intervene militarily in Yemen? So you always have to be mindful of what’s the next rung up the escalation ladder. But the one thing you can never do if you’re a superpower, and last time I checked, America remains the world’s lone superpower. You can’t cede control of the escalation ladder to your adversary. If you do that, and it kind of looks like that’s what’s happening here, you’re no longer in the driver’s seat. You’re stuck playing defense. The bottom line here is that the Houthis should be more afraid of us than we are of the Houthis. And right now, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Another party that hasn’t intervened militarily in Yemen yet, as far as we can see, is Israel. And Israel’s actually been attacked directly by drones and missiles that have been fired from the houthi controlled areas in Yemen. Why do you think we haven’t seen that? It’s a good think, and this is not on the basis of any insider knowledge, but just from reading publicly available reports, I think, or at least I suspect, that the Americans are telling the Israelis, hey, stand down. You don’t need to take a shot at the Houthis will take care of it. If that’s the case, it’s not a good look for the United States to lean on our ally, the only democracy in the region that’s, let’s be clear, under attack on multiple fronts. And tell them you don’t have to worry. Worry about this one, because we’ll do it. And for us to not do it, for us to not take decisive action to reduce the threat to Israel, but also to ourselves, that’s mismanagement of the region. Well, Ambassador Nathan Sales, senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle east programs and a former U. S. Ambassador at large and coordinator for counterterrorism, speaking on the line from the Washington, DC area. Glad you could be with us on Flashpoint, Iran. Thanks so much. An iranian american rights group says it will keep pressing a us college to fire a controversial iranian professor that the college suspended last month. Oberlin College in the midwestern us state of Ohio said it put Mohammed Jafar Mahalati on indefinite leave on November 28. It did not elaborate. The nonprofit group Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran apologists, or IrIA, has campaigned for Mahalati’s removal, accusing him of covering up Iran’s mass killings of political prisoners in 1988 when he served as its UN ambassador. The US department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been investigating Oberlin College in response to a 2019 complaint about antisemitism on campus, including alleged antiisrael rhetoric by Mahalati. Lordan Bazargan is a member of IRIA. I asked her on the phone how her campaign for Mahalati’s removal began in 2020. We realized that the report at Amnesty International published at the end of 2019 for the 30th anniversary of the 1988 massacre of political prisoners in Iran. In chapter six, they named several people as the perpetrators of this atrocity. So all the characters were familiar to us, Homani, Hamanimir, Hossein, Musavi Rafsanjani, and all the other ones. But the name of Muhammad Jai Par Mahalati and two other person, data sheikh of Iran in London and ambassador of Iran in Geneva, were unknown to us before. So we googled them, two of them. We couldn’t find anything. But Mohammed Jahar Parmahalati came up as a professor at Oberlin College. So we decided the family members to get together, write a letter written by Mr. Kabe Shahruz, our lawyer in Canada, that he’s also one of the family members who lost his uncle in this atrocity. So we wrote a letter hoping that Oberlin College will fire him. More than 600 people signed our letter. They were human rights activist family members, Americans, Iranians, everybody that was worried about this injustice, miscarriage of justice, I should say. And unfortunately, as soon as the college received it, they ignored us. They never answered us. And three and a half years later, here we are. Finally, he has been put on indefinite teaching position, and we appreciate that, but it’s not enough for us. Well, the college, as I understand it, did not explain the reason for suspending Mr. Mahalati. Have you heard anything about why exactly they did it? Of course, they don’t answer. And first, when we started, we already knew, because we read all the documents of the UN, and we knew about Mahalati’s anti Semitism activities in the UN and what he had said against Baha’I and what he had said defending the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. So we knew all of that. But we started our campaign with just crimes against humanity, hoping that the college will fire him because of that. But since the college ignored us, and Mr. Benjamin Bainhall from Jerusalem Post was the only reporter that the first day that he saw the tweet of Kavishah, he sent a press query to Oberlin College, and he stayed on the story. We released documents to him about anti semitism and anti Israel speeches that he had at the UN. So after that article, we were hoping he gets fired. He didn’t. So we started a protest in November 2021, for the first time we went at overnight college. We protested. More than 80 of us showed up through Zoom and being present, several family members of the leftist of the MEk people, people who were political prisoners, a Baha’I person who had lost his father, and a monarchist whose father was killed right after the revolution, because we wanted our campaign to be inclusive of every fraction of iranian opposition. And we are proud of that. And we had five protests at Oberlin. And we also put protests around London, in Germany, in Berlin, London, Atlanta, Washington, DC, and New York, in front of the businesses of the board members, since the board members were ignoring us as well. And then we got lucky that Melissa Lando, one of the Oberlin graduates, she had documented the teachings of Mahalati at the school that were anti Israel and they were also pro Hamas, glorifying Hamas. She had also filed a complaint that two years later, finally, the Department of Education started investigating. And then also we found the documents that he had while he was at Columbia University. He had asked a student to have relationship with him for their jobs and grades. We hadn’t released that bundle yet. Unfortunately, New York Post made the title in a way that he was fired for the sexual harassment stuff. But that piece of information we hadn’t given to the college yet. So I doubted that part had anything to do with it. But now we are releasing all that information as well, hoping the college finally fire him and don’t give him the benefits that he’s receiving right now. Well, what do you know about how Mr. Mahalati has responded to all of these allegations? He hasn’t made any recent media comments, as far as I’m aware. But what can you share about his statements on all of these accusations and your reaction to them? Of course, he had denied it. After our first protest, after our letter, he had released a statement saying that he did not know his position always had been that he did not know that. We gathered more documents, sending it to the Amnesty International. In another unbelievable turn of events, Amnesty International on February of 2023, issued another report, 17 pages, that documented this atrocity, because in the first three weeks of July, they had killed the MEK, the Mojahedin members, and they paused for two weeks. So Amnesty International released its first alert about this atrocity. In that pause, so Mahalati had eleven days to save at least the leftist. 4000 meks are already killed, but 1000 leftists, including my brother, could have been saved. He had spoken up, which he didn’t. He’s lying. That he did not know. Well, you were mentioning that you want to see Oberlin College do more. So what exactly are the next steps that you would like to see here? We want to make sure that he doesn’t receive any pension. We want to make sure that Oberlin College creates a memorial in the memory of our poland loved ones. And we want a course taught at Oberlin College against the islamic regime of Iran and its atrocities. The same way that we are talking about Nazism and what Stalin did in Russia. We have to talk about the political islam and what it has done in the Middle east and how the reason behind all the atrocities and the wars in Middle east is actually the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is the father of Taliban and grandfather of the ISIS, and they have to be punished for what they did. Well, what is your expectation about whether the college will actually do these things? You know, for the past three and a half years, people have been telling us it’s impossible. It’s impossible. As a tenor, there is no way you guys can do it. And we did it. So I’m sure this time takes time. It takes efforts, but we will go for it. And we are going to go after the other apologists of islamic regime of Iran, like Musa Bian at Princeton’s and the other ones? Well, Lodan Bazargan, member of the alliance against Islamic Regime of Iran apologists or IriA. Great to have you on Flashpoint, Iran. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate this time. Mahalati did not respond to a VOA request for comment sent to him by email last week. The New York Post reported earlier this month that Mahalati denied sexually harassing his student when he faced the allegation in the 1990s and that the case was settled in 1998. Oberlin College also did not reply to a VOA question emailed on Monday about its position on Bazargan’s call for denying Mahalati a pension. You, you’re listening to VOA’s flashpoint Iran. I’m Michael Lippin. A report by kurdish rights group Hengaw says iranian Kurds who make a living by carrying goods on their backs from Iraq to Iran across A mountainous border suffered a surge in casualties last month. Hengaw said eight of the Kurds known as Kohlbars were killed and 110 were injured. It said 93% of the casualties were caused by Iranian security personnel opening fire on the coal bars. The rights group said the 118 casualties from November were were almost quadruple the figure for October which stood at 30. Sheilan Kurdpur is a board member of the Kurdish community in Germany and an activist who studies the issue. I asked her by phone why so many Iranian Kurds work as Kohlbars. Well, it’s basically because of exploitation. Like the government is really exploiting these areas like Balochistan and Kurdistan and the non Persian areas. Basically the people there have no jobs, they have no money, they’re lacking of everything. And the coal bars, they carry loads like up to 75 kilos and they basically carry them between the Iranian Iraqi border or also between the Iranian Turkish border and they earn their livelihood by capitalizing on the price disparities like the differences of the price between the borders. And also it’s not that the goods really come to the Kurzan areas, it’s again Tehran profiting from the coal bars. So is there any actual evidence that the Iranian authorities, while on the one hand their security forces shoot at these people, on the other hand they have some kind of relationship in which the governmental authorities take those goods and profit from them? Yeah, I mean the evidence is just if you talk to the people right, like the government they are basically the ones who often say okay, we need this and this and that and then the covers would just go and bring the goods. So there is not really like a big evidence but there are also documentations where people tell their stories. And I also talk to a lot of people who are here now, work as a coal bar or no coal bar people and they say it’s a really big dilemma because at one point it is not really a job. Coal bar is not a job because you always put your life to risk when you start bringing these goods. Because where the borders are going through the mountains, and especially in wintertime, it’s really, really dangerous to walk these routes, especially if you carry heavy weight, just because of being exposed to the elements of winter and the harsh terrain. Yeah, I mean this is one thing and the other thing is also because they’re always on the risk to be shot dead. Like people from the government just wait there to see them and they just shoot like they don’t make a difference on young or old or whatever and they don’t really treat them as human. And not only them, also their horses, like if they have animals with them who carry their goods, they often also get shot dead. So would it be possible to explain why security forces would shoot at the very people who apparently are helping the authorities to profit from illicit trade, why would they be shooting at them if in some way they’re also trying to exploit them? So it is always a question of corruption. So at the one hand, they profit from it, but on the other hand, they also accuse them to be very close to oppositional groups, kurdish oppositional groups like the Kurdish Party, the Democratic Party of Kurdistan, Iran, for example. And they accuse them to smuggle weapons for them. And also what we can see since years is that they’re always trying to do some ethnic cleansing as well, right? Like they try really to cut the Kurdish people off from everything they could benefit from. And this is also one of the reasons. So what do you think is the solution to this problem and to the dangers that kohlbars are facing? The solution would be not to exploit the Kurdish people within Iran, because they’re actually rich of many things, but nothing is left for them. And it’s not just for the Kurdish people, also for the BeLUG people. If you look at them, they have actually one of the richest land. Like they’re rich in resources and everything. And if they wouldn’t be left behind by the government, not only left behind, but also be part of the power, like Kurdish baluch. And all those who are not Persian Shia or Azerbaijan Shia, who have different religious beliefs or whatever, are not in power in Iran. And this is a big problem because they don’t have any representatives, nobody basically cares. And those who are in power are usually those people who benefit from this centralistic regime. So the solution, it’s a very structural thing that we have to talk about, but it is the solution for many problems that Iran does have. Well, Sheilan Kurdpur, German Kurdish activist and board member of the Kurdish community in Germany, joining us on the line from Berlin. Thank you very much for speaking with Flashpoint Iran. Thank you so much. Well, that brings us to the end of this week’s program. You can subscribe to more episodes on Apple and Google podcasts. If you’re using the Apple app, feel free to leave a review. Also, let me know what Iran related topics you’re interested in hearing about in future podcasts. Post me a message on the Ex social media platform with my account name at michael underscore lippin. On behalf of the Flashpoint Iran team, thank you for listening and we invite you to join us again next week.