Establishment liberals have a soft spot for, and even a fascination with, revolutionaries.
It is one of the things I hate most about them, and it’s emblematic of their indifference to the damage they cause to society and their casual disregard for victims.
Born in 1964 and politically precocious, I was very aware of the cultural environment in the early 1970s. At eight, I distributed George McGovern bumper stickers, read Doonesbury, and watched the Vietnam War on TV news while I ate dinner. We had picture books featuring the Kent State events, and hagiographies of JFK, RFK, and MLK were on our bookshelves. Later in the decade, I read Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson books about politics and culture.
One of those books was Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which exposed the shallowness of the liberal elite and the grift of the people who take advantage of them.
You can still read Wolfe’s essay Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s on New York’s website, and it isn’t even behind a paywall. They even republished it in 2023 because it was such a cultural touchstone. The essay described a party at Leonard Bernstein’s posh flat in New York City, featuring all the glitterati raising money to defend the Black Panthers who were being tried for a terror campaign.
It was one of many such fundraisers, where the Panthers and the Glitterati mingled and discussed the finer points of killing capitalists over canapés and champagne.
This being New York City, of course, the Panthers who had been placing bombs and shooting things up were acquitted. The police were too aggressive in going after them, you see, and the crowd roared in delight, as it always does when the “good guys” win. Ask Bill Ayers about that. I hear he has a nice job in Chicago and friends high up in politics.
Nothing has changed; or should I say, things have only gotten worse when it comes to the excitement that establishment leftists feel when they rub shoulders with terrorists.
Also indebted to @greggroman’s excellent article on Doostdar, which quickly brought me up to speed and paints an even more damning picture of the professor. https://t.co/gE1n5CPiSC
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) November 6, 2026
🚨 The University of Virginia hosted a lecture today exploring the “impish” and “mischievous” side of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.
The lecture, titled “The Impish Revolutionary,” was hosted as part of UVA’s Islamic Worlds Initiative and delivered by University of Chicago professor Alireza Doostdar. The event description highlighted the “daredevilry and clowning” of Revolutionary Guard soldiers.
Here is Doostdar in an earlier appearance arguing that Ayatollah Khomeini’s characterization of America as the “Great Satan” should be understood as a substantive moral condemnation of the United States, not simply dismissed as demonization.
He goes on to explain another Iranian religious figure’s assessment that Khomeini’s formulation was “genius” because, in this interpretation of Islamic theology, Iblis (Satan) primarily tempts people toward evil, while the United States supposedly goes further by committing massacres, imposing sanctions, deceiving others, and hypocritically invoking human rights.
Doostdar has also revealed that his mother remains a “committed revolutionary” who supported the Iranian Revolution.
But perhaps the most extraordinary detail is that his brother, Ahmadreza Mohammadi-Doostdar, was convicted of acting as an illegal agent of the Iranian government.
According to federal investigators, his brother conducted surveillance of the University of Chicago’s Hillel Center and Rohr Chabad House, including photographing security features around the Jewish facilities. He pleaded guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to 38 months in federal prison.
Just another outrageous event at UVA that will probably end up in the university’s new “online targeting” reporting system because someone outside the university dared to scrutinize them.
Michiganders have just elected a senator from the Muslim Brotherhood, and in New York City, the mayor is a big fan of Hamas and Hezbollah. In the current wars in the Middle East, the IRGC and Hamas are the good guys, and raping Jews or throwing acid in women’s faces if they refuse to wear the hijab is in style and applauded by our liberal betters.
So should it surprise us that the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, is hosting a University of Chicago professor to lecture on just how FUN those IRGC guys are?
They are positive cards, laughing it up as they hang people for opposing the regime. Not like that mean tweet guy, the fascist, who is building a ballroom that is far too gaudy to bear!
Professor Doostdar has earned his place as a favorite of the Radical Chic crowd. He supports all the right things.
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.”
The United States really IS the Great Satan, you know, and Jefferson’s academic descendants are right to remind the students and the world just how wonderful the Iranian regime is and how evil Jefferson’s Republic has always been.
No doubt, once the lectures were over, everybody could sit down and enjoy a nice glass of port as they discuss the latest sensational article in Jacobin.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it’s spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there’s nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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