Iranian professor: "The young hate Palestinians and love Bibi"

Sadaq Zibakalam (Photo: Iranian networks )

At a time when the Ayatollahs' regime is educating the people to hate the "Little Satan," i.e., Israel, and to "stand firmly on the side of Palestine," it turns out that beneath the surface, the situation is exactly the opposite.

Sadaq Zibakalam, a lecturer in the Department of Iranian Studies, claimed that the younger generation in the Islamic Republic feels loathing for the Palestinians as a result of the Ayatollahs' support for them. This was reported this morning (Monday) by the exiled Iranian news website Iran International.

In a speech delivered at an academic conference in Qatar, in English, Professor Sadaq Zibaklam, a lecturer in the Department of Iranian Studies at the University of Tehran, recounted his frustration with the attitudes of the younger generation regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Since October 7 of last year, you will be surprised by the number of Iranians who hate the Palestinians. What happened to our sympathy? It is gone. It evaporated. If someone had told me that the day would come when the Iranians would hate the Palestinians and they would praise Netanyahu, of all people, they would see him as a hero. I would have thought that whoever told me that was crazy."

"But I have seen it with my own eyes over the past 15 months, the level of hatred for the Palestinians among the young people in Iran. And the hero is Netanyahu. Do you think they know anything about Netanyahu, the Likud party or Hamas? No, no. They hate the Palestinians.

Professor Sadaq Zibakalam is known in Iran as a reformist and neoliberal. In recent decades, he has become famous for criticizing the government of the Islamic Republic in the field of foreign policy and supporting the normalization of Iran's relations with Western countries.

In 2014, he refused to step on the Israeli and American flags that were deployed at the entrance to Mashhad University. According to him, "The flag of every country is the identity and symbol of the nation of that country. Trampling and burning a country's flag is an unacceptable act."

Kikar Hashabbat contributed to this article.