The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent

Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again for criticizing Iranian foreign policy.

By Arash Azizi

Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again.

Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.

The new charges stem from a speech he made at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar in January.

Expressing one’s opinion can make a person a criminal in Iran. But Zibakalam had voiced not even his own view so much as a sociological observation: that Iranians no longer support the Palestinian cause, and many even cheer for Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

“You’ll be surprised, since October 7 last year, [to see] the number of Iranians who hate the Palestinian” groups, Zibakalam said. “But I saw it with my own eyes during the past 15 months … For [so many] of the younger generation of Iranians … their hero was Netanyahu … Everyone was talking about the U.S. elections … hoping and praying that Donald Trump would win.”

Zibakalam is himself a harsh critic of Trump and in the same speech decried the American president as “anti-women, anti-Arab, anti-immigration, and anti-Black.”

He has also accused Netanyahu’s government of war crimes and called attention to the “millions of Israelis” who oppose it.

Zibakalam thus was not condoning the views he described, but rather lamenting the turn of a population that once backed Palestinian leaders, such as Yasser Arafat.

Iranians, he explained, have come to hate anybody associated with their own regime, whose policies oppress them.

“I can tell you why they hate Hassan Nasrallah,” he said of the Hezbollah leader slain by Israel last year, and “why they hate Hamas.” The reason, he said, is “simply because the Islamic Republic supports them.”