Xiyue Wang, a former American prisoner who spent three years in Iran, has sued Princeton University for failing to secure his release.
According to Washington Free Beacon, Xiyue Wang in the complaint he filed a month ago stated that Princeton sent him to Iran for a doctorate in 2016, but after his arrest, it did nothing to secure his release and tried to maintain the credibility of the university and its relations with Iran will prevent Xiyue Wang’s wife from making public the news of his arrest.
Xiyue Wang accused Princeton University and its Iran central, of acting on the advice of ‘pro-regime activists and academics’ before and after his arrest.
This American researcher noted that after feeling threatened in Iran, Princeton University lawyers and its officials asked him not to seek sanctuary in the Swiss embassy in Tehran.
“Everything Princeton did and abstained from doing was centered around absolving its institutional responsibility, protecting its institutional reputation, and maintaining its political relations with Iran,” Wang says in the lawsuit, which has not been previously reported.
Zhou Wang, who was arrested in Iran in August 2016 and sentenced to ten years in prison for espionage, was released from Evin in December 2019 following a prisoner exchange agreement and returned to the United States.
Ms. Kylie Moore-Gilbert (@KMooreGilbert), an Australian researcher who was previously imprisoned in Iran tweeted about Xiyue Wang’s complaint against Princeton University:
“The way that @Princeton has treated @XiyueWang9 has been shameful. They should reflect on those values they claim to uphold- academic freedom and human rights, and should closely examine the ties of some of their staff to the Iranian regime.”
“Instead of taking action to assist and accelerate Mr. Wang’s release, Princeton chose instead to protect their reputation over Mr. Wang’s health and well-being,” the lawsuit reads. “Princeton did nothing but try to suppress news about the case.”
Ms. Moore Gilbert, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia, was arrested in Iran in the fall of 2018, and the Iranian judiciary sentenced her to 10 years in prison on espionage charges. In December last year, she was exchanged with three Iranian prisoners convicted of plotting to assassinate an Israeli diplomat in 2012 and returned to Australia.
The question raised here is, what exactly is happening at Princeton University, that Mr. Wang was forced to file a lawsuit against an American university that should be an example of justice, respect, and human values?
Meet Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who left Iran in 2009 and has since resided at Princeton University as a Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at the Program on Science and Global Security. His background that clarifies everything has been explained by the Washington Examiner on September 10, 2012, in an article entitled ‘Princeton’s Iranian Agent of Influence’. Below are parts of this article.
“Mousavian’s jobs in the foreign ministry, his ambassadorship to Germany between 1990 and 1997, and most important his position on Iran’s National Security Council from 1997 to 2005—all came from his ties to the beardless, white-turbaned Rafsanjani, who was the most powerful man in Iran when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989.
“The founder of the IRP (Islamic Republican party), Mohammad Hosseini Beheshti, also launched the Tehran Times, the Marxist-Islamist English-language newspaper of the revolution, and made Mousavian editor in chief in 1980. Rafsanjani, Khamenei, and virtually everyone else who mattered in Iran’s fledging theocracy was tied to the IRP.
“When Rafsanjani became president in 1989, his key foreign policy was expanding trade relations with Western Europe, a step critical to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear aspirations.
“1997, he became the head of the foreign-relations committee of Iran’s National Security Council. He’d studied at Sacramento City College and Sacramento State University and received a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Kent in England. He was a good choice to serve as the spokesman for Khatami’s nuclear-negotiating team.
“(In) his chats with U.S. officials and think-tankers, Mousavian seems unwilling to foreclose the possibility that he will return to the Islamic Republic—that he can, somehow, be accepted back into the ruling elite.
“He wants to be seen as a member of the loyal opposition even though the Islamic Republic has never really accepted the legitimacy of a bifurcated body politic.
“…he was the Iranian ambassador to Germany when Iranian agents machine-gunned Iranian-Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin in 1992. In the early 1990s, Rafsanjani and Khamenei, then working in tandem, gave orders to Iranian intelligence to assassinate several annoying dissidents in Europe and Turkey.
“Why Princeton University…, would want to give a fellowship to someone who has so much blood swirling around him is a different question.” (Washington Examiner, September 10, 2012)
It seems that Mr. Wang became the victim of an appeasement policy with the cruel regime in Iran when the Western powers tried to achieve their appeasing JCPOA agreement with it in 2015, influenced by people such as Mousavian who are working under mouth-filling titles like ‘Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at the Program on Science and Global Security’ in Western institutions.
With the job to distract the public opinion from the regime’s real ambitions in its nuclear program and other cases like its destructive behavior in the Middle East and most important its human rights violations.
