++ MEK former Mohammad Karami reported from Tirana that three women from the MEK’s Leadership Council have separated from the group. The MEK have tried to hide this and threatened the women with ‘the Pentagon’ [sic] to silence them. The MEK’s newspaper published a photograph of one of the women alongside some faked comments attributed to her so that they could accuse her of lying – character assassination. The woman has contacted her family and explained how this misinformation cannot be true. She also told them she is struggling because Albanian authorities exert pressure on anyone who leaves and have even assigned security personnel to help the MEK keep members under control.
++ There has been reaction to Rajavi’s Christmas message. Commentators remind us that over the years Rajavi sent several Christian Iranians to their death because they would not convert to become Shias in the organisation. Such victims include survivor Edvard Thermador in Germany and Phillip who was killed by the MEK in Iraq.
++ The reaction to an open letter to Donald Trump from thirty “members of the Iranian opposition, including human rights activists and former political prisoners” has been quite precisely divided. Only the MEK felt jealous and wished they had also jumped on this bandwagon. They even got frontman Ali Safavi a slot on Fox News to say as much. However, every other Iranian person, personality, group, business, charity, housewife or leader has universally condemned the letter and poured scorn on its authors in various ways – as nobodies, as traitors, as etc.
In English:
++ Massoud Khodabandeh wrote an article denouncing the MEK’s act of introducing fake information into the investigation into what really happened in Aleppo over the past few months. Such fake information can only derail a genuine fact-finding mission. Khodabandeh gives several examples of previous occasions when the MEK’s fake information undermined and impeded important issues for political reasons.
December 30, 2016