Iran Interlink Website

++ In the run up to the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow at the end of October, former MEP and MEK advocate Struan Stevenson has been busy publishing his demand that Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi be arrested on arrival in Scotland. Now Stevenson is claiming that he has actually stopped Raisi from attending the Conference for fear of arrest. This remarkable achievement started with spreading stories from ‘sources from inside Iran’ saying that Raisi had been invited to the Conference. This information was not published anywhere in public in Iran and it is unlikely that Stevenson has access to the offices of the president of Iran, so how he could know about this invitation is anyone’s guess. After dropping this information into their publications, the MEK and Stevenson threaded together a narrative which focused on alleged crimes committed by Raisi as a judge thirty years ago, and the demand for his arrest. According to Stevenson, this has frightened Raisi so much that he has refused to come. This prompted ridicule on Farsi social media. The man who used to work for Saddam Hussein and the MEK has come to the low point that he is farting and laughing at it himself.

++ In Albania, journalist Gjergji Thanasi has written about the family of Hassan Heyrani in Iran. His parents have applied for visas to Albania so they can see the son they have not met with for 25 years. They explain how the MEK prevented Hassan from contacting them. But now he is living freely they should be able to visit. The MEK are trying behind the scenes with the corrupt Albanian government officials to prevent them getting visas. Thanasi is adamant that he will do all he can to make sure they are able to visit.

++ A spokesman for the judiciary in Iran has talked about the court case involving former members of the MEK demanding compensation from the leaders for their suffering. The spokesman announced that the fine and compensation amount has been issued. The verdict has now been passed by the foreign office to the countries that support and harbour this group, requesting that they hand over the guilty people and ensure they pay the money.

++ In Albania, the issuing of ID cards to all non-Albanians has started. Officials have entered the camp and one by one are taking fingerprints and identity details from each resident. The MEK and its backers are desperate to stop this, but it seems they can’t do much as this is a blanket issue covering everyone who is a foreign national in the country. If Albania wants to join the EU they have to go ahead with this. What the MEK is really afraid of is not the former members getting ID cards, but the issue of ID cards to current members. Once they have this documentation half the members will leave.

++ This week and last week, Iran was shining in wrestling, football and other sports. The MEK completely ignored the existence of sport in Iran this week. Some commentators reacted saying that Maryam Rajavi sent congratulations to the football teams of Iraq, Brazil and elsewhere but totally ignored Iran. This, they say, reminds us that they and other anti-Iran agents have been lobbying for sanctions on Iranian sports, which has failed.

In English:

++ Anne Khodabandeh wrote how the MEK has evolved ‘From Fanatical Terrorists to Fanatical Followers’. According to Khodabandeh, the MEK is fading into obscurity. It’s place – causing trouble between the US and Iran – is disappearing since the new Iranian president prefers to look East in pursuit of Iran’s national interests. The MEK is not mentioned in current discourse on Iran and Iranian issues, including the Swedish court case. Even though this is essentially an MEK event, both Struan Stevenson and Iran International fail to mention the group in their public stances. Ironically, as Iran has emerged victorious in several sporting fields in recent weeks, Maryam Rajavi herself cannot speak about Iran. Khodabandeh identified Rajavi’s move to shift control of the MEK to her daughter and niece as evidence that she is prepared to use their status as French citizens to take control of the vast personal wealth she inherited from her husband Massoud from Paris. She cannot travel to Auvers-sur-Oise, but her daughter and niece can. Without a meaningful role, the remaining members in Albania will become more and more a burden to the MEK’s backers. Neglect will mean the MEK will fade to become a cult of fanatical followers without a struggle.

October 16 2021

++ Al Jazeera reported the death this week of former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani in Paris. Bani Sadr left Iran with Massoud Rajavi in 1981. Commentary on his death focused on the point that he was fooled by Rajavi to come to Paris to join a coalition of opposition forces. However, when he discovered that Rajavi was going to work with Saddam Hussein (during the Iran-Iraq war) he refused to continue working with Rajavi and the MEK. After this split Bani Sadr became pro-active in helping former MEK members in the West and in promoting human rights.

++ News that Albania is to be used by the UK Home Office to host its asylum seekers is not a new phenomenon. The Americans also recently said they would ‘temporarily’ hold Afghan refugees in Albania for processing. Albania is notorious as a centre for quarantine to hold questionable people and to see what to do with them. In these recent examples, Britain and the US will choose which asylum seekers they want – which are useful – and reject those who are unwanted or even dangerous. The situation with the MEK was the same. The original US plan was to move the MEK members from Iraq to Albania, choose who they wanted and disperse the rest into the community. But with the MEK the Americans changed their mind under pressure by the Israelis, Neocons and anti-Iran elements, and instead of de-radicalising them, gave them land and support to build the cult again. Maryam Rajavi admitted that the MEK was not capable of doing what it had done with Saddam Hussein, but she convinced these backers that she could get the MEK to work under the tutelage of Prince Turki; intelligence based work that they had also done for Saddam. So, the click farm was established and the MEK set about stitching people up, feeding the false court case of Hamid Nouri and other dirty work like helping Israel with the assassination of Iran’s nuclear scientists.

++ As the court case of Hamid Nouri rumbles on in Sweden, several commentators reacted to the public rivalry between Maryam Rajavi and chief witness Iraj Mesdaghi. The MEK sites are totally allocated to him now and the MEK even published a thick book just to demonise him. Ironically, everything in the book and on the sites is based on some documents allegedly originating from inside Gohardasht prison and Iran’s Intelligence ministry which purportedly show that Mesdaghi did not resist under torture. Commentators have asked ‘did any other people actually resist torture?’ People also ask: ‘Who except Iranian intelligence could feed you that information. Are you claiming to have access to Iran’s Intelligence ministry?’ Commentators point out that three times more information than this has been exposed about Massoud Rajavi himself. Including former SAVAK officials admitting that after his arrest he cooperated with them, and that is why he wasn’t executed along with the other leading MEK members in 1972. They detailed the information that Rajavi gave up – naming the places and people and plans he exposed so they could be arrested. People now ask how those documents about Rajavi are different from these about Mesdaghi. But the main issue that people are highlighting is what kind of court is this in Sweden where the witnesses are publishing books against each other during the court case and accusing each other of being paid agents of the Intelligence ministry of Iran and the Swedish judge doesn’t either see or care.

++ Atefeh Nadalian from Nejat Society, Tehran has published a lengthy analysis with facts about women in the MEK, titled ‘From Talking to Deeds’. Nadalian explains how from the start of the MEK to the present time, the MEK talk constantly about how pro-women the organisation is. But in their deeds the MEK is shown to enact the worst suppression of women even from the time of the Shah. In the MEK, marriage, divorce, having children, giving up children, are all done by force. Women in the MEK don’t even have the rights of a farmyard animal, let alone human rights. The situation now is so inhumane that elderly MEK women are banned from having the support of their families in their old age. Their families cannot care for them, or even place them in a home so as to give them comfort and dignity. All this, however, is different when it comes to the Qajar-Azodanlu and Abrishamchi families. They are rolling in wealth and castles and privilege.

Oct 08, 2021

++ This week marked the 40th anniversary of the turning point in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war when Iranian forces took Abedan and forced the Iraqis into retreat. Several media outlets in Iran reminded their readers that at this exact time when Saddam Hussein began to lose the war, Massoud Rajavi ordered the MEK inside Iran to go all out in Tehran to intensify and maximise their indiscriminate terrorist attacks. Rajavi later admitted that ‘we knew that these attacks (armed gangs attacking anywhere and anyone) would not succeed, but we had to try’.

++ This week, schools in Iran opened. Maryam Rajavi called on schoolchildren to take up arms and undertake an uprising. She didn’t say how they could achieve this. Commentators wrote that Rajavi is so nasty that she can’t even bear to see children being educated. Some compared her to the Taliban.

++ Over the past few weeks, Iran has been in the news for various reasons, political, social and economic: Iran became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization; the US agreed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq (something Iran’s leaders vowed to make happen after the illegal killing of general Soleimani, deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and eight others); Iran’s naval commander highlighted the navy’s various successes; Iranian fuel successfully arrived in Lebanon to ease shortages there; Ali Landi, a 15-year-old boy who heroically rescued two women from a fire, died of severe burns; Iran’s women’s football team qualified for the AFC Women’s Asian Cup; Iran’s volleyball team beat Japan to win the 21st Asian Volleyball Championship. Maryam Rajavi and the MEK maintained complete silence over all this news, pretending none of it happened at all. Not even a word of criticism or scorn. Nothing. Just sliding rapidly into irrelevance.

++ In Albania, news about the Swedish court case has reached the media as several members of the MEK cult travelled to Sweden to give evidence. Commentators point out that this in itself throws the case into question – members of a terrorist cult giving testimony against their sworn enemy. One social media post pointed out that it would be equally possible to ‘find’ fifty witnesses to present exactly the opposite evidence based on their memories of that time.

In English:

++ Swiss media and the MEK’s own sites reported that the investigation into the assassination of Kazem Rajavi in 1990 has been re-opened. Last week, Massoud Khodabandeh wrote a lengthy piece outlining the various stages in which Massoud Rajavi and his family were slowly but surely ousted from their leadership of and involvement with the MEK. One of those stages was this assassination which, according to Khodabandeh, could only have been performed with inside knowledge of Kazem Rajavi’s security. The re-investigation was initiated by Saleh Rajavi last year. Perhaps he too felt that his family had been ignored and pushed aside too far and for too long. Prescient.

++ During a meeting with his counterpart Ann Linde on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian mentioned the ongoing trial of an Iranian national which features witness testimony by the MEK. Amirabdollahian characterised this as a ‘fabricated case’ and that ‘all evidence and allegations presented to the court, are fabricated by a group, which is known to engage in falsification and deceit’. He added, ‘this demonstrates that the court process lacks validity and is politicized’.

++ Iran Front Page reported that the Head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, warned the IAEA not to allow terrorist groups (MEK) to use it as a plaything. The comments came while the AEOI chief was in Moscow for talks with Russian nuclear officials. Press TV also reported on Eslami’s remarks indicating that the MEK manipulates the IAEA through fake news.

September 02 2021

++ Meeting with Iran’s delegation at the UN General Assembly was, despite western media disinterest, of great interest to many countries, which did in fact hold meetings with foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. Those countries, in particular, which support the restoration of the JCPOA. Even the UK foreign minister Liz Truss met with him. Which kind of left America standing alone in an empty room clinging to its intransigence over its sanctions regime. Years ago, the MEK would have been able to rally a couple of hundred supporters outside the UN to protest against Iran. This year, from their hidey-hole in Albania, desperate to appear relevant, they re-hashed on a website a previous speech by Mike Pompeo (which they had paid for) and pretended that he was supporting them now. The current theme of the MEKs activities is to denigrate president Ebrahim Raisi and create mistrust so as to prevent rapprochement between Iran and the west.

Behind the scenes the MEK is bankrolled by Saudi Arabia, whether directly or through intermediaries. But the driving force behind this anti-Iran push are extremist elements of the Israeli right. And as long as there are American politicians, former officials and military personnel and justice systems like Sweden’s willing to be corrupted by MEK dollars, this charade will continue. But Raisi himself spoke to this charade in his videoed speech when he denounced the use of terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy: “you cannot fight terrorism with double standards. You cannot make a terrorist group, such as ISIS and claim to fight it somewhere else”. Equally applicable to western support for the terrorist MEK.

++ Borna News in Iran published a long analytical piece by Middle East expert Jafar Ghannadbashi, outlining 14 actions taken by Saudi Arabia against Iran, each of which could lead to war or weaken western leverage against Iran. One of these actions is “to help the armed terrorist groups, one of which is the MEK. This means that a large part of all the expenses of the hypocrites in Albania and elsewhere is paid by Saudi Arabia. In addition to the seminars and conferences that are being held in Paris, apart from the separatist groups that are in the border areas of our country, Saudi Arabia also pays for them and supports them. Saudis have repeatedly said: ‘We will bring the war to the inside of Iran’.” According to Ghannadbashi, the money spent by Saudi and Israel to stop rapprochement between Iran and the west is a waste of money.

In English:
++ The MEK has entered a new phase which should be called the rise of the ‘Qajar’ Dynasty’ or the Third Ideological Revolution. Maryam Rajavi has consigned Massoud Rajavi and his ‘Rajavi Dynasty’ to obscurity and appointed at leadership level in the MEK her own daughter, her niece, her former husband’s niece’s daughter, along with a small cabal of loyal women, groomed specifically for their roles. For all we know, she might even be contemplating changing her name back to Qajar-Azodanlu to complete the coup. Massoud Khodabandeh wrote a long article outlining how this coup came about over forty years. “Looking back over MEK history after this recent leadership announcement, it is clear that there was a deliberate attempt by Maryam Rajavi to protect and promote her family and friends in the organisation. Whether motivated by jealousy or ambition, she pushed the Rajavi family out. Her control over the MEK became almost inevitable after Massoud disappeared in 2003. The Massoud-Saddam combination became the Maryam-Faisal combination. But when Faisal announced five years ago that Massoud Rajavi was dead, it was clear she was not ready to show her hand. Whether she had not fully groomed her daughter and the other women for this role, or she had not assumed full control over the money, the time has now arrived. In effect, Maryam Rajavi has instigated a third Ideological Revolution – the Qajar Dynasty’s leadership of the MEK.”

++ A short piece by Ali Alavi published by Iran Interlink says that Albania’s agreement to temporarily house nearly 500 Afghan refugees is simply a way for the Americans to vet them before choosing which ones are acceptable over there. “Albania is notorious as the backyard for US dirty work – a hub for financing, recruitment and training and dispatching ‘good’ terrorists. That’s why the terrorist cult Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) is based there.” Alavi pointed out that many of these Afghan refugees speak Dari which is very close to Farsi. “The newly arrived Afghan refugees who speak Farsi are ripe for recruitment by the MEK. They can be used to bulk out the audience at Maryam Rajavi’s fake gatherings. They can be used in the click farm at the MEK camp in Durres. They can be trained over the coming year or so, to replace some of the older MEK members in North America and Europe.”

++ An Iran Interlink editorial highlights the hypocrisy of the MEK celebrating Democracy Day when in its 57-year history it has never held an election among its members to choose its leaders or its policies.

++ Habilian Association published a collection of articles under the title ‘Mojahedin-e Khalq Uncovered: The Terrorist Group in the Eyes of International Media’. This comprises media articles and reports published on the MEK by governments, research institutes and think tanks that help us “to understand how MKO’s terrorism has been viewed by experts, journalists, politicians, governments and international organizations during the past 17 years.”

Sep 24, 2021

++ This week, Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks, renowned human rights defender, participated in an online discussion for the Saudi outlet Iran International in London. The programme focused on the water shortages and disturbances in Khuzistan. In the middle of the discussion, Sharifpour-Hicks pointed to evidence that the MEK had been involved in taking over the peaceful demonstrations in an attempt to turn it into violent overthrow of the regime. This prompted both the other participants and presenter together to vigorously attack her, denouncing her as an ‘agent of the regime’. Straight after this programme another Saudi paid outlet, ‘Independent’ in Farsi, from London, followed up in attacking her. After that the Albanian troll farm was put into motion to carry on the attack. In response to that, Dr Muhammad Sahimi the well-known academic and opposition personality, published a brief note on social media looking at the situation from different angles.

Starting with all the evidence including the self-proclaimed evidence from MEK about their involvement – which appears to confirm what Sharifpour-Hicks said. Then going through the history of the output of the Saudi outlets and the troll farm in Albania and how they tie up together. Then Sahimi points out that Sharifpour-Hicks, as a human rights defender has not looked into the background of Iran International, believing it to be a genuine, normal television company rather than a Saudi propaganda channel, and has fallen into their trap. For Iran-Interlink the question is not about the outlets, they are known people and, from the other side, Sharifpour-Hicks is a known person too with her reputation intact. The question is, how is it that when it comes to their outlets, the Saudis do not want the name of the MEK to be made public, even though they are using them and their troll farms. They want the MEK but don’t want them named. Unfortunately for them, Maryam Rajavi can’t shut up and could not resist making it public that the MEK were there killing people. It is worth mentioning in this regard, that several police were shot and killed during the disturbances, and that the coalition between the MEK and Ahwazi separatists, whose videos show them shooting people, goes back a long time, not least including the terrorist attack on the military parade in Ahwaz in September 2018.

In English:

++ In a spectacular display of political illiteracy, the MEK launched an attack on Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and critic of the MEK. For years the MEK used Alireza Jafarzadeh in the US as their frontman, even banning him from speaking Farsi in order to create a more convincing Americanised persona. But since the MEK is a cult and as in any cult the members must be kept in an insecure cycle of promotion and demotion, so Jafarzadeh has been removed and now Ali Safavi has been brought out in his place. Safavi and Jafarzadeh are among a handful of MEK members who were recruited as students in the US and UK at the time of the Iranian Revolution. Their English language skills were key to their use in what the MEK calls their public relations department. Sadly, they were not recruited for their political abilities, and in spite of talking to endless numbers of politicians and media over the years, their political knowledge and skills have remained at best at the level of a first-year undergraduate student. Hence the attack on Michael Rubin.

Safavi’s attack was then rehashed and republished in paid and unpaid media, with the Albanian troll farm doing its work to amplify and spread the message. This kind of organised character assassination is not new to the MEK, and no matter whose idea it actually was for Ali Safavi to publish this writing against him, the purpose, presumably, was to warn others off from criticising the MEK. However, all this does is to reveal the MEK’s stupid idea of politics: oppose any and everything to do with Iran because ‘the regime’; when the Republicans are in power, attack Democrats, when Democrats are in power, attack Republicans. Michael Rubin published a dignified response to the MEK’s diatribe in The National Interest, explaining in simple terms that even the MEK could understand, exactly what is the trouble with the Mujahedin al-Khalq [Sic]: in short, “The MKO’s tendency to cry wolf hinder and obstruct the real fights against the Iranian regime, Iranian terrorism, and the Islamic Republic’s covert nuclear program”.

Jul 30, 2021