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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Warmonger Zuhdi Jasser Supports MEK Terrorists, Calls For Regime Change in Iran

Is there a neo-con war that the sad Zuhdi Jasser will not support or advocate? If you recall, Zuhdi was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, now he is praising Maryam Rajavi, leader of the cult group, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), a group that Seymour Hersh revealed received training from the CIA.

The MEK was a designated foreign terrorist organization until it was taken off the list in 2012 due to the lobbying efforts of former government officials.

In his twit post, Jasser asserts, “Instead of appeasement Iran we should heeding courageous Iranian dissidents Maryam_Rajavi begging for regime change”.

Zuhdi Jasser purports to be a representative of the “moderate” Muslims of the United States but reportedly he is nothing but a tool of the right wing who uses him to justify their stereotyping and propagandizing about Muslims and wars in the Middle East.

Nejat Society reporting from LOONWATCH.COM

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Congressman Tom Cotton Makes Allies of Radical Marxist Muslims

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.; shown) is not only the darling of the neonconservatives and war hawks, but he also seems to be making a play to get in the good graces of “an Iranian dissident terrorist group.” Here’s the story as reported by Nick Hankoff for Voices of Liberty on May 8:

On Wednesday, Cotton participated in a panel called “After Iran Nuclear Framework Agreement, Now What?” organized by the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) in a Senate meeting room. The OIAC, through spending millions of dollars lobbying, is responsible for getting an Iranian dissident terrorist group removed from the State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations in 2012 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That would be the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that assassinated half a dozen Americans in Iran and targeted many others in the run up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The MEK was founded with Marxist, feminist, and Islamic tenets and incorporated cultish tendencies including personality worship of its husband-wife founders, forced divorces for elderly women, and a forbiddance to marry for young women.

The revolutionary group considers itself a government-in-exile, ready to return to Iran once the current regime is overthrown. The MEK has no measure of support from the Iranian people.

Cotton’s cozying up to the “MEK-fronting OIAC” is particularly troublesome in light of the fondness President Obama seems to have for the same gang. Consider this facet of the story told by The New American’s Alex Newman in 2012:

After a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign that unlawfully enlisted top members of the bipartisan U.S. political class, the Obama administration decided that the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MeK), an Islamo-Marxist terror cult notorious for murdering Americans, should no longer be on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations. Experts say the decision paves the way to begin openly showering U.S. taxpayer money on the anti-American outfit in its bid to overthrow the Iranian regime.

The controversial decision to formally "delist" the organization came in the wake of reports charging that the federal government was already arming and training the cult-like Iranian MeK in violation of U.S. terror laws. The purpose of the alleged support, according to multiple sources, was to help wage a proxy war against Iran. Criticism of the administration’s recent decision, however, erupted quickly and forcefully.

Newman also briefly outlines the MEK’s origins and mission:

Also known as the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, the MeK was founded in an effort to advance a hybrid system incorporating communism and Islam. It officially landed on the U.S. government’s terror list some 15 years ago for perpetrating numerous terror attacks against civilians and more than a few senior American military personnel. The group was also allied with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, helping him to wage a brutal war against Iran while suppressing dissidents within Iraq.

In fairness, Senator Cotton may be ignorant of the MEK’s militant and terroristic intent. In fact, perhaps his alliance with the group may be an example of an enemy of his enemy being his friend.

Both Cotton and the MEK oppose any agreement between Iran and the United States. Cotton was the chief architect of a controversial letter co-signed by 46 other senators and sent to the government of Iran explaining that any treaty between the two countries would require congressional approval.

For its part, as Hankoff reports: “The female co-founder of the MEK, Maryam Rajavi, has said that toppling the government in Iran is the best shot the US has at defeating the Islamic State.” He adds that, “Cotton has said bombing Iran would last no longer than how long proponents of the 2003 Iraq War promised.”

Hankoff and Newman both point out that Cotton’s not the only neocon to feel comfortable in the company of MEK.

“It’s possible Tom Cotton is (willfully?) ignorant to the leftist, tyrannical values and aspirations of the MEK. But like Howard Dean, Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, and many other politicians, there are big opportunities to work together for mutual political growth and enrichment,” Hankoff writes.

Newman confirms this collaboration, reporting:

Despite federal statutes defining as a felony the provision of any “material support” to designated terrorist organizations, the MeK managed to buy die-hard support from numerous senior U.S. politicians and former officials on both sides of the aisle. Advocates for the terror cult range from neo-conservative terror-war cheerleaders like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Mukasey to liberals like Howard Dean and Gen. James Jones. Former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, ex-CIA and FBI bosses, and many others jumped on the pro-MeK bandwagon, too.

In light of Cotton’s admitted alliance with MEK, where is the outrage from conservatives? Where is the call for Cotton to renounce any association with the group, especially considering that to continue their relationship would be a felony and a violation of federal law prohibiting such cooperation?

Hankoff puts it this way, “Neocons and Marxist-Islamist terrorist cultists joining together to undermine US-led international negotiations to prevent war with Iran. Politics makes strange bedfellows.”

Calls for comment by Senator Cotton’s office made by The New American were unreturned at press time.

by  Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.,   The New American

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Well-Funded Exile Group’s Desperate Attempts to Sabotage Diplomacy on Iran

A month ago, intense negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland, resulted in a framework for a final nuclear deal between six world powers and Iran. As negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Russia, the United States and United Kingdom, plus Germany) continue nuclear talks to reach a comprehensive deal before the end of June, opponents of diplomacy and potential détente have intensified their efforts to derail any accord.

Prominent in this effort is exiled Iranian dissident organization, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK or MKO, also known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or PMOI) which was classified as a terrorist organization by the EU until 2009 and by the United States until 2012. MEK is bitterly opposed to the current Iranian government and seeks its overthrow.

The cult-like organization has spent vast sums of money to lobby political elites on both sides of the Atlantic for recognition as an alternative to the current Iranian government. Since a negotiated, multilateral deal with Iran would effectively bury prospects of Western-led regime change in Iran, the MEK is attempting to leverage its extraordinary influence to sink talks.

Regime change in Iran, by any means, is the only item on the MEK agenda. Like experienced salesmen, its members employ different tactics to “sell” this approach to various audiences.

In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non-proliferation and Trade last month (delivered via videoconference from Paris), Maryam Rajavi, the self-proclaimed “president-elect” of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which serves as the MEK’s front office, suggested the best way for Western nations to combat the threat posed by ISIS is to oust the regime in Iran. Of course, no reference was made of the fact that Iran was one of the first countries to commit blood and treasure to the fight against ISIS. Nor did Rajavi mention that, when ISIS first overtook Mosul in the summer of 2014, the MEK hailed the militant group and its supporters as “part of a popular revolution against the Maliki regime” in Iraq, which the MEK views as an Iranian pawn. Once the U.S. military joined the fight against ISIS, however, it became politically untenable to defend or minimize its crimes. So, the MEK quickly changed its tune, suddenly portraying ISIS as Iran’s creation.

Exploiting local political sensitivities in Europe, the MEK has chosen a different tactic to advocate for government overthrow. To European audiences, the MEK has emphasized Iran’s human rights issues, such as the high number of executions in the country, as well as issues to do with women rights and infringements on religious liberty. In mid-April, MEK operative Firouz Mahvi, a member of NCRI’s so-called “Foreign Affairs Committee” and a fixture at the Brussels-based European Parliament (EP), sent an e-mail to parliamentarians (MEPs) calling on them to adopt an urgent resolution on capital punishment in Iran. The proposed resolution would have almost certainly led to the cancellation of a scheduled visit by members of the Majles, the Iranian parliament, to Brussels. In fact, this very thing happened last year: following the adoption of a different resolution on Iran critical of its human rights record, the Majles delegation cancelled a planned trip in protest.

Inter-parliamentary dialogue is one of the only institutionalized platforms for interaction between officials from the EU and Iran. For progress in EU-Iranian relations to occur, whether on the nuclear issue or otherwise, it is essential to keep Iranian conservatives at the table.

Realizing the issues at stake and familiar with the MEK’s modus operandi, the parliamentary majority read the situation correctly: The MEK’s push for a resolution on capital punishment had little to do with genuine concern for the human rights of Iranians, and everything to do with ongoing attempts to sabotage the nascent EU-Iran dialogue.

When their plan failed, MEK associates, this time under the guise of the dubious “Iranian Refugee Association in Belgium” (it has neither an e-mail address nor a website) launched a call for MEPs to boycott the May visit from the Iranian delegation. While the call was not heeded by Polish conservative Janusz Lewandowski , chair of the EP delegation for relations with Iran, other MEPs fell into the MEK’s trap. For example, Beatriz Becerra, a Spanish MEP from the centrist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats of Europe (ALDE) challenged her colleagues to raise new legislation in the Iranian parliament, which is said to limit the sexual and reproductive health rights of Iranian women, with delegation members. She also tabled a written question on the issue to the Council of the EU and the European Commission. Becerra may be a well-intentioned defender of women rights, but her aggressive advocacy on behalf of the MEK and Maryam Rajavi certainly does more harm than good.

Another common MEK strategy is to hold public hearings in the EP, like the one organized last month on religious freedom in Iran by the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group. ECR is a strange mix of seemingly respectable mainstream parties such as British Conservatives and fringe right-wing outfits, such as the Dutch Calvinist party (which until recently forbade women from becoming members) and the Islamophobic, anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party. When it comes to foreign policy, what binds these disparate forces together is their fervent support for Israel, extreme hostility to Palestinians and hardline hawkishness on Iran. In the recent past, even after the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, the ECR tried to block the first official visit of European parliamentarians to Tehran. The bid failed and the delegation visited Iran in mid-December 2013.

In light of this, it is unsurprising the ECR yielded the floor to Sanabargh Zahedi, chair of NCRI’s so-called “Judicial Committee.” Presenting himself as an “Islamic scholar,”  even though there was no evidence of his scholarship on Islam or any other field for that matter, Zahedi asserted that, “unless all countries put improvement of human rights as a pre-condition to doing business and trade with this regime, we will not see any real progress in any area, including the nuclear issue.”

None of this is to say that human rights in Iran should not be a matter of grave concern. [..]

Still, there are more effective ways to address these crucial issues than calling for regime change, undermining nuclear negotiations, or following the agendas of those with obvious ulterior motives. Ultimately, the nuclear deal and the possibility of engagement with Iran hold a better promise for achieving real progress in the human rights sphere than any delusions about  “regime change.” This is certainly how respectable human rights organizations and activists see it.

Hadi Ghaemi, director of the New York-based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran welcomed last month’s Lausanne agreement as an important step toward creating better conditions for discussing human rights with Iran. Those in the West who genuinely care about the human rights of Iranians would do well to listen to these voices rather than let themselves become puppets in the MEK’s destructive schemes.

Eldar Mamedov, Muftah.org

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Not The Onion: Tom Cotton Befriends Radical Marxist Muslim Cult

How badly does Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) want to squander a deal with Iran over its civilian nuclear program? Bad enough to become the fastest rising star of the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, yes, but this week the freshman senator went even further than sending a letter to the Iranian government.

On Wednesday, Cotton participated in a panel called “After Iran Nuclear Framework Agreement, Now What?” organized by the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) in a Senate meeting room. The OIAC, through spending millions of dollars lobbying, is responsible for getting an Iranian dissident terrorist group removed from the State Department’s official list of terrorist organizations in 2012 by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That would be the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that assassinated half a dozen Americans in Iran and targeted many others in the run up to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The MEK was founded with Marxist, feminist, and Islamic tenets and incorporated cultish tendencies including personality worship of its husband-wife founders, forced divorces for elderly women, and a forbiddance to marry for young women.

The revolutionary group considers itself a government-in-exile, ready to return to Iran once the current regime is overthrown. The MEK has no measure of support from the Iranian people.

Its possible Tom Cotton is (willfully?) ignorant to the leftist, tyrannical values and aspirations of the MEK. But like Howard Dean, Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, and many other politicians, there are big opportunities to work together for mutual political growth and enrichment.

Here’s a tweet heralding the alliance between Cotton and the MEK-fronting OIAC:

For Cotton and the MEK, prospects of their shared enemy in Iran reaching a nuclear deal inspires outrageous rhetoric. The female co-founder of the MEK, Maryam Rajavi, has said that toppling the government in Iran is the best shot the US has at defeating the Islamic State. Cotton has said bombing Iran would last no longer than how long proponents of the 2003 Iraq War promised.

A little more on the MEK: Prior to giving themselves up to Americans in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 US invasion in Iraq, the group was financed by Saddam Hussein (remember the reason for invading, his support for terrorists?). Since then their anti-imperialist leanings have given way to promoting “human rights,” and they’ve dropped their anti-Israel schtick for a partnership with the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service. Through American intelligence officers, NBC News and Seymour Hersh have each concluded that the MEK carried out assassinations on five Iranian nuclear scientists after training with Mossad.

Neocons and Marxist-Islamist terrorist cultists joining together to undermine US-led international negotiations to prevent war with Iran. Politics makes strange bedfellows.

by Nick Hankoff, VoicesofLiberty.com

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Why Is Congress Listening to an Ex-Terrorist Iranian Cult Leader?

In what one member of Congress called a “historic hearing” yesterday, Maryam Rajavi, leader of the controversial Iranian dissident group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, testified via satellite before a congressional subcommittee on the threats posed by ISIS and Iran, which she sees as one and the same. The MEK is considered a dangerous cult by many, and until three years ago was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. But after years of concerted lobbying, it enjoys a surprising amount of support on Capitol Hill. And yesterday the MEK displayed its growing influence in U.S. foreign policy debates.

It’s been a long and winding road for the MEK. Ideologically, the MEK originally sought to fuse revolutionary Marxism with Islam, but it has largely abandoned that rhetoric today for something more palatable to Western supporters. The group was formed in the 1960s by leftist Iranian students opposed to the Shah’s regime. During the 1970s it carried out attacks that killed several Americans working on defense projects in Iraq, and supported the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. After the Iranian Revolution, the group fell out with the new Islamic state and went underground, carrying out a series of high-profile attacks against the Iranian government while its leaders fled to Paris. During the 1980s and 1990s, the MEK fought as a private militia on behalf of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

But things changed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the MEK renounced violence (after being disarmed by the American military) and cast itself as supporters of the democratic opposition in Iran. Not everyone bought the group’s transformation into defenders of liberty, secularism, and women’s equality. Critics say the group began to transform into a cult centered around its leaders, the married couple Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, after the Iran-Iraq War, when thousands of its fighters were killed.

In 2003, New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rubin visited the group’s Iraqi compound at Camp Ashraf and described it as resembling a “fictional world of female worker bees … dressed exactly alike, in khaki uniforms and mud-colored head scarves, driving back and forth in white pickup trucks, staring ahead in a daze as if they were working at a factory in Maoist China.” Followers at Ashraf were reportedly cut off from the outside media, required to attend regular self-criticism sessions, and barred from personal friendships and emotional relationships. 

But the group played its cards well as Western concerns grew over Iran’s nuclear program, reportedly passing information from its supporters within the Islamic Republic on nuclear facilities to the U.S. and, according to some reports, cooperating with Mossad to assassinate Iranian scientists. It also began a multiyear, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to remove itself from the terrorist list, including paying American figures like Rudy Giuliani and Howard Dean to give speeches on its behalf. It worked, and in 2012, Hillary Clinton took the MEK off the list.

Since then, the group’s influence has been growing. Its supporters regularly crowd hearings on Capitol Hill dealing with Iran and its increasing influence in Iraq. The Iraqi government has long viewed the MEK with hostility and has carried out several brutal attacks on its compound. U.S. officials also believe Iranian troops participated in a 2013 attack  that killed at least 50 MEK members in 2013. One of its staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, held up a planned arms sale to former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government in part over concerns about the treatment of the MEK.   

Ted Poe, R-Texas, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, which held Wednesday’s hearing, is another prominent MEK backer. Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for Poe, told me by email that Rajavi has a “long history of speaking against what she calls ‘Islamic fundamentalism,’” and “can speak to how ISIS’ ideology is both similar to and different from the mullahs leading Iran.” Asked if there were any concerns given the MEK’s history, Hynes replied, “the administration does not consider them a terrorist group and neither do we.”

Rajavi was certainly feeling the love from Congress on Wednesday, testifying before an overflow crowd at the hearing, which was titled “ISIS: Defining the Enemy.” Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, compared her appearance to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s address to Congress that day, noting that Japan had also once been an enemy of the United States. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, is not a member of the subcommittee but dropped in to refer to Rajavi as a “great leader.”

Still, not everyone was as welcoming. Former State Department counterterrorism director Daniel Benjamin, who had been scheduled to testify, dropped out of the hearing rather than appear with Rajavi. Another, former ambassador to Syria and prominent administration critic Robert Ford, told Foreign Policy he was “shocked” to learn she was on the panel and demanded that the subcommittee “put me on a panel without the MEK or I wouldn’t appear.” He wound up speaking earlier in the day.

Suspect groups playing on American naiveté by telling gullible politicians exactly what they want to hear. Anybody remember that great band Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi Expatriates? They sure were reliable sources, weren’t they…  More…

In her appearance, via satellite from Paris, Rajavi made a case familiar to anyone who listened to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress in March: that ISIS and Iran are two sides of the same coin, despite the fact that Iranian-backed militias are fighting the group in Iraq. “The Mullahs regime is not part of any solution to the current crisis. Instead, it is the heart of the problem,” she said, referring to the Iranian government as the “Godfather of ISIS.” She referred to the current fight between ISIS and Iran as merely an “internal power struggle” within Islamic fundamentalism and warned that “fundamentalism of the Shiite kind is more dangerous than the Sunni one” because Shiites already have a state, Iran, which is projecting its power in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.

While the support for Rajavi was a bipartisan affair, her message seemed to resonate in particular with critics of the Obama administration’s Iran policy. Hynes denied to me that the timing of the hearing had anything to do with the ongoing debate over nuclear diplomacy and Iran sanctions, saying “There is no relation. Ms. Rajavi is an expert on radical Islamist extremism and is being called to testify in that capacity.” Still, Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-New York,, who praised Rajavi and the MEK as the legitimate democratic opposition of Iran, said during the hearing that when he listens to the administration’s rhetoric on the Iranian regime, “I honestly do not know if my president is on the same team as I am.”

By Joshua Keating, Slate.com

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

MEK Uses Congressional Spotlight to Push Regime Change in Iran

WASHINGTON — MEK leader Maryam Rajavi told lawmakers on April 29 that the path to defeating the Islamic State (IS) runs through regime change in Tehran.

Testifying by teleconference from the exiled group’s headquarters in Paris, Rajavi urged the United States to stand up to Iran throughout the region. Her appearance has sparked controversy because the MEK was listed as a terrorist group until 2012, but several lawmakers defended her right to testify and held up her organization as a viable democratic alternative to the mullahs.

"Since [1979], the regime in Tehran has acted as the driving force for, and the epicenter of, this ominous phenomenon regionally and worldwide," Rajavi testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s panel on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade. "The ultimate solution to this problem is regime change by the Iranian people and resistance."

The hearing drew a crowd of MEK supporters, including a who’s who of lawmakers who have long supported — and taken money from — the MEK and its Iranian-American affiliates. They include Reps. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who aren’t on the committee but stopped by to praise Rajavi.

"This is a very historic hearing," said Jackson Lee, who along with panel Chairman Ted Poe, R-Texas, actively pressed the State Department to take the MEK off its terrorism list. "This is one of the few times that the voice of the opposition [to] the government of Iran has been part of an official discussion. And that’s very important for the American people."

Other lawmakers, including ranking member William Keating, D-Mass., ignored Rajavi and directed their questions only at the other witnesses. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., who also isn’t a committee member, was the only one to challenge her to explain why the United States should put its trust in a group that was kicked out of Iran in the early 1980s and fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Tehran.

"Over the past 30 years, the United States has been drawn into some serious diplomatic and military dead-ends in the Mideast by mistakenly backing individuals and organizations claiming popular support, which turned out to be exaggerated and somewhat manufactured," Davis told Rajavi. "Would you please tell us about the role of the [MEK] … and its place in the current Iranian political life?"

Rajavi said it was impossible to gauge support for the MEK because the mullahs would never allow free and fair elections. But she said the regime’s "fear" of the group and its efforts at "demonizing" was a strong indication of the MEK’s "strength."

Freshman Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., left little doubt that he believed in her.

"I honestly do not know if my president is on the same exact team that I am," he told Rajavi. "Because there are individuals like you, who are willing to rise up and take control of your country’s future."

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., said the MEK’s terrorism designation belonged in the past and compared Rajavi’s appearance to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s address to Congress earlier in the day. He said the media had "attacked" the MEK’s inclusion in the hearing because she was advocating for a certain policy — namely, regime change — but argued that most if not all other witnesses do the same.

"I’ve never heard a witness that wasn’t providing information to further their public policy interests," Sherman said.

Other witnesses, however, took a much different view, arguing that Rajavi’s testimony detracted from the fight against IS. Former State Department counterterrorism coordinator Daniel Benjamin pulled out of the panel after finding out that Rajavi was testifying, and former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford demanded to be seated on a separate panel.

"I wanted to have an in-depth discussion of the Islamic State in great detail, because, precisely, we have American servicemen and women in harm’s way," Ford told reporters after leaving the hearing before Rajavi’s appearance. "It’s really important to get the strategy right. And that requires a detailed discussion."  

By: Julian Pecquet, Congressional Correspondent for Al-Monitor

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Buying your way to respectability

Maybe you’ve heard the saying “money talks, bullshit walks”? Well on Capitol Hill, money and bullshit are often the same thing, and they both get to talk as long as they want or until the cash runs out, whichever comes first. Take the People’s Mujahedin, or Mujahedin-i Khalq (MEK), an Iranian exile group that I’ve written about in the past. MEK used to reside on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups until 2012, when a massive PR campaign led by the most prominent collection of lobbyists that money could buy, bolstered by some strategic donations to the right politicians, convinced Hillary Clinton to remove them from the list. To be fair, the EU had already delisted MEK as a terror group in 2009, and Canada delisted them right after the US did, and obviously there’s no corruption in either Europe or Canada, so I’m sure this was all on the up and up. All MEK did to get listed as a terror group in the first place was little stuff like assassinating a half-dozen or so Americans and blowing up a few US-owned buildings in Iran in the 1970s, before the revolution. Totally innocent stuff, you know.

MEK, known for its opposition to Iran’s current clerical government, was actually founded in the 1960s as a Marxist group opposed to the Shah and his decadent, Western, corrupt, yadda yadda, you know the drill. After the Iranian Revolution, which MEK fully supported, its leader, Massoud Rajavi, found himself getting the short end of the stick in the new Iranian order, so he fled the country before Ayatollah Khomeini could throw him in prison. He set up in Iraq and struck up a friendship with an amiable fellow named Saddam Hussein, and also started dropping MEK’s previous anti-Western and Marxist rhetoric in an effort to get on America’s good side. Also, where MEK had criticized the Shah for having cordial relations with Israel, after the Revolution it started working with the Israelis to carry out covert attacks inside Iran, particularly assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. In 2002, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which claims to be Iran’s “government-in-exile” but is really MEK’s cuddlier political front group, claimed to have revealed information about the existence of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility to the US, which is true inasmuch as you’re willing to ignore the fact that the US already knew about Natanz before NCRI/MEK said anything.

Since he took firm control of the group after the 1979 revolution, MEK has essentially existed as Massoud Rajavi’s personal entourage/fan club. It’s got a creepy cult of personality vibe about it even when you get past the fact that it has demonstrably engaged in numerous real-deal terror attacks over the course of its existence (it supposedly “renounced violence” in 2001, but it kept right on assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, so…). It’s even mirrored that not-at-all creepy US cult, Scientology, in that, not unlike David Miscavige’s missing-since-2007 wife, Shelly, nobody has seen or heard from Massoud Rajavi in over a decade, since the Iraq War, when the US actually targeted MEK camps (they were, after all, still on the terror list) and upended things for Massoud’s bro Saddam. MEK insists that Massoud is alive and well and in hiding, but control over the organization appears to have gone to his wife, Maryam Rajavi.

All of this is prelude to the news that Maryam Rajavi will testify tomorrow by videoconference to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade about…the fight against ISIS. Maryam Rajavi has no experience as a counterterrorism expert, nor does MEK have any experience fighting (or any reason to fight, let’s be honest) against ISIS. Subcommittee chair Ted Poe (R-TX) claims that he invited her to testify “about the threats the Islamic State (IS) poses to MEK members who remain at Camp Liberty in Baghdad,” but, and this may come as a shock so sit down before you read it, she plans on explaining how the US should fight ISIS by overthrowing the clerical government in Iran. That makes no logical sense, but MEK has never been about “making sense.”

Rajavi’s invitation to testify has caused a bit of a kerfuffle around tomorrow’s hearing, as both former US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford and former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Daniel Benjamin have flatly refused to appear alongside Rajavi (Ford has said he would be willing to testify on a different panel, which the subcommittee apparently has decided to do, but Benjamin seems to have pulled out of the hearing altogether). Benjamin cited MEK’s past terrorist activity, including its participation in the 1979 US embassy hostage crisis, as the reason for his unwillingness to testify alongside Rajavi, while Ford was a little blunter:

“The committee handled this abysmally,” Ford told Al-Monitor in a phone call late Monday. “What the fuck do the MEK know about the Islamic State?”

Poe has been defending his decision to include Rajavi in the hearing (at the cost, mind you, of getting testimony from an actual counter-terrorism expert) because she can testify about how threatened the MEK members in Baghdad are by ISIS (which, if they’re in Baghdad, is “hardly at all”). The problem with that is a) she’s planning on testifying about regime change in Tehran instead and b) why doesn’t Poe invite someone from, say, Iraq’s Yazidi community, which is actually directly threatened by ISIS, to testify before his subcommittee? Maybe (SPOILER ALERT: here’s where the money comes in) it has something to do with the fact that nobody from the Yazidi community has managed to put a cool $38K in cash and prizes in Ted Poe’s pockets the way MEK has:

Poe received $17,900 in campaign contributions from supporters of the MEK between 2009 and 2014, according to an analysis I conducted of campaign finance data. Surprisingly, nearly half—or $8,600—of the total flowed into his campaign while the group was still on the State Department’s terrorism list between 2009 and its delisting in 2012.

In 2013 and 2014, the group also paid for $19,671 in travel expenses (including business-class plane fare) for Poe’s travel to MEK events in France.

So, hey, if you’ve ever wanted to testify before Congress but there’s no discernible reason why they should invite you to do so, plus maybe you’ve got some unsavory things in your past that could complicate matters, don’t worry! Just fork over a few tens of thousands to your favorite congressperson and you could soon find yourself offering your “expertise” (or irrelevant ranting, but whatever, you bought your time fair and square) to our nation’s top legislators! Good luck!

ATTWIW.com

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Maryam Rajavi

Cult Leader Will Tell Congress: Fight ISIS by Regime Change in Iran

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade announced that a controversial Iranian exile opposition figure would be testifying via video uplink at a hearing on the Islamic State, known as ISIS. What does the witness, Maryam Rajavi, a co-leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), have to say about the subject at hand?

Rajavi’s written testimony, a copy of which was obtained by The Nation, focuses on an unexpected way of bringing ISIS to heel: by fostering regime change in Iran. “The ultimate solution to this problem” of Islamic extremism, such as ISIS, Rajavi says in the written statement, “is regime change by the Iranian people and Resistance”—a reference to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s political wing.

It sounds counter-intuitive—Iran’s aid to the Iraqi government and various Iraqi militias, after all, is widely credited with stopping ISIS’s advances there—but not when you know about the MEK’s tortuous past. Over the years, the MEK has been nothing if not opportunistic; animated by the twisted logic that the enemy of its enemy is its friend, the group seizes whatever political angle is fashionable at the moment to bring them relevance (Congress is happy to oblige). But more to the point, the MEK has always had only one goal: the overthrow of the Iranian regime. For decades, it has tried to shoehorn regional and geopolitical dynamics into its aim, irrespective of any salient connections.

The plan to bring down ISIS by toppling Iran’s government, then, is little more than the latest chapter of group’s 50-year history of monomaniacally trying to install itself atop the Iranian government. Indeed, Rajavi is testifying at Congress with the title of “president-elect” of the NCRI, which hopes to run a transitional government immediately upon the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Founded as an Islamo-Marxist revolutionary group in the 1960s, the MEK spent its early years pursuing its Quixotic aims by opposing the Shah’s government with a vengeance: through student organizing, outright terrorism—including against American targets when the United States was allied with the Shah, helping to earn its 1997 American designation as a terror group—and fighting at the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution. By the 1980s, after the leader of the revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, kicked the group out of Iran, critics were regularly deriding the MEK as a cult of personality—not least because of its continuing “wacky” behavior, as a former congressional aide put it to me for a feature I wrote this winter with Eli Clifton.

So how do Rajavi and MEK plan to end the threat from ISIS by upending the Iranian regime? That’s not so clear. But it definitely involves ignoring, despite the current clashes, the distinction between Sunni and Shia extremism—including, for example, propagandistic exaggerations like saying that “Shiite militias act more viciously than their Sunni equivalents, such as ISIS”—and pointing out several times that Iran went Islamist before anyone else. That’s about it.

It’s worth noting, however, that the MEK does have some experience in Iraq: after going into exile, its leaders gathered their fighters in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take his side in the Iran-Iraq war—earning the enmity of many Iranians. After the war ended, the MEK, led by Maryam Rajavi and her husband Massoud (who hasn’t been seen in public for a dozen years), stuck around and enjoyed Hussein’s largesse, acting, periodically, as mercenaries to crush incipient uprising against the Iraqi strongman—earning, in turn, the enmity of many Iraqis.

After Hussein’s fall in 2003, the American invaders stripped the MEK of its multitude of arms. (Curiously, for a group that claims to have renounced violence in 2001, Rajavi cites in her Congressional testimony the “disarming” of the MEK as a “misguided polic[y]” that helped give rise to Muslim extremism—but not the invasion that toppled their benefactor itself.) The MEK then languished in its camps, coming under periodic attack by a murky combination of the Iraqi army and, reportedly, government-aligned Shia militias. Dozens of MEK adherents were slaughtered.

The period also marked the growth of an ardent pro-MEK lobby in the United States. As Eli Clifton and I detailed in our Intercept piece this winter, a multimillion-dollar campaign kicked into gear to remove the MEK from the US State Department’s terrorist list. Once that hurdle was cleared, the MEK—despite its cult-like practices—began to accumulate more mainstream power in Congress, where super-hawkishness against Iran is guaranteed to attract powerful bedfellows, including large amounts of pro-Israel donor money and more modest cash from MEK supporters themselves.

Meanwhile, the massacres of the MEK’s ex-fighters at its Iraqi desert bases fueled the group’s hatred of the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki, which had failed to protect them. Just as the MEK had grown close to Hussein because he was an arch-enemy of the Iranian regime, the group likewise reviled Maliki’s government, and vice-versa, for its closeness to the Iranians—the Islamic Republic had hosted and fostered Maliki’s movement in exile before the 2003 war, and supported his Shia government after its rise to power in Iraq.

When ISIS began to rip apart what was still then Maliki’s Iraq, the MEK’s prevailing logic seemed to again fall back on the enemy of its enemy. Perhaps chastened by their own labeling by the US as a terrorist organization, the group seldom uses the word “terrorism” in conjunction with ISIS. Instead, MEK propaganda refers to ISIS as “extremists,” in some instances. At other times, the language is more ambiguous: Last June, when ISIS took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, one MEK website gave a triumphalist account of the conquest, referring to ISIS as “revolutionary forces.”

Historical revisionism of the ISIS assault started almost immediately. “These forces have taken over the Badoush prison and they had hundreds of prisoners that had been proclaimed to be terrorists and they freed them,” read a Persian-language post on the website Mojahedin.org. HRW, however, collected survivor testimonies from the prison takeover that told a different story: “After seizing Badoush Prison near Mosul, the gunmen from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, separated the Sunni from the Shia inmates,” an HRW release said, “then forced the Shia men to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot them with assault rifles and automatic weapons.”

Herein lies the MEK contradiction behind its early positions. On the one hand, ISIS, like the MEK, is militantly opposed to Iranian influence in the region. But Rajavi needs to gin up support in Washington. So she poses herself in opposition to ISIS, claiming the best strategy for fighting the marauding Sunni terrorists is to… overthrow the first regime in the region to commit blood, money and heavy weaponry to the fight against ISIS.

As ISIS became the world’s most famous terrorist group, the MEK eased its whitewash and adopted the stances Rajavi will bring to Congress on Thursday: namely, that ISIS is an extremist group—whose model and inspiration is Iran, however nonsensical that point is. That Congress would invite these ex-terrorists—Rajavi’s past prevents her from getting a visa, the reason for her video testimony—speaks ill of their commitment to shaping serious policy on either ISIS or Iran. Rajavi’s participation proved such an embarrassment that a distinguished diplomat, Ambassador Robert Ford, and another witness withdrew from the hearing rather than speak alongside her on the dais—just as the top UN official for human rights in Iran withdrew from a program last year in Canadian parliament where Rajavi was set to appear.

The MEK’s story is a tragic one of sustained failure, of being massacred and massacring, of being abused and abusing its own people, of terrorizing and being terrorized, and of a constantly morphing politics consistent only in its oddness and toxicity. That story needs to be heard, but as a cautionary tale, not as expert advice. Instead, Congress is asking one of the groups most hated in Iraq and Iran what to do about those countries’ woes. What could go wrong?

Ali Gharib, The Nation

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

Former Iranian Terrorist Group, MEK, To Testify Before Congress

Why is a Texas Congressman inviting the political leader of a former Iranian terrorist group to testify about ISIS and Islamic Extremism before a House subcommittee on terrorism?

WASHINGTON — Maryam Rajavi, acting president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), will address the House Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ( Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).

The NCRI is the political wing of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, also known as the MEK in its Persian acronym. The group is a former terrorist organization, which, according to the FBI, killed American citizens in Iran in the 1970s, was involved in the 1979 hostage crisis, and attempted to overthrow the Iranian revolutionary government with the help of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War.

Al Monitor reports Rajavi was invited by Texas Rep. Ted Poe, the chair of the subcommittee, to testify about the dangers ISIS poses to MEK members at Camp Liberty in Iraq. Poe is quoted as saying about the hearing: “This hearing will explore what drives ISIS and how we can use ISIS’ ideology against it.”

The MEK rose to fame in Washington in 2002, when it publically revealed that Iran was enriching uranium at a secret location called Natanz. However, it has since been revealed that the U.S. was already aware of the site and had even provided details about it to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The group’s most recent foray into the international spotlight came in February, when they claimed to have revealed another secret nuclear site near Tehran called Lavizan-3. Yet this revelation has garnered little attention, as nuclear nonproliferation experts do not believe the NCRI’s claims are credible. Further, there is a stronger understanding now that the MEK intends to upset the nuclear negotiations between the P5+1 countries and Iran by any means necessary.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, wrote last month in Foreign Policy: “[T]here is every reason to think the latest allegations by NCRI represent a politically motivated effort to derail the engagement of Iran over its nuclear program.”

Likewise, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told a Februar press briefing: “We don’t have any information at this point in time to suggest the [NCRI’s] conclusions are accurate.”

The MEK was removed from the State Department’s terrorism list three years ago after a concerted lobbying campaign, which featured some of the most prominent politicians and officials in the U.S., including John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Tom Ridge, former director of Homeland Security; and Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City.

A MintPress News investigation into this campaign revealed that claims made by the MEK and their supporters in the U.S. government are not grounded in truth and are laden with legalistic terms to confuse basic historical facts.

Despite this, Raymond Tanter, a former member of the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, recently wrote an article in Townhall praising the subcommittee for selecting Rajavi as a witness for the hearing. He wrote: “As a prodemocracy woman with a moderate view of Islam, Rajavi represents the opposite of the misogynous Iranian regime’s rulers.”

Tanter added that Rajavi is a good candidate to testify because the subcommittee members will be able to ask how her how she’s dealt with Islamic extremists in the past and how to counter radical Islam.

The problem with this reasoning is that the MEK is a kind of cult, according to the FBI, Human Rights Watch, the Rand Corporation, and just about every other organization which has investigated the group. It is precisely the kind of organization that should not testify about Islamic extremism.

Jeremiah Goulka, author of “The Mujahedin-e Khalq in Iraq: A Policy Conundrum,” a report published by the Rand Corporation in 2009, told MintPress, “At the MEK camps, there’s a whole set of practices that are all textbook out of cult theory – sleep deprivation, make-work projects… forced celibacy, forced divorce, [and] gender segregation.”

Masoud Banisadr, a former member of the MEK, who had served as the group’s representative to the United Nations and the U.S., confirmed that forced divorces were common in the group. Banisadr told MintPress: “All members were forced to divorce their spouses, and later they have to send their children abroad to Europe and United States to be adopted by supporters and other members.”

The group currently has an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, where they launch campaigns related to Iran, attend congressional legislative hearings about the country, and attempt to influence public perception of the current regime.

Former Iranian Terrorist Group, MEK, To Testify Before Congress

By Sean Nevins , Mint Press News

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Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Benjamin Helped Delist Mojahedin Khalq. That Doesn’t Mean He Wants to Testify With Them

Former State Official Helped Delist the MEK As a Terror Threat. That Doesn’t Mean He Wants to Testify With Them.

Controversial Iranian dissidents group may no longer be considered by the U.S. as a terror threat. But it has spooked a former State Department counterterror official who is refusing to testify at a House hearing where the group’s leader will also speak.

The April 29 hearing, in front of a House subcommittee on terrorism and nonproliferation, will focus on the threat from the Islamic State, which has overrun much of Syria and Iraq. Among the invited speakers is Maryam Rajavi, president of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which is the umbrella organization for groups that include Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK).

Until 2012, the MEK was on the State Department’s terrorism list for killing six Americans in the 1970s. For years, the MEK  — which has been likened to a cult — filled campaign coffers of numerous lawmakers while paying steep speaking fees to officials like former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who were paid up to $30,000 for speeches supporting the MEK — which is dedicated to overthrowing Iran’s clerical regime.

Daniel Benjamin, formerly the State Department’s counterterror coordinator, also was slated to testify at the House hearing. But on Monday, Benjamin declared that “I will not appear at a hearing” about the Islamic State with the MEK’s defacto leader, because “I know of no substantive expertise that the MEK has developed on ISIS.” News of Benjamin’s cancellation was first mentioned on Twitter by ALM Congress Pulse.

In an email to Foreign Policy, Benjamin noted that the MEK’s “exclusive focus” of concern has for decades been Iran. “So one has to wonder what the purpose of Rajavi’s presence on this panel is,” said Benjamin, who is now director of an international studies program at Dartmouth University.

“Being delisted as a Foreign Terrorist Organization — a decision I took part in — doesn’t mean that this group … has suddenly … become trustworthy or worthy of engagement,” he said.

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who sits on the House panel, disputed that, and said the group should no longer be vilified since it is no longer on the U.S. list of foreign terror threats.

“Former is former,” Sherman told FP Monday afternoon, referring to the State Department list. He said the group helped uncover Iran’s secretive nuclear facility at Natanz.

However, other claims by the group have been less reliable. The Obama administration believed the MEK was providing misinformation in an effort to derail recent nuclear talks with Iran. During negotiations MEK insisted Tehran was building underground nuclear facilities, an assertion dismissed by the State Department.

The MEK did not return multiple requests for comment. It last drew widespread attention in Washington in 2013, when members of the group were trapped at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. American supporters of the group sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to help the MEK members escape “premeditated mass murder planned at the highest level and executed by Iraqi forces and agents, using equipment and training provided by U.S. forces.”

Sherman also dismissed Benjamin’s rationale for pulling out of his appearance — that MEK had nothing to offer on the Islamic State threat.

“If people pulled out of hearings just because they thought the witnesses’ expertise was on a related issue but not on the official title of the hearing, we’d have a lot of empty chairs,” he said.

David Francis, Foreign Policy,

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