“I didn’t want to be on a panel with the MEK. I was shocked they invited the MEK. What the MEK has to do with the ISIL, I don’t have a clue,” Ford told FP. “I told the committee to put me on a panel without the MEK or I wouldn’t appear,” the former envoy stressed.
The enthusiasm of some hawks in Congress for the Mujaideen-e Khalq (MEK) has started to create a bit of a backlash. The Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee invited the cult’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, to testify remotely as part of a panel on ISIS. That prompted one former State Department official to withdraw from the meeting entirely…
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…
The appearance of Maryam Rajavi by videolink (because she is refused a visa to enter the USA) in Congress last week attracted a flurry of responses from critics and ex members in Iran Interlink’s Farsi site. These largely ignored American politics and instead demanded to know what was being …
A controversial foe of the Iranian government sought to tie the rise of the Islamic State terrorist group to the regime in Iran before Congress on Wednesday — a link that President Obama and many foreign policy experts have rejected but one that has gained traction on Capitol Hill as Obama continues nuclear talks with Iran.
“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/MKO/PMOI] … and its place in the current Iranian political life?”
Maryam Rajavi has no experience as a counterterrorism expert, nor does MEK aka MKO/PMOI have any experience fighting (or any reason to fight, let’s be honest) against ISIS…., and this may come as a shock so sit down before you read it, she plans on explaining how the US should fight ISIS….
Yes, Congressman Poe is right. Maryam Rajavi is the most informed person about what is really going in the MKO aka MEK/PMOI camps in Iraq or France but she is not the most reliable person at all. She is not reliable because of the long history of fraud and Goebbels -like propaganda of her group….
as Ali Gharib and I documented in February, MEK’s aka MKO/PMOI influence in Washington, particularly with Iran hawks, has coincided with a flow of money from the group to American politicians, in particular, to embattled Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) who is currently under indictment on unrelated federal corruption charges.So why did Poe and the Republican majority on the terrorism subcommittee decide to invite Rajavi…..
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 …