-
- Wearing Hijab is mandatory within the MEK affairs despite the cult leader’s claims.
- All the women have to wear the type of Hijab the Cult leaders dictate to them; Scarf.
- Female members of MEK are ought to wear exactly the same uniforms. They are not allowed to choose their own clothes’ color; all the women have to wear Khaki uniforms and red or mud-colored head scarves.
- Female members are banned from applying any form of cosmetics even sunscreen crème.
- Before the Ideological revolution and forced celibacy the women were forced to marry whoever the organization would decide.
- Women in MKO Camps have not been allowed to step in Iraq’s public alone for at least 25 years.
- A large number of female members of MEK became infertile through hysterectomy calling the “Ideal Summit Operation”.
- A large number of female members are manipulated to be abused sexually by the Cult leader; Massoud Rajavi.
- Female members are forced to dedicate all their mind and heart to the cult leaders.
- Female members were deceived by the cult leader to attend a ceremony called “Salvation Dance” in which the women had to dance naked in front of their guru; Massoud Rajavi.
- Women are deprived from experiencing the feeling of motherhood since having child is forbidden within the Cult of Rajavis.
- Women are deprived from marital life.
- Wearing Hijab is mandatory within the MEK affairs despite the cult leader’s claims.
++ After the terrorist attack in Paris last week, many Farsi commentators have criticised France for not acting properly against terrorists. Writers joke about France sending an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf to help “fight terrorism” while the MEK has maintained its political headquarters just outside Paris for thirty years. Maryam Rajavi has abused the impunity offered by France to repeatedly voice her support for ISIS and other terrorist groups. After the murders at Charlie Hebdo, the MEK tried to jump on the bandwagon claiming its London representative Nourouzi was interviewed by Al Jazeera English – though nothing was broadcast by that station. The MEK website also shows pictures of MEK agents leafleting the unity protestors. Former MEK member Ghorban Ali Hossein Nejad writes that he saw the MEK were the only people who had their own banners and leaflets and as such were given a hostile reception by French citizens. Two other ex-members in France have warned French security services that they want it to be put on record that the MEK will certainly soon attempt a violent attack against former members. Other writers have published articles comparing Rajavi’s cult and Daesh with documents showing MEK support for Daesh. One article criticises Maryam Rajavi for supposedly condemning the attack, pointing out that “this has been done by your friends who you call the ‘revolutionary tribes’. Why are you condemning your friends?” Another article, welcomed by many, was by Fanous Association in Germany titled ‘France, Victim or Culpable?’ This describes French cooperation with various terrorist entities, and highlights the MEK as an example.
++ Two more people died – one man in Tirana died of old age (he was around 90 years old), and one woman in her late fifties died in Iraq from a heart attack. The MEK as usual tried to make a propaganda issue of it, but everyone else claims these deaths could have been prevented. The Iraqi authorities say that an ambulance is on permanent stand-by just outside Camp Liberty, but the MEK don’t allow residents out unless they are dead or on the point of death. The authorities say that everything the MEK need is available to them such as medical care, hotel rooms – more so than for ordinary Iraqis – and this provision is supervised and vouched for by the UN. People who knew Mirza Agha, the old man who died in Tirana, say that for the last ten years at least he was kept by force in the MEK camps where the MEK were pushing for him to die through overwork and poor diet and other stressors. Several commentators have said it is extremely rare that the MEK do not claim a dead person as a martyr – no matter how or why they died – and it is significant that in his case they did not. The MEK claimed that Mirza Agha had been forcefully working for Iran’s Intelligence service because of his daughter being in the MEK before he defected and joined the MEK in Iraq. He is described as having been a” refugee” with the MEK for twenty years. Experts in MEK behaviour point out that this is a deliberate and rare omission and shows there is some other information which means the MEK are afraid of calling him a martyr.
++ This week Hamed Sarafpour published a note against the articles by some of the internal critics of the MEK. He specifically mentions Esmail Vafa Yaghmai, who has been writing repetitively over the last few months to “prove” he is not “an agent of the regime”. Sarafpour’s comments were welcomed by many who had become sick of Yaghmai. Sarafpour and others say that Yaghmai is a clear example of somebody who doesn’t understand that you cannot be outside a cult and still support it. Yaghmai claims he has left but writes over and over that he is loyal to the MEK cause. He just doesn’t get it and is destroying himself and his own reputation.
++ Ghorban Ali Hossein Nejad, resident of France, has written to the Sheikh of Al Azhar University in Cairo – a Sunni source of high religious scholarship – and exposes the falsity of a letter sent there by the MEK’s Jalal Ganjei. Hossein Nejad says Ganjei poses as a mullah and religious scholar when he wants, but at other times is secular. Using documents and other evidence, Hossein Nejad exposes that “all the things they wrote for you were written by me as the head of the MEK’s Arabic translation department. Ganjei doesn’t know Arabic properly nor does he know Islam properly.”
In English:
++ Gareth Porter in Middle East Eye writes ‘Four ways the West got the Iran nuclear issue wrong’. These are: Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth; The intelligence goes wrong; Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons and Refusing to acknowledge the weaponisation evidence is tainted. Under this latter heading he says: “Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.”
++ Mazda Parsi writing for Nejat Bloggers dissects the MEK’s online presence saying its News websites are based on “sheer propaganda and stupidity”. The MEK’s journalism consists of propaganda or politically-based mind control and its anti-Iran stance uses archived photographs and fake pictures. Parsi points out that “On only one day, you may find a dozen of cases of protests and gatherings that have taken place in various cities of Iran, reported on the MKO websites and TV channel. Seemingly, the MKO’s propaganda runners do not care about realities and truth. They believe that their goal should justify any means. Demonizing the Islamic Republic is their main objective and preference regardless of validity and authenticity of the news.” This false news, he says, only fools the uninformed members and ill-informed supporters. If such protests existed as the MEK claim over thirty years, there would surely be a revolution in Iran. The problem then must be with the MEK’s news.
++ An article in Nejat Bloggers says ‘Maryam Rajavi’s claim for promotion of equality in her cult is absurd and ludicrous’. Quoting women ex-members of the MEK, the article talks about forced dress codes, in particular hijab. One says, “In the cult, women are not allowed to use any kind of hijab except green, khaki and red scarves. However, red and khaki scarves are allowed only for special occasions. You would be punished if you wore your red or khaki scarf in occasions other than the group’s propaganda ceremonies and marches.” In addition, “forced divorce, forced celibacy, forced hysterectomy surgeries to make female members barren and particularly sexual abuse by Massoud Rajavi” act as evidence that Maryam Rajavi’s claim to support women is absurd.
++ Anne Khodabandeh of Iran Interlink wrote a short article titled ‘Rajavi’s lobbyists demand Mojahedin Khalq terrorist cult in Iraq be re-armed rather than removed”. The article points to the irony that the MEK supporters who lobbied so hard and expensively to have them de-proscribed as a terrorist group now want them re-armed. Khodabandeh says that “small arms are wanted in order to impose greater control over these captives as they become more and more desperate to escape the tyranny of the cult”. The article concludes: “Instead of demanding the MEK be re-armed ready to utilize violence again – the raison d’etre of the terrorist cult – this gang should be demanding from Massoud and Maryam Rajavi that each resident of Camp Liberty be given the opportunity to make contact with their families in privacy and to freely leave the camp if they desire. Then we would see how quickly and efficiently these people can be resettled.”
++ Fars News reported in English that “Iranian Judiciary Chief Sadeq Amoli Larijani lashed out at the West’s double-standards in dealing with terrorism, saying the western countries’ support for the terrorist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization shows that their claims about fighting terrorism are all untruthful. “Now the MKO terrorist group with the worst criminal record is supported by the West, and the Arab financial and spiritual supporters of the ISIL are also West’s allies; then how can one believe that the West, specially the US, Britain, France and Germany, are fighting against terrorism,” Amoli Larijani said, addressing a number of high-ranking judiciary officials in Tehran.”
January 16, 2015
Rajavi’s lobbyists demand Mojahedin Khalq terrorist cult in Iraq be re-armed rather than removed
It is surely ironic that the same bunch of people who lobbied hard and at great expense to have the Mojahedin Khalq terrorist cult removed from European and American terrorist lists (the flimsy claim they had renounced terrorism was only po
ssible because in 2003 the US army captured, disarmed and confined them to a single camp in Iraq), is now lobbying to have them re-armed.
Whether delusional or corrupt, this gang – listed below and now posing as the International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ) – says the residents of Camp Liberty should have their “personal protection weapons returned to them for self-defence following serious threats and attacks [sic] as the Iranian regime’s intervention in Iraq grows”. But has neglected to inform their English speaking audience that the MEK leader, Massoud Rajavi, has demanded the MEK be re-armed with heavy weapons as well as small arms.
In any case, anyone who knows anything about the situation of Camp Liberty knows that the residents are deliberately imprisoned incommunicado inside the camp by the MEK leaders, that the greatest danger these residents face is from these MEK leaders, and that small arms are wanted in order to impose greater control over these captives as they become more and more desperate to escape the tyranny of the cult.
The ISJ statement should certainly not be read without context: Since attaining sovereignty in 2009, each successive government of Iraq has designated the MEK as a terrorist entity which must, under the Constitution, be entirely removed from Iraqi territory. The demand for re-arming rather than removing this group is doubly insulting for a country still swarming with Western spawned terrorist groups.
Perhaps the most ironic ‘complaint’ of the Committee is that the government of Iraq is not investigating the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf in which fifty three people died. How is this possible when forty two key eye witnesses – survivors of the attack – have been incarcerated by the MEK inside Camp Liberty so that no investigator in the world has access to them?
Instead of demanding the MEK be re-armed ready to utilize violence again – the raison d’etre of the terrorist cult – this gang should be demanding from Massoud and Maryam Rajavi that each resident of Camp Liberty be given the opportunity to make contact with their families in privacy and to freely leave the camp if they desire. Then we would see how quickly and efficiently these people can be resettled.
List of members of the ISJ according to the MEK:
Alejo Vidal-Quadras, former MEP; Patrick Kennedy, former Congressman; Günter Verheugen, former member of the EU Commission; Nicole Fontaine, former MEP; General Hugh Shelton former US military; David Kilgour, former Canadian Secretary of State; Ingrid Betancourt; Raymond Tanter; Horst Teltschik; Colonel Wesley Martin, former US military; Senator Lucio Malan, Italian Senate; Alessandro Pagano MP; Antonio Razzi, Italian Senate; Gérard Deprez MEP; Ryszard Czarnecki, MEP; Tunne Kelam MEP; Lord Carlile, UK; Lord Clarke, UK; Lord Maginnis, UK; Lord Dholakia, UK
About Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton):
Middle East Strategy Consultants,
http://www.mesconsult.com
Autor of “Saddam’s Private Army” and “The life of Camp Ashraf”
Propaganda or politically-based mind control, is the main method used in the journalism of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO). The Anti-Iran propaganda launched in the group’s websites is companied by archived photos and fake pictures.
Top news on the MKO website include a long list of protests, gatherings and clashes with police all over Iran! It is worth knowing that the so-called news reports are not reflected in any other news media even the mainstream media such as BBC, CNN etc…
On only one day, you may find a dozen of cases of protests and gatherings that have taken place in various cities of Iran, reported on the MKO websites and TV channel.
Seemingly, the MKO’s propaganda runners do not care about realities and truth. They believe that their goal should justify any means. Demonizing the Islamic Republic is their main objective and preference regardless of validity and authenticity of the news.
The group’s media wants to manipulate its supporters –since nobody else cares about their media and news. Therefore, nobody believes their fabricated news about Iran. Moreover, the mainstream media, even the biased ones are more believable and realistic about the events in Iran than the news by the MKO.
The MKO’s misinformation campaign influences the opinion of its target audience –mostly its uninformed followers inside the group and its paid advocates in Western countries. Besides, a number of these supporters and followers have never been provided accurate information on the true nature of the group and what is really going on in the Iranian society today.
But one thing is sure: If, according to the MKO media, the Iranian community is protesting every day and all the time, then why no revolution, no big change takes place in the country? Although it’s been over three decades now, that the MKO reports of the alleged protests, uprisings and gatherings against Islamic Republic, yet no changes is taking place in Iran. Even the most suppressive government would collapse following such a chaos the MKO claims about Iran. So what is the problem with the MKO news?
Mazda Parsi
First denying Iran’s nuclear rights and then using suspect intelligence to build a false picture of its programme
For more than three decades, the United States and its European allies have committed one fundamental error after another in the process of creating a commonly held narrative that Iran was secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. The story of how suspicions of the Iranian programme hardened into convictions is a cautionary tale of political and institutional interests systematically distorting the judgments of both policymakers and intelligence analysts.
Too many of these basic errors have been committed along the way to cover them all in a single article. But four major failures of policymaking and intelligence represent the broad outlines of this systematic problem.
1. Denial of Iranian rights, followed by denial of the truth
The first failure, which set in train all the others, involved the US trying to strangle the nuclear programme of the Islamic Republic in its cradle and then blithely acting as though it bore no responsibility for the resulting shift in Iranian nuclear policy. It all started with a decision by the Reagan administration early in the Iran-Iraq war in 1983 to put diplomatic pressure on its allies to stop all nuclear cooperation with Iran. France was pressed to forbid a French-based multilateral consortium from providing the nuclear fuel that Iran had counted on for its lone nuclear reactor at Bushehr.
The US State Department acknowledged at the time that it had no evidence that Iran was working on or even wanted nuclear weapons. That US effort to choke off any nuclear assistance to Iran thus represented an extremely serious violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which guaranteed Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear technology.
Not surprisingly Iran responded to that US denial of its nuclear rights by defying US wishes and acquiring the technology to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel itself on the black market and later through negotiations with China and Russia. US aggressiveness toward Iran’s nuclear programme had backfired.
But instead of recognising that it had made a serious error, Washington compounded the original policy blunder by treating the Iranian response as prima facie evidence of nuclear weapons intent. In 1995 Secretary of State Warren Christopher, in the course of explaining an order by President Bill Clinton banning all US trade and investment in Iran, accused Iran of having an “organised structure dedicated to acquiring and developing nuclear weapons.” That was an obvious reference to the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuge and other enrichment technology. The Clinton administration thus acted as though there was no relationship between Iran’s interest in obtaining gas centrifuge technology and the US denial policy that preceded it.
2. The intelligence goes wrong
The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies began to drift away from reality on the Iran nuclear issue in the early 1990s, when Western intelligence agencies were gleefully poring over intercepted telexes from Sharif University in Tehran seeking various “dual use” technologies – those that could be used either for a nuclear programme or for non-nuclear applications. They had found that the telex number on many of the messages was that of the Physics Research Centre, which was known to do research for the Iranian defence ministry. That was enough to convince them that Iran was pursuing a covert nuclear weapons programme.
The telexes ultimately turned out to be false positives, however. In late 2007 and early 2008, Iran turned over detailed documentation showing that every one of the “dual use” procurement items sought in those telexes had been requested by various faculties of Sharif University for faculty and student research. And the Physics Research Centre’s telex number was on the telexes because the former head of the organisation was teaching at the university and had been asked to help in the procurement of the items. The intelligence analysts had wrongly interpreted the inherently ambiguous “dual use” evidence as confirming pre-existing suspicions of Iran’s intentions.
That analytical failure was a template for a series of four intelligence assessments of the Iranian nuclear programme by the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center and later by the US intelligence community as a whole that falsely concluded that Iran had an active nuclear weapons development programme as of the time of the assessment. That string of false positives raises serious questions about the 2007 US national intelligence estimate by a team of analysts that had just repeated the same mistake in a draft estimate only a few months earlier.
3. Ignoring the Fatwa against chemical weapons
The belief of Western governments that Iran must have pursued nuclear weapons has been based on their ignorance of a pivotal historical episode that should have caused them to question that belief. During the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, Saddam’s troops attacked Iran with chemical weapons many times, killing 20,000 Iranians and severely injuring 100,000. Yet Iran never retaliated with its own chemical weapons, as Joost Hiltermann’s A Poisonous Affair, the authoritative source on chemical attacks in that war, has documented.
That fact poses a fundamental challenge to the Western narrative on the Iran nuclear issue, because there is no credible explanation for the Iranian failure to retaliate with chemical weapons other than the fact that supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had forbidden the possession and use of all weapons of mass destruction as illicit in Islam. The Revolutionary Guards acted on their own to acquire the capability to produce mustard gas weapons, as the wartime Iranian Minister for military procurement has confirmed in a recent interview. But his account of his meetings with supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini also confirms that Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against such weapons early in the war and repeated it in 1987.
The implications of that historical episode for an understanding of the politics of WMD policy in Iran are obviously far-reaching. It lends strong credibility to the Iranian claim that the current supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons is an absolute bar to Iran possessing such weapons. But the news media has continued to dismiss the problem by clinging to an old narrative, which was based on false information that Iran not only had possessed chemical weapons but also had used them.
4. Refusing to acknowledge the weaponisation evidence is tainted
For nearly a decade, the international politics of the Iran nuclear issue have revolved around intelligence documents and reports of Iran nuclear weapons work. A 1,000-page cache of documents that surfaced in 2004 showed the redesign of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile to accommodate a nuclear weapon and high explosives experiments that could only be used for nuclear weapons. More incriminating intelligence documents followed in 2008-09. The IAEA has now been investigating them for nine years.
But Western governments, abetted by compliant news media coverage, have chosen to ignore the considerable evidence that these documents were of very dubious origins. Contrary to the cover story that the documents were passed on to Western intelligence by a participant in a covert Iranian programme or by a German spy, a former senior German foreign office official has now revealed that the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained them from a sometime source who was a member of the Iranian exile terrorist organisation Mujahedeen E-Khalq (MEK). The MEK was then serving Israel’s Mossad as a means of laundering alleged intelligence, so it is safe to assume that the documents came from Israel.
IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei (1997-2009), who insisted that the documents had not been authenticated, recalled in his memoirs, “No-one knew if any of this was real.” Against the wishes of the Bush administration, he refused to use them as evidence against Iran.
Major contradictions between information in the papers and the independently verifiable timelines of Iran’s missile and nuclear programmes indicated that the authors were not Iranian specialists. The re-entry vehicle depicted in the studies, for example, was not the one that Iran was redesigning at the time and that was revealed to the world only after the documents were handed over.
El Baradei also revealed that a subsequent series of intelligence documents, which included the claim that Iran had installed a large cylinder at Parchin to test atomic weapons designs, had been passed on to the IAEA directly by Israel. That intelligence proved to be equally problematic: former IAEA nuclear weapons expert Robert Kelley found the Parchin cylinder claim technically implausible.
The US government and its Western allies have all closed their eyes, however, to the evidence that these documents were designed to justify US action by the United States against the Islamic republic. The political convenience of the accepted narrative of the Iran nuclear issue has continued to suppress any active interest in learning the truth.
– Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, “Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” was published in February 2014.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Middle East Eye
++ Massoud Rajavi’s threat to kill former MEK members and any other critics in Europe has attracted many responses in Farsi from people who warn that both Europe and America must take this seriously as they believe that, one way or another, something bad will happen. Even internal critics of the MEK have been complaining that these threats are getting worse by the day.
++ Now that the MEK have been asking for the Americans to give them their weapons back in Iraq, Farsi commentators have found more ammunition with which to ridicule the group. The MEK have had to label even internal critics as ‘agents of the Iranian regime’ to try to answer the mockery. The MEK claims “the regime is shivering with fear at the flash of light of the MEK’s guns”. These critics report that Rajavi claims Camp Liberty to be “the centre of struggle and war”. They say these are ridiculous claims; the MEK are beating the war drum with nothing in their hands. But more in depth analyses reveal greater concerns. Families and experts alike have written to the UN pointing out that when Rajavi talks like this it means he is preparing a catastrophe for his followers. They anticipate that Rajavi intends to recruit some murderous gang to kill the residents of Camp Liberty. This scenario is not new, and Rajavi has acted in this way in the past. The families of residents are now seriously worried that their loved ones will be killed rather than be allowed out of the camp.
++ In Albania the MEK have opened up a plethora of websites using various pseudonyms. The main focus of the sites is to praise the MEK and denounce the ex-members who have just arrived in Albania from Camp Liberty as liars. But the central problem is exposed by the MEK themselves as they complain they pay $500 per month to these people to keep quiet – the UN only pays $250 per month – but in spite of this people are getting the money and still exposing everything about the situation through anonymous posts on Facebook and blogs (reporting who is coming and going from the MEK side, and who the main contacts are, etc). The MEK’s dilemma is that it cannot control this information leakage even through bribery.
++ Along with asking to be re-armed, the MEK have this week published an article claiming that because Iran is working toward rapprochement with the Americans, this proves they are not anti-Imperialist! As usual this has engendered many ironic responses. Such as Saber in Nejat, who creates the comparison between them and Iran by pointing out that ‘having a win win relation between two counties is not a problem, but being the mercenary of another country against your own is seriously a big problem’.
In English:
++ Mazda Parsi writing in Nejat Bloggers says the MEK is trying to recreate cult conditions in Albania to keep newly transferred people under their hegemony. To this end they have sent one of Rajavi’s most loyal cult lieutenants, Faezeh Mohabatkar to link the main cult in Iraq with those resettled in Albania. By choosing Mohabatkar, who is known to ex-members as a torturer, the MEK is sending the message: You cannot simply leave the cult. But Mohabatkar has been tasked with imposing cult conditions in Tirana where the group members are no longer isolated as they are behind the bars of Ashraf or Liberty. As an expert in MEK cult affairs, Parsi questions whether she can succeed in imposing the MEK’s cult practices in a European city and retain all of the relocated members inside the cult. Evidence of the previously resettled members shows, he argues, that once members are cut off from the intense control of cult relations they are able to defect more easily.
++ An article by Dr. Ismail Salami published by Global Research deals with the continued attempts of Mossad and the MEK to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists. The article reports that over two years Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has thwarted several such attempts. The MEK’s involvement is exposed by a NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem which “cites two anonymous senior US officials with two interesting claims: 1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and 2) the terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” So the report testifies to the veracity of what Iranian officials have asserted about the involvement of MEK and Israel in murdering nuclear scientists on the Iranian soil.” In the context of recent death threats by Rajavi against critics, the author writes, “Interestingly, a few weeks ago, I received a threatening email from Ali Safavi, the notorious MKO spokesman (through a western publisher of mine) in which he had pontificated about the virtues of the MKO terrorists and the so-called ‘vices’ of the Islamic Republic, accusing me of serving as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic. I strongly believe that revealing the murky realities of a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of 17000 innocent Iranians is only my ethical obligation. Besides, Ali Safavi and the likes of him should come to their senses and realize that their efforts to whitewash their crimes will eventually prove pointless and that there is no way at all for them to lend a cloak of legitimacy to their unnamable crimes against the Iranian nation.”
The article concludes that ISIL and the MEK are ‘cut from the same cloth’ and that “Mossad is dispatching assassins into Iran to liquidate Iranian scientists is only meant to strike fear and beyond that, to secretly make up for what the ISIL and MKO terrorists feel emasculated to do in Iran.”
++ Anne Khodabandeh of Iran Interlink has written a brief Open Letter addressed to President Hollande. The gist of the letter is that France has protected the terrorist MEK for thirty years in a de facto terrorist enclave to which even the French security services have no access. Now that Rajavi has threatened to kill his critics – with names and photographs of his targets – then the French President is responsible for anything that happens. Khodabandeh writes: “You are the President of France, not ISIS or Al Qaida. You, therefore, are responsible for the security of your citizens. I also hold you responsible for my life because you are currently hosting a terrorist group which threatens to kill me simply because I speak out against its continued crimes. In a democracy we don’t beg terrorists not to kill us. Instead we expect our elected leaders to ensure that such crimes are prevented.”
In their abortive effort to assassinate another Iranian nuclear scientist, Israeli officials only sustained desperation and disgrace in their dastardly elimination campaign against Iran which was apparently in sync with ISIL inhumane brutalities inside Iraq and Syria.
More alert than ever, security forces are diligently tasked with protecting the lives of the Iranian scientists wherever they are.
A top Iranian military official said on Saturday that in the last two years, “the Zionist entity has been making clandestine efforts to assassinate an Iranian nuclear scientist, but the timely presence of the IRGC security forces thwarted the terrorist operation.”
It is now common knowledge that Tel Aviv has been carrying out covert ops inside the Iranian soil for a couple of years, assassinating Iranian nuclear officials and scientists although Israel has constantly declined to admit to its unjustified iniquity against the Iranian nation.
Translating suspicion into conviction, a report carried by CBS News in March 2014 revealed that Obama has pressured Israeli espionage apparatuses to put an end to their assassinations inside Iran against the country’s nuclear scientists.
The terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization AKA MKO or MEK seems to be a ubiquitous agent any time there is an assassination in Iran. A shadowy cult with myriad of financial, military and intelligence connections to Tel Aviv and Washington, the MKO works in league with Kidon, the assassination unit within the Mossad. There are solid reports which indicate that the MKO members have received military and intelligence training both from the US forces as well as from the Mossad.
In 2012, Seymour M. Hersh revealed that at a secret site in Nevada, the US Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, “a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K.” According to the report, the training ended sometime before President Obama took office. A retired four-star general says, “They got the standard training, in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months…. They were kept in little pods.”
Within the US government, the cult enjoys a rather immense support for their sabotage activities against the Islamic Republic. Among their shills are former top Bush officials and other Republicans (Michael Mukasey, Fran Townsend, Andy Card, Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani) as well as prominent Democrats (Howard Dean, Ed Rendell, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark).
A revealing report by NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem cites two anonymous senior US officials with two interesting claims: 1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and 2) the terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” So the report testifies to the veracity of what Iranian officials have asserted about the involvement of MEK and Israel in murdering nuclear scientists on the Iranian soil.
Interestingly, a few weeks ago, I received a threatening email from Ali Safavi, the notorious MKO spokesman (through a western publisher of mine) in which he had pontificated about the virtues of the MKO terrorists and the so-called ‘vices’ of the Islamic Republic, accusing me of serving as a mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic. I strongly believe that revealing the murky realities of a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of 17000 innocent Iranians is only my ethical obligation. Besides, Ali Safavi and the likes
of him should come to their senses and realize that their efforts to whitewash their crimes will eventually prove pointless and that there is no way at all for them to lend a cloak of legitimacy to their unnamable crimes against the Iranian nation.
During the Iraq-Iran war, the MKO joined hands with Saddam Hussein, the tyrannical ruler of Iraq in attacking and killing Iranian combatants. However, a bloodier chapter in the history of the cult can be traced in their collusion with Saddam in crushing the popular uprisings in 1991. No doubt, their tanks took an inconceivable reprisal on thousands of innocent civilians. The callous command of Maryam Rajavi is still gnawing and tearing at the hearts and minds of the Iraqis: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
Unfortunately, the MKO, long considered a terrorist organization, was delisted thanks to the unflagging endeavors of former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2011, Mohamed Ali Lobnani, a Lebanese national, who was arrested on charges of spying for Mossad confessed that he had spied for Israel under the cover of a Shiite cleric in Lebanon.
In a court hearing session, Lobnani said he had phone contacts with Mohammad Alizadeh, an MKO ringleader, claiming that had no idea that the number was a Mossad contact number.
Asked about the link between MKO and Mossad, he noted, “As far as I know, the group (MKO) has been collaborating with Israel for several years and has massive interactions with Mossad.”
The MKO is the artifact of a corrupt ideology which is in many respects comparable to that of the ISIL cult. No wonder they are fighting shoulder to shoulder with the ISIL terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
The fact that these two curious cults are thriving rigorously, that the West caters – either publicly or secretly – to their cravings, that they are being bigheartedly financed by the puppet regional regimes and that they receive sophisticated military and intelligence training from Mossad and CIA evinces a believable bond between the two.
That the MKO and the ISIL cults are pursing the selfsame path of perversion is no coincidence at all. The reason is simple: they are cut from the same cloth. And that Mossad is dispatching assassins into Iran to liquidate Iranian scientists is only meant to strike fear and beyond that, to secretly make up for what the ISIL and MKO terrorists feel emasculated to do in Iran.
Dr. Ismail Salami,
After the relocation of a few hundred of members of the Mujahedin Khalq Organization in Albania, the organizations’ leadership found it crucial to maintain its rule over relocated members who were not isolated in 
the cult hegemony anymore. In order to keep members under the cult control in Albania, the MKO needed to use its most reliable servants.
One of these servants is Faezeh Mohabatkar who has been recently sent to Tirana too. She is one of five assistants of the MKO’s first commander.
The relocation of such a person to Tirana shows that the MKO leaders are planning to reorganize their cult-like group in Albania and Europe. Massoud and Maryam Rajavi probably are counting on Albania as a new container for their cult of personality.
The new commander for MKO members in Tirana seems to be fully trusted by the leaders. Faezeh Mohabatkar apparently fits all the criteria of a suppressive cult commander who is able to keep resettled members under the cult control by any means possible.
Most of the former members of the MKO recall Mohabatkar as a torturer. Zahra Sadat Mirbaqeri is former member of the group who has experienced mental and physical torture under Faeze Mohabatkar’s ruling. Mrs. Mirbaqeri declares that she is ready to present her testimonies against Mohabatkar in any court of justice.
Mirbaqeri recounts the pain and suffering she underwent under the command of Faezeh:
“… I was sick. They ordered that I had to attend a session for Ashins (women of the second layer of the Leadership Council). I refrained from attending the meeting. So, Faezeh ordered 6 to 7 women in the room to take me to the meeting by force. I hided in a corner of the dorm but they found me.
“Despite I was resisting, they took me to the meeting by pulling my arms and feet on the floor
“I was shouting and crying; the pain in my neck exacerbated. They put my army uniform on me by force….”
Since then, Zahra Mirbaqeri was sentenced to death because of the disobedience she showed toward her superior. She was all the time verbally abused by Faezeh in the cult sessions.
Now, Faeze is supposed to execute cult jargons in Tirana where the group members are no more quarantined behind the bars of Ashraf or Liberty. Will she succeed to run her cult-like practices in a European city? Is she able to maintain the entire relocated members in the cult?
The experience of the previously resettled members demonstrates that once members are cut off the cult-like relations they are able to defect more easily.
Choosing Faezeh Mohabatkar – with a horrible background of oppressive attitude – for linking the main cult in Iraq to the part of cult resettled in Albania, has a message to relocated members: You cannot simply leave the cult.
But, is this method an effective technique to prevent the cult of Rajavi from collapsing?
Mazda Parsi
Iran Interlink, January 02 2014:…
++ The Mojahedin Khalq released a statement this week exclusively in Farsi language. The statement, purporting to be from the MEK spokesman in Oslo, Norway, consisted swearing at everybody concerned with the situation in Iraq. The Americans, along with the United Nations and the government of Iraq, were attacked for “working for Iran”. In particular American Jane Holl Lute who heads the UNAMI effort to expel the MEK from Iraq, was named in the statement as working for Iran. The US and UN were lashed for not providing sufficient security for the residents of Camp Liberty [who the MEK do not allow to leave the camp], and demands the return of ten percent of the arms that were taken from the MEK in 2003 when the group surrendered to US troops during Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the same statement the MEK lashed the US, Iran and Iraq for fighting against ISIS, saying the group belongs to the country of Iraq.
++ The MEK statement from Oslo attracted many different reactions, to the extent that the MEK was forced to issue denials of their support for ISIS in various third class English language media. Many comments in Farsi simply criticised the MEK’s support for ISIS. Others took a more ironic line, saying that even were the arms returned to them, the residents of Camp Liberty are incapable of using them. In more detailed comments people point to the number of former combatants at the time of Saddam Hussein which numbered around 4,000, and the list of arms which the US army took from them – the MEK claimed 20,000 items of heavy and light armoury were surrendered, of which 5,000 were heavy armaments. These figures simply point to the falsity of the MEK’s position say commentators, whereby 4,000 combatants had 5,000 heavy weapons – certainly they were incapable even then of using them all. Other critics say that this demand is an attempt by Massoud Rajavi to muddy the waters in order to create conditions for the residents to be killed one way or another – an attack from ISIS or Iraqi forces for example. Families of Camp Liberty residents have expressed their deep concern at this turn of events and have written extensively to the UNHCR asking to be allowed to rescue their relatives and loved ones themselves.
++ Another statement issued by the MEK this week came out in support of a criminal gang in Iran who were involved in a shoot-out with police. The armed thieves were ludicrously described as revolutionaries by the MEK.
++ An MEK website this week published an article advertising a resolution passed in the British Parliament in support of Maryam Rajavi and her views – as usual without names. Official sources in the parliamentary press office confirmed that no such resolution has been registered let alone voted on or ratified.
++ An article by Ebrahim Khodabandeh titled ‘The Cult and the Families’ goes into detail about cultish activities and compares Rajavi’s cult with others. The article reveals that such cults are very much afraid of the members’ families and examines why this is so.
++ Secretary General of Habilian Society, Hashemi Nejad, whose father, a prominent religious leader, was assassinated by the MEK, gave an interview which was reported in various Iranian media. Hashemi Nejad used documents to criticise the “financial, intelligence and political backers of the murderers of our people”. Now, he says, these same people are pretending to be human rights activists and want something from us as well.
In English:
++ Press TV reported that the MEK has spoken out in support of ISIS. “The anti-Iran terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) has openly expressed support for the ISIL militants and their acts of terror in a clear indication of its wrath over Iran-Iraq cooperation against the Takfiri group. In a statement on Saturday, the MKO said any measure against ISIL would be a blatant violation of the UN Security Council’s agreements.”
++ An article by Ken Silverstein in The Intercept is an attack on former high-level U.S. officials, former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh, “who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,” which has been a near complete catastrophe”. The article points out that “Freeh is one of many former U.S. officials who got paid big speaking fees (reportedly up to $50,000 a pop) by a creepy Iranian group called the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, to successfully advocate for its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He also opened up a consulting firm whose clients have included Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who the U.S. Department of Justice accused of taking massive bribes from a British defense contractor. That’s right, Freeh represented a prince from America’s old pal Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whose export of Wahhabism is credited with giving rising to the Islamic State.”
++ The sister of one Camp Liberty resident, Azar Hossein Nejad from Tehran, Iran, wrote an open letter to the UNHCR asking for them to facilitate the transfer of her sister out of Camp Liberty.
January 2, 2014
Oceanfront views, 24-hour doorman, heated pool, and perhaps best of all, a “private tunnel to the beach.” This $3 million Palm Beach, Florida penthouse could be yours, but unfortunately it isn’t because this prize has 
already been claimed by a former high-level U.S. official who helped pave the way for the over decade-long “war on terror,”which has been a near complete catastrophe.
Iraq is aflame, the Islamic State is on the rampage, the situation in Afghanistan worsens by the day, and thousands of Americans—and many more Iraqis and Afghans—have died during the post-9/11 conflicts. Meanwhile, the combined cost of the “war on terror” comes to an estimated $1.6 trillion.
But if the American people got screwed on the deal, a lot of former senior government officials who played important roles in this debacle have done quite well for themselves. It’s New Year’s Eve and I need to write a final sendoff to 2014, so I thought I’d take a look at the fortunes (literally) of some of these figures: Former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis Freeh (I’ll cover former Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge in a New Year’s post).
Consider Tenet. As head of the CIA, he missed multiple signs of a major Al Qadea attack directed against the United States, called the case against Saddam building Weapons of Mass Destruction a “slam dunk,” and approved the Bush administration’s torturing of terror suspects.
In any fair world Tenet would be tried for criminal incompetence. Instead, he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom and after resigning in 2004 (at which point his agency salary was south of $200,000), he received a $4 million advance to write a memoir. In it, he confessed to “a black, black time” a few months after 9/11 when he was sitting at home in his favorite Adirondack chair thinking about the tragedy that killed 3,000 Americans on his watch and asked, “Why me?”
Tenet has received millions more in his current role as managing director of a privately held New York investment bank and as a board director and advisor to intelligence and military contractors. Meanwhile, he collects fat speaking fees to talk about “current global threats to U.S. security and what the future holds for the U.S., our allies and interests around the globe.” (Top Secret: Here’s where he gets his best intelligence.)
Not bad for the son of Greek immigrants who before entering government service in 1982 (as legislative director to then-Senator H. John Heinz III) worked at the American Hellenic Institute and the Solar Energy Industries Association. When he headed the CIA, Tenet lived in a ranch house in Potomac, Maryland, which he bought in 1986 for $179,000. He currently splits his time between New York and the affluent D.C. suburb of Bethesda, where he reportedly lives in a neighborhood “known for its tree-lined streets, vintage brick homes, and atmosphere oozing with understated luxury.”
Then there’s Louis Freeh, Tenet’s counterpart at the FBI during the run-up to 9/11. (He resigned a few months before the attacks.) The former FBI director was seriously injured in a car wreck this August, but told police he had no idea what happened because he’d been asleep at the wheel, which is a perfect metaphor for his FBI stewardship. (And let me sincerely say I wish Freeh a speedy recovery, but the metaphor is precise.) Like Tenet, Freeh failed to act on a mountain of evidence pointing towards 9/11, i.e. an April 2001 memo sent to him by his assistant director that cited “significant and urgent” intelligence of “serious operational planning” for terrorism attacks by Islamic radicals linked to Osama bin Laden. He also botched cases involving Richard Jewell, Wen Ho Lee, and Robert Hanssen.
Freeh resigned from the FBI two months before 9/11. When he worked there he was making an annual salary of $145,000 and lived “in a heavily mortgaged house in Great Falls, a Virginia suburb,” according to an old and admiring New Yorker profile. He and his wife now own at least four lavish estates worth many millions of dollars, including a residence in Wilmington, Delaware, a six-bedroom summerhouse worth more than $3 million in Vermont, and a beachfront penthouse at 100 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida, which was bought for $1.4 million and now has an estimated value of $3 million.
How’d that happen? Well, Freeh is one of many former U.S. officials who got paid big speaking fees (reportedly up to $50,000 a pop) by a creepy Iranian group called the People’s Mujahedin, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, to successfully advocate for its removal from the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He also opened up a consulting firm whose clients have included Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar, who the U.S. Department of Justice accused of taking massive bribes from a British defense contractor. That’s right, Freeh represented a prince from America’s old pal Saudi Arabia, home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whose export of Wahhabism is credited with giving rising to the Islamic State.
Freeh is also hired to conduct investigations, like the controversial report he produced about Penn State’s football program. Nasser Kazeminy, a Minnesota businessman who in 2008 was accused of bribing former Senator Norm Coleman, also hired Freeh to conduct a “thorough investigation” of the allegations against him in the hopes of clearing his name.
In 2011, Freeh issued a public statement saying that his investigation had “completely vindicated” both Kazeminy and Coleman. Sure, Kazeminy had bought Coleman $100,000 worth of presents, but, Freeh said at a press conference, “There was no quid pro quo in the gifts. There was no wrongdoing.” Freeh also met with the Justice Department – which was investigating the bribery charges but declined to bring a case—on Kazeminy’s behalf.
Oh yeah, about Freeh’s Palm Beach penthouse. As I discovered through Florida property records, Freeh’s wife co-owns it with Kazeminy, which kind of makes you wonder about just how thorough and impartial his investigation was. The quit claim deed giving Freeh’s wife one-half ownership of the penthouse was signed nine days after Freeh’s vindication of Kazeminy.
Freeh declined to comment for this story.
Ken Silverstein, The Intercept
Photo: Sotheby’s
Email the author: kensilverstein@firstlook.org