Fake Iranian activist ‘Heshmat Alavi’ exposed
The White House has used a completely made-up Iranian journalist to justify sanctions.
Fresh sanctions roll out to “put pressure” on Tehran. THESE are the freaks they want instead.
Regime change in Iran has been a US objective for decades. And as is typical with all US regime change schemes America has nurtured a group of exiles to replace the current Iranian government should they succeed in overthrowing it. While America’s chosen regime change exiles for a given country are typically right-wing reactionaries, American’s Iranian replacement goes a step further. it is a straight up CULT. They call themselves the Mojahedin-e Khalq or the MEK. …
Soapbox,
Historian Olsi Jazexhi, invited to Arena by Dritan Hila of Ora News, said that Albania has become the main base of Israel’s Mossad and the Iranian Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, NCRI, Rajavi cult, Saddam’s Private army ….).
Jazexhi: Albania has become one of the main bases of Israel’s Mossad and the Iranian Mojahedin (Maryam Rajavi cult), a former terrorist group. Al Jazeera made a documentary a month ago which showed how 1700 computers have been brought from abroad to Manzas where the Mojahedin Khalq terror group stick online and attack any government trying to trade with Iran. The Mojahedin Khalq are used by Donald Trump to sabotage the European policy towards the nuclear deal with Iran. Whoever reads the news, the Mujahideen (Maryam Rajavi cult) produce an article every week or every month saying that ‘Iran has come to Albania to attack us.
Ora News.tv, Tirana ,Translated by Iran Interlink
US-Iran relations haven’t been this tense in years. The Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May – and last month, levelled threats against Tehran at the UN General Assembly. But caught between all this is a group based in Albania with a mission to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK, previously in Iraq, now operates out of a military compound near the capital Tirana. Our Courtney Kealy went there to get a glimpse.
The Iran-based MEK based in Albania, which has the support of the United States of America, wants to change the Iranian regime.
“I miss her. I love her very much, I love her very much. I love Somaye, please come out,”, Mahbube Mohammadi, the mother of an MEK member breaks down while talking about her daughter.
Somaye is a member of Mujahedin_e Khalq, known as the MEK, a shadowy group dedicated to regime change in Iran.
“Just please help me,… if you can please …”says Somaye’s mother while shedding tears.
Somaye lives in a secret compound in Albania with the group limit contact with the outside world.
The Mohammdi say they used to support the MEK but now they want just their daughter to come home. …
Strait Talk, TRT World
For a country that has been on the wrong end of United States foreign policy for nearly four decades, it is no surprise the debate over Iran has been polarising. The US’s decision to withdrawal from the nuclear deal this year has boosted those calling for the hardest stance against the Islamic Republic.
Those pushing back against what many say is an agenda for regime change in Iran are reporting an online backlash the likes of which they have not seen before. However, the Twitter accounts doing the trolling may not be the organic opposition voices they are made out to be.
For all the accusations of disinformation and fake news from both sides, it is rare that we can point to facts, a location, and actual personnel explaining the modus operandi of an organised troll factory.
The Listening Post’s Will Yong investigated this story and the trail has led him, surprisingly, to Tirana, Albania.
Faking the online debate on Iran
How keyboard warriors target journalists, academics and activists who favour dialogue instead of war with Iran.
Last month, Google, Facebook and Twitter announced the shutdown of pages and accounts they say were linked to Iran. While the effectiveness of Iran’s online disinformation networks is far from established, the Islamic Republic has now joined Russia in the popular consciousness as another government using the internet to destabilise its adversaries.
Meanwhile, a widespread campaign of social media manipulation by actors who are opposed to the government in Tehran has had many analysts eyeing Iran’s enemies for clues to who might be behind the project.
“The turning point was really [Donald] Trump’s election,” says journalist and New America fellow Azadeh Moaveni. “Once it became clear that there would be heightened hostility with Iran, there was a profusion of new accounts, anonymous accounts who were single-mindedly and purposefully going after people who wrote about, talked about Iran with nuance.”
While Twitter did not respond directly to questions about the methodology it used to detect organised manipulation of its platform, lecturer in Middle East history at Exeter University, Marc Owen Jones, shared with us how he uses freely available Twitter metadata to detect the presence of bots.
“If you want to use bots to be effective you need a lot of accounts, which means you might create a lot of accounts on a specific day or week or month,” explains Jones. “The majority of the accounts tweeting on the #FreeIran and #Iran_Regime_Change hashtag from late December up to May, were created within about a four-month window. What that would suggest is that a lot of the activity on those hashtags came from bots.”
Most of the accounts identified had only a few dozen or a few hundred followers and used generic profile pictures. The vast majority tweet almost exclusively in opposition to the Islamic Republic with many exhibiting sympathies with an exiled Iranian dissident group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK).
The MEK was instrumental in Iran’s 1979 revolution but turned to violent attacks on civilian targets after being sidelined by Ayatollah Khomeini. A violent backlash forced the group into Iraqwhere they allied with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war.
In 2013, the MEK moved to Albania at the behest of the United States. The group has long lobbied for policies to overthrow Iran’s government.
The MEK declined our request for an interview citing, “terrorist threats of Iranian regime and mobilising the agents of Iranian Ministry of Intelligence under the guise of journalist”.
However, former MEK members still stranded in the Albanian capital, Tirana, having left the group, described how the MEK uses thousands of fake Twitter accounts to both promote their organisation and to boost online calls for regime change.
“Overall I would say that several thousand accounts are managed by about 1,000-1,500 MEK members,” former MEK member, Hassan Heyrani, told The Listening Post. “It was all very well organised and there were clear instructions about what needed to be done.”
The MEK online unit was especially active during several weeks of protests beginning in December 2017. Members were ordered to emphasise the anti-regime character of the demonstrations.
“Our orders would tell us the hashtags to use in our tweets in order to make them more active,” says Hassan Shahbaz, another former MEK member. “It was our job to provide coverage of these protests by seeking out, tweeting and re-tweeting videos while adding our own comments.”
MEK keyboard warriors would also target journalists, academics and activists who favour dialogue rather than confrontation with Iran.
“Because of my platform, I have received a significant amount of Twitter attacks of this kind, but I am nowhere near being alone,” Trita Parsi, author of, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, said. “This is actually a very pervasive phenomena, the big victim of this is that we don’t have a rational conversation about policy towards Iran.”
Since access to Iran for journalists is restricted, social media can become a proxy for where the debate is going, leaving open the possibility that both state and non-state actors can use platforms like Twitter to create and manipulate trends in ways that suit their agenda.
“It’s not like what happens on social media stays there any more,” Marc Owen Jones said. “It filters its way into mainstream media. There is so much propaganda, so much fake news that it would take very little to create a wave of what looks like popular Iranian opinion against the government that’s not necessarily real.”
Contributors
Trita Parsi – Author, Losing an Enemy – Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy’
Azadeh Moaveni – Fellow, New America
Marc Owen Jones – Lecturer in Middle East History, Exeter University
Hassan Heyrani – Former MEK member
Hassan Shahbaz – Former MEK member
The Listening Post, Aljazeera
Albania just for Albanians not for Rajavi Terrorists
A secretive member of the US-backed MKO terrorist group refuses to talk about the nature of their organization to the members of CODEPINK, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement in the US.
Medea Benjamin and National Director Ariel Gold two members of social justice movement faced an uncommunicative member of the US-backed Mojahedin-e Kahlgh (MKO or MKE) when they try to have an interview about the nature of the group at the terrorist organization’s headquarter in DC.
The women-initiated group tried to talk to the MKO member, asking him about the group’s legitimacy and what he does at the headquarter, but the man who calls himself Ali refuses to give them even the simplest information about the MKO and when he is asked about the Saudi money that is being given to the group he says that it is all Iranian propaganda while the previous reports revealed that the goup are financially supported by the Saudi Arabia.
“As you can see, they were not receptive. Bolton wants to attack Iran & put these folks in power? It’s a repeat of the Iraqi National Congress debacle after the US invaded Iraq,” the CODEPINK group wrote on their twitter account refereeing to the hostile nature of the group.
The MKO – listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community – fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq and was given a camp by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
They fought on the side of Saddam during the Iraqi imposed war on Iran (1980-88). They were also involved in the bloody repression of Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq in 1991 and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds.
The notorious group is also responsible for killing thousands of Iranian civilians and officials after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
More than 17,000 Iranians, many of them civilians, have been killed at the hands of the MKO in different acts of terrorism including bombings in public places, and targeted killings.
From the Medea Benjamin FB Page
Canadian citizen Mostafa Mohammadi, who wants to take his daughter out of the Mojahedin camp in Manza, claims he was attacked by some members of this community. He says his daughter is unjustly held in the camp.
He is in Albania to rescue his daughter from Manza camp, alleging that she is being unfairly held there. Mostafa Mohammadi, an Iranian with a Canadian passport, was attacked by Mojahedin members at Medresea. He says he and his wife were hit by representatives of MEK.
This couple have been in Albania for several days because they want to rescue their daughter, Somayeh Mohammadi, who, according to the couple, is in this camp. They were not allowed to contact their daughter and therefore there was conflict, resulting in claims to have been hit by some Mojahedin during the prayers at Medresea in Tirana.
The Canadian couple are in the QSUT under the care of doctors after the physical assault by the Mojahedin representatives. After the incident, the police escorted several Mojahedin members to the premises of police station number four in the capital.
The Iranian man says he was physically abused, but after medical examinations at University Hospital, no fracture was found or symptoms of shock. Some days ago, Shqiptarja.com published a letter that her father, Iranian Mostafa Mohammadi, had sent to Interior Minister Fatmir Xhafaj, alleging that MEK is holding his 38-year-old daughter hostage. Earlier though, his daughter, Somayeh Mohammadi, in a letter wrote that her father Mostafa is an agent of the Iranian Interior ministry and is in Tirana to plot against her.
Shqiptarja, Tirana, Albania, Translated by Iran Interlink
In pursuit of regime change in Iran, the Trump administration and prominent Republicans and Democrats alike are supporting the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which former top US official Larry Wilkerson says is a “bloodthirsty cult.” Ben Norton reports
Story Transcript
BEN NORTON: The Donald Trump administration has made regime change in Iran one of its top foreign policy priorities, and some of the extreme warhawks Trump has willingly surrounded himself with are supporting a fanatical cult in hopes of toppling Iran’s government. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been a keynote speaker at multiple conferences held by the Iranian opposition group the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known popularly as the MEK. At a summit in Washington, D.C. in May, Giuliani declared that Trump is committed to regime change. Weeks later in June, Giuliani again spoke as a keynote speaker at the MEK’s conference in Paris.
RUDY GIULIANI: We are now, I believe, very realistic in being able to see an end of the regime in Iran. We can see it.
BEN NORTON: The MEK was considered a terrorist organization by the United States government until 2012. Larry Wilkerson, a former top George Bush administration official, told The Real News Network that the MEK is a bloodthirsty cult that is widely considered by Iranians to be full of traitors.
LARRY WILKERSON: I mean, this is a group that, when I was chief of staff of the State Department, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell actually worked together, one of the few times they did, to keep them out of our hair in Iraq. And that was primarily because, number one, they were on the top of our list of terrorist organizations. Number two, they were a bloodthirsty cult, and we knew that. All of us knew that. The intelligence people knew that. The diplomats knew that. Everyone who ever had any dealing with Mujahideen-e-Khalq knew that they were a cult, first and foremost, and a brutal, bloody, ruthless cult all together.
I have never met in all my time and dealing in track two diplomacy and other diplomacy with Iran, and with dealing with the Iranian people in general, and Iranians in this country, for that matter, other than those around the royal group in this country, or in Iran, who thought they were anything other than traitors. Traitors and terrorists. Because they joined Saddam Hussein in what to most Iranians was the most seminal period in their lifetime, and that was the brutal eight years of war between Iraq and Iran, started, of course, by Iraq. So they see these people as traitors.
BEN NORTON: The MEK is one of several terrorist organizations that the U.S. government has allied with on and off, supporting it when it is politically convenient. Trump’s hyper-hawkish neoconservative national security adviser John Bolton is a staunch supporter of the MEK, and has previously spoken at its annual conferences. President Trump’s lawyer even took credit for helping to lead a global campaign to get the group unlisted as a terrorist organization.
RUDY GIULIANI: We fought a worldwide battle to shed the unfair label of terrorism in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union. That label is now gone, and you are seen as defenders of human rights.
BEN NORTON: Larry Wilkerson, a retired U.S. Army colonel who previously served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the MEK has spent large sums of money and carefully undergone a rebranding to portray itself as democratic, secular, and moderate. Wilkerson argues that the U.S. has helped to facilitate this rebranding to push for regime change in Iran.
LARRY WILKERSON: This is the group that has become for the neoconservatives, and for some of those associated with Trump, the Iraqi National Congress. The Ahmad Chalabi/Iraqi National Congress. But it was, for the war with Iraq, fomenting that war, leading the United States to that war. The MEK is now serving as that entity for the coming war with Iran.
And I think what you see, in order to use them, to employ them as a Chalabi-like tool in this march to war with Iran, they have been refurbished. I think Saudi money’s been in there. I think U.S. money has been in there. I think big-time money has been spent with largely U.S. European marketing entities that refurbished their name to make them look good. And I’ve even been told, I assume- this is coming from some of my intelligence community contacts- I’ve been told that they are keeping what was the more radical leadership in the shadows. They’re not letting them be exposed so much, because they realize they still are the same people they were before.
But they’ve got new people to interface with the public, as it were. And they’ve got a new image, as you pointed out. And that image is being marketed by these very good marketers who are being paid enormous sums of money in order to do this. So it’s not quite as easy as it was with Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. I mean, we had all kinds of reports about their wasting money and being useless. Secretary Powell even turned them over the Pentagon because he was fed up with them. But I think this group is even worse. But at the same time, they have better marketers. They have people who are really good at advertising them and making them look good.
BEN NORTON: Rudy Giuliani, in fact, bolstered this explanation when he boasted at the MEK’s conference in Paris that the U.S.-backed cult is allegedly coordinating the protests that are rocking Iran.
RUDY GIULIANI: Those protests were not happening accidentally. Those protests are happening because they’re being coordinated now, unlike in 2009, they’re being coordinated by many of our people in Albania, and many of our people here, and all throughout the world.
BEN NORTON: Although the MEK has become largely associated with ultraconservative hawks from the Republican Party, it also has increasing support among corporate Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, also issued a statement of warm greetings to the MEK conference, which she described as a gathering of the, quote, friends and supporters of a free Iran.
Wilkerson argues that the growing bipartisan U.S. support for this Iranian opposition called is the result of the dangerous idea that the enemy of the enemy is your friend. And he warns that the Trump administration’s belligerent aggression against Iran eerily reminds him of the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq.
LARRY WILKERSON: Well, you’ve got people like Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats, and certainly people like you’ve named, and others in the Republican Party, who subscribe to the very simplistic proposition that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if that enemy has been my enemy for a long time.
And that’s the case for the MEK. And as I said before, this is a very very similar situation to Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in 2002, a situation with which I’m very familiar, because what’s been happening is there’s been this desperate search by everyone from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy, which is really the replacement for Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, which manufactured the intelligence for the war with Iraq, including connections with Al-Qaida and 9/11, and the weapons of mass destruction, which were nonexistent. This is the group FDD, now, that outside the Pentagon, outside the formal government structures doing the same thing that Doug Feith’s group was doing, manufacturing intelligence.
Now, I think, I’ve sensed of late that what the administration really wants, and what it would prefer- and this is probably, I have to say this, it’s probably because of Donald Trump’s influence on this situation, if he has any at all. They’re trying to bring so much pressure to bear on the Ayatollah, on Rouhani, and Zarif, and others that the regime collapses of its own weight. And they’ve interpreted the recent disturbances in Tehran, in particular. And I think this is a misinterpretation of those disturbances. But nonetheless, they’ve interpret them as an indication that it’s working.
So they think tightening the sanctions, making everything effective by November, getting Iran’s oil off the market, ceasing that method of their making any money in the world and so forth, is going to topple the regime. So I think Donald Trump thinks he’s going to do all this without war, that we’re going to wind up with the regime crashing of its own weight. I think that’s rather naive. I don’t think that’s going to happen. And I think in that not happening, John Bolton’s going to try others, and we’re going to wind up on a war track with Iran.
RUDY GIULIANI: Will it happen? Yes. When will it happen? Now. And I want next year at this time, I want us to have this convention in Tehran.
BEN NORTON: Reporting for The Real News I’m Ben Norton.
The real News
A report by Richard Engel
On assignment with Richard Engel
How did a fringe Iranian opposition group with a history of assassinating Americans get so cozy with the likes of John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani? By paying them thousands to speak at its events, where they advocate for MEK-led regime change inside Iran.
(END)
From Richard Angel twitter account:
VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: We obtained never-before-seen footage of the MEK’s secret base in Albania. The MEK is an Iranian opposition group with a history of terrorism. More recently it’s paid thousands to @AmbJohnBolton & @RudyGiuliani. More tonight at 9PM ET @MSNBC @RichardEngel pic.twitter.com/teaGhQeVZy
— On Assignment with Richard Engel (@OARichardEngel) May 25, 2018
NBC report in Albanian media:
Kronika e NBC/ Pamjet me dron mbi kampin e muxhahedinëve, dëshmia për torturat https://t.co/vRnIJFqHdN
— Massoud khodabandeh (@ma_khodabandeh) May 27, 2018
On MSNBC @OARichardEngel I explained that no decent American intelligence officer would say MEK is trustworthy because it is a Destructive Cult.
Examining how @AmbJohnBolton and @RudyGiuliani were paid to speak for Maryam Rajavi. pic.twitter.com/U83F12h5ko
— Massoud khodabandeh (@ma_khodabandeh) May 27, 2018
Rachel Maddow, MSNBC,