extracts of Kenneth R. Timmerman’s article in FrontPageMagezine on July 11, 2007
In politics as with love, second marriages show the triumph of hope over experience.
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Few doubt that the Iranian regime has embarked on a collision course with the West and is hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons. Even Euro-sceptics acknowledge that Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has taken Iran on a dangerous path, and have allowed an unprecedented complaint against him by the government of Israel for inciting genocide to proceed at the United Nations.
But from acknowledging the problem to proposing marriage to the first pretty face wearing a skirt is a leap cooler heads should avoid.
MEK organizers staged a multi-media extravaganza recently at a gigantic exhibition hall on the outskirts of Paris that was worthy of Third Reich propagandists.
The MEK itself claimed that 50,000 people attended the June 30 event. Even their supporters, however, knew the number was inflated and settled on 20,000.
The normally level-headed Daniel Pipes, who attended the event, failed to ask how many of those who came to the rally had been paid by MEK recruiters, a common practise I exposed two years ago in covering a much smaller rally in New York.
The MEK has always been able to rent a crowd for the benefit of TV cameras and naïve Western commentators.
Where they have not succeeded, however, is to convince their fellow Iranians that they have discarded the Marxist-Islamist ideology that made them join forces with Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, when they helped to round up senior officers in the Iranian military for execution by the Islamist komitehs.
Pipes noted that the “slick production” outside Paris was “aimed mostly at an audience outside the hall, especially in Iran,” with the goal of “reminding Iranians that an alternative does exist to today’s theocracy.”
The only problem is that the MEK does not represent an “alternative” to the Islamic regime, but just a flavor of tyranny.
After the group lost its power struggle with ayatollah Khomeini in 1981 they fled to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein welcomed them with open arms.
He allowed the MEK to establish training camps near the Iranian border, and used MEK units to smash the Kurds in northern Iraq. (And if you believe all the rented names of so-called Iraqi tribal leaders who sign those full-page ads in American newspapers calling for the U.S. to support the MEK, just ask Iraqi president Jalal Talabani what he thinks of the group.)
In April 1988, MEK leader Massoud Rajavi and his political ‘wife,” Maryam, announced the coming liberation of Iran and sent their Iraq-based troops across the border into Iran.
The intended “liberation” quickly turned to disaster. Although there were no Revolutionary Guards or even regular Iranian army units in the vicinity, the MEK were so hated by Iranians that old men and young boys killed the invaders with pitchforks.
Thousands were slaughtered in a matter of days and the Rajavi’s liberation “army” never recovered. (That didn’t prevent these masters of Nazi-style propaganda from claiming a huge victory, even parading about afterwards in “captured” Iranian tanks that had been loaned to them by Saddam Hussein).
When making a revolution, it is critical to choose one’s allies well. This is a group that openly boasts of having murdered Americans, and that aspires to power in Iran. Their track record is clear.
Tehran’s leaders would like nothing better than for Western nations to openly back the MEK. Because the group is so hated inside Iran, such support would give the regime a convenient whipping boy. Contrary to the delusions of some that we somehow can “unleash” the MEK, enthroning a terrorist group as the embodiment of the democratic opposition would rally support for the regime.
There are many courses of action now available to Western governments and even to individuals seeking to have an impact on events inside Iran. These range from ratcheting up economic and financial sanctions against the Tehran regime, a strategy spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Treasury, to disinvestment from companies that continue to support Iran’s oil and gas industry.
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We would be much better served by policies that encourage the Iranian people in their aspirations to freedom, than by trotting out worn-out cult figures who promise a new form of tyranny. Daniel Pipes of all people should know better.