++ In Albania, former MEK members reacted to Maryam Rajavi’s promise to the UNHCR that she would reinstate payment of their refugee allowances to them. They say she is lying. “What she means is ‘do as I say’, and if you don’t she invents an excuse why you shouldn’t get paid. Such as, accusing you of talking to your mother and father and saying ‘therefore, you are an agent of the Iranian regime’ so I shouldn’t pay. This is how she keeps people trapped in the organisation. She uses every trick in the book. In some cases, she has said she will employ smugglers to take dissenting members to another country. It turns out they are not really smugglers. They sometimes just take the person down a back alley and beat them up really badly. Others, have been taken to neighbouring countries and handed over to the police who imprison them as illegal immigrants. All this is to prevent formers and dissident members from talking about conditions inside the MEK.”
++ World leaders listened open mouthed to Donald Trump’s speech to the UN. Afterwards, apart from Israeli PM Netanyahu, who indulged in a session of mutual praise with Trump, the only other person in the world who praised them both was Maryam Rajavi. Because of this she has made herself a laughing stock.
In English:
++ Nejat Society wrote a take-down of the MEK’s so-called election of a new Secretary General. “The approach adopted by the MKO in the so-called election is so ambiguous that no one can define the role of the elected secretary general and the differences between the authority of her and that of the disappeared leader Massoud Rajavi and even that of the alleged ‘president-elect’ Maryam Rajavi. The election is seemingly a performance of democracy rather than an authentic act of democracy in the cult of Rajavi.”
++ In an open letter addressed to Human Rights Watch and the ICRC, Sahar Family Foundation highlights the human rights abuses meted out to former members of the MEK in Albania. The letter accuses international humanitarian organisations of remaining silent over the MEK’s treatment of its members. “Today we learned that Maryam Rajavi has informed the UNHCR and some of the former members that they would start paying the allowances again according to their commitments. But the former members do not want their lives to be controlled and dictated by a destructive mind control cult which abuses the most basic human rights of its members. Such an arrangement allows the MEK to do and demand whatever they want and to hold the monthly allowances as ransom for these conditions. As an example, this cult coerces some of the former members to act against others and spy on them in order to get their own money.”
++ Juan Cole in Global Research asks, ‘What Will Iran Do if Trump Tears Up the Nuclear Agreement?’ Mentioning the MEK’s role in the affair Cole says “The cult, the Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK, i.e the People’s Jihadis, is now pushing a line that something sinister is going on at the Parchin military base. The UN inspectors visited it in 2015 and are not interested in going there again. The Non-Proliferation Treaty excluded inspections of military facilities at US and USSR insistence, and the JCPOA followed that legal tradition. The MEK, which is a small terrorist organization that wants to overthrow the Iranian government in favor of its mixture of Shiite fundamentalism and Marxism, has some sort of shadowy and creepy relationship with AIPAC and the Israel lobbies. Giuliani regularly speaks for big bucks at their meetings. This sort of thing is much more suspicious than the Russian connection.”
++ Massoud and Anne Khodabandeh wrote an analysis in the Huffington Post of the ‘regime change platform’ espoused by Americans, Israelis and Saudi Arabians. The article concluded that support for the defunct MEK is evidence that nobody, not even Iran’s enemies, actually wants regime change. The reason? Iran is too strong, its military too advanced, and its civil population too stable to risk an even worse situation than pertains in Syria, Iraq, Libya etc.
++ Amirfarshad Ebrahimi has written a lengthy, detailed analysis of Half a Century with the MEK for the Global Institute of Democracy and Strategic Studies.
September 22, 2017