++ Channel 4 News broadcast a segment about the MEK in its 7 o’clock news programme on Thursday, ‘The shadowy cult Trump advisors tout as an alternative to the Iranian government’. The piece focused on MEK in Albania as a secretive, ageing cult which pays Americans to make them appear popular. It was clear that MEK has been reduced to a role as a propaganda outlet for western regime change pundits. One former member described how his job was to create Twitter and Facebook accounts to make it appear that MEK was popular among Iranians. (Presenter Lindsay Hilsum – International Editor – did not ask how much he was paid for this work, but the answer is ‘nothing’ because MEK are modern slaves.) The in-depth news segment concluded that MEK members in Albania will die of old age or disease without having seen their families for many years.
++ MEK’s response to the Channel 4 programme was predictable. A flurry of copy/paste denouncements implying that C4 collusion with Iran would lead to the killing of MEK in Albania. Some good responses to this were:
@gthanku Puns N’ Roses, who Tweeted: “The replies from MeK trolls are hilarious; they’re oblivious to the fact that they’re bolstering this expose by illustrating the kind of trolling the MeK defector describes in it.”
@WeAreManyEU We Are Many, who Tweeted: “Funny how all these MEK trolls are saying the same thing at the same time. Seems they are all sitting next to each other and have created a production line of trolling.”
++ The C4 report mentioned a damning report by Albanian police and security services which says: “In Iraq some former members of this organisation were murdered [by the MEK]… there are reasonable suspicions that the situation here is similar to the one in Iraq.”
++ In Albania, the popular satirical comedy programme Fiks Fare on Top Channel TV tore the MEK apart by ridiculing the group. The programme is titled ‘Canadian family asks Top Channel’s “Fiks Fare for help: “MEK mujahedeens took our daughter’. In one scene a Top Channel journalist visits the MEK Manza camp to ask if Somayeh Mohammadi could verify if a handwritten document was actually hers. The reception was similar to the one given Channel 4 Presenter Lindsay Hilsum. A gun toting Albanian security guard aggressively tries to send her away but is soon out of his depth and has to call on MEK members to try to get rid of the journalist. MEK claimed that Fiks Fare had threatened Somayeh. Unfortunately for MEK the journalists had recorded the entire conversation.
++ Gazeta Shqiptare published a piece ‘Answering the defamations of Margarita Kola and the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) cult’ which exposes the politicised agenda of the MEK lawyer.
++ Somayeh was again brought in front of a camera inside the Manes camp to nervously read a pre-written statement. She was accompanied by MEK Commander Farid Toutonchi, whose real name is Mahoutchi. In a Balkans Web piece titled ‘Letter / Somayeh’s Iranian Father Calls on MEK member in Tirana: Let me meet my daughter’, Mostafa Mohammadi exposes this former tank driver who has blood on his hands from Iraq. In his letter, Mostafa makes the same demand as he has always made: bring my daughter to a public place where I and her mother can meet with her away from MEK minders and controllers. MEK’s only reply is to label everyone – from Mostafa to Lindsey Hilsum – ‘an agent of the Iranian regime’.