{"id":1690,"date":"2008-02-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/2008\/02\/10\/key-figures-in-the-israel-lobbies-support-a-terrorist-group-that-has-fired-on-us-troops\/"},"modified":"2021-01-21T18:56:04","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T15:26:04","slug":"key-figures-in-the-israel-lobbies-support-a-terrorist-group-that-has-fired-on-us-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/posts\/1690","title":{"rendered":"Key figures in the Israel lobbies support a terrorist group that has fired on US troops"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span>I’m very excited and pleased to introduce today’s guest poster, Danny Postel, who comes to us with some absolutely chilling revelations about the bad faith of the neoconservatives’ supposed dedication to”freedom”(I know, I know: you’re shocked). Danny is the author of Reading \u201cLegitimation Crisis\u201d in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism and is co-coordinator of the Committee for Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the International Society for Iranian Studies. <\/span>\u2014<\/span>Rick Perlstein <\/span>By Danny Postel <\/span>During the week of October 22-26, an official announcement effuses, \u201cThe nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever \u2013 Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.\u201d Ringmastered by David Horowitz, this circus will be performing under the tent of something called the”Terrorism Awareness Project.\u201d <\/span>The purpose of this ballyhoolooza, we are told, is to confront the \u201cBig Lies\u201d of the Left regarding terrorism and militant Islam. Worthy subjects, to be sure. Indeed I would like to help the sponsors of the \u201cwake-up call\u201d promote awareness of them. Toward this end, let\u2019s consider the American Right\u2019s \u201cspecial relationship\u201d with one group of terrorists. <\/span>The U.S. State Department officially considers the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) a Foreign Terrorist Organization. While those honors date back to 1994, they\u2019ve been renewed during the Bush years. Indeed in 2003 Foggy Bottom went further, including the National Council of Resistance of Iran \u2014 an MEK alias \u2014 under the terrorist designation. (The MEK is also known as the People\u2019s Mujahedeen.) <\/span>To make a long and bizarre story short, the MEK got its start in early 1960s Iran, helped overthrow the Shah in 1979, but quickly turned on the revolutionary government it helped bring to power. Employing an ideological blend of Stalinism and Islamism, the tactics of a paramilitary guerilla faction, and the organizational structure of a cult, the group went into exile, eventually making their home in Iraq in the mid-1980s. Not only did Saddam give the organization cover: he armed, funded, and utilized them for a variety of ends over two decades.\u00a0 <\/span>The group\u2019s wicked political brew was on spectacular display on the old MEK flag (see below; since abandoned) [editor, Iran-Interlink – this is still the official MEK logo], with its sickle and Kalashnikov positioned atop ofbeneath a Koranic verse. (Not \u2014 to state the obvious \u2014 that the mere presence of a Koranic verse in and of itself implies Islamist political commitments, but in this case the shoe very much fits.)\u00a0 <\/span>Here you have virtually everything the Right claims to oppose all rolled into one: Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, and Saddam. Naturally, then, neoconservatives would utterly deplore the MEK and everything it stands for, right? The MEK would in fact make an ideal target for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and Terrorism Awareness efforts, no? <\/span>Well, no. At least one of the carnival\u2019s acts, it turns out, is rather fond of the Islamo-Stalinist-terrorist cult group, and has repeatedly argued for the removal of the MEK from the State Department\u2019s list of terrorist groups and indeed urged the U.S. government to embrace it. Daniel Pipes, who will be speaking at Tufts on October 24th as part of the Horowitz high jinks, has made the MEK a recurring theme in his writings going back several years. <\/span>Pipes has also gone to bat for the MEK right in the pages of Horowitz\u2019s house organ.\u00a0 <\/span>But Pipes is far from alone on the Right in championing the MEK. He co-authored the first piece linked to above with Patrick Clawson of the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Right-wing commentator Max Boot has argued not merely for the removal of the MEK from the terrorist list but for funding and unleashing it to do battle with Iranian forces \u2014 this while casually acknowledging that it is a \u201cpolitical cult.\u201d (More on Boot\u2019s disfigured views .) <\/span>In some cases the MEK plays a stealth role in the media machinery of the American Right. What the FOX News Channel tells viewers about Alireza Jafarzadeh when he appears on its airwaves is that he is an \u201cFNC Foreign Affairs Analyst.\u201d What you have to go to the FOX News website to discover, however, is that Jafarzadeh served \u201cfor a dozen years as the chief congressional liaison and media spokesman for the U.S. representative office of Iran\u2019s parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.\u201d But it is scarcely known that the sonorous-sounding National Council of Resistance of Iran is in fact a front name for the MEK.\u00a0 <\/span>Now, it’s true that Jafarzadeh discontinued his post with the National Council of Resistance of Iran\u2014but only when (and only because) its Washington office was forced to close in 2003 as a result of the State Department decision about it being a front for the MEK. It’s not like he had a change of heart. <\/span>If you attend an \u201cIslamo-Fascism Awareness Week\u201d event, you might want to ask the speakers about this terrorist cult and whether they condemn it. Some of them might \u2014 not all neoconservatives agree on the MEK.\u00a0 <\/span>But the fact that several prominent American conservatives have cozied up to an Islamist-Stalinist cult that was on Saddam\u2019s payroll and the State Department considers a terrorist organization \u2014 this raises serious questions (to put it mildly) about the Right\u2019s bedfellows and the calculus that determines them. <\/span>It suggests the need for a little more terrorism awareness. <\/span> \u00a0<\/span>CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS –<\/span>infowars.net<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here you have virtually everything the Right claims to oppose all rolled into one: Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, and Saddam. Naturally, then, neoconservatives would utterly deplore the MEK and everything it stands for, right? The MEK would in fact make an ideal target for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and Terrorism Awareness efforts, no?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[77,178,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[361],"class_list":["post-1690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-mujahedin-khalq-spy","tag-pmoi-iran-people","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-danny-postel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=1690"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=1690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}