\u201cThe speech was hosted by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, a group that aims to promote democracy in the Islamic Republic and was supportive of the December protests there.\u201d \u2014Politico (5\/5\/18)<\/p>\n
\u201cRudy Giuliani delivers the keynote speech at the annual Iran Freedom Convention.\u201d \u2014Fox News (5\/5\/18)<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 2018 Iran Freedom Convention for Democracy and Human Rights is meant to voice support for the Iranian citizens who protested against their leadership in December.\u201d \u2014CBS News (5\/5\/18)<\/p>\n
\u201cAt an Iranian freedom event in DC, Giuliani, citing NSA Bolton, made the motion of ripping up a paper when talking about what the Trump administration will do with the Iran nuclear deal.\u201d \u2014ABC News reporter Tara Palmeri (5\/5\/18)<\/p>\n
Politico: Giuliani Took Money From a Group That Killed Americans. Does Trump Care?<\/p>\n
Two years ago, Politico\u2018s coverage (11\/23\/16) of MEK had a quite different tone.<\/p>\n
None of the above outlets bothered to mention the MEK\u2019s cult-like nature when reporting on the so-called \u201cFreedom Convention,\u201d or the fact that Giuliani has been paid thousands of dollars by the group. According to Politico (in another article, from 2016):<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The MEK has paid Giuliani handsomely for years\u2014$20,000 or more, and possibly a lot more\u2014for brief appearances before the group and for lobbying to have it removed from the State Department\u2019s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), which occurred in 2012.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Shouldn\u2019t this be mentioned? Isn\u2019t this relevant to what purpose the \u201cconference\u201d serves, and why its voice is legitimized and boosted by Western media and Trump flacks?<\/p>\n
Part of what makes the MEK\u2019s strategy so effective is their rebranding themselves as\u00a0 benign-sounding, Western-friendly democrats just fighting for \u201cfreedom.\u201d That media play along with this fiction is evidence of 1) widespread ignorance of the most basic facts of Iranian politics, even among nominal foreign reporters, and 2) how desperate Western media are for images of pro-US, pro-Israel regime-change advocates\u2014a cohort that is close to nonexistent in non-cult form.<\/p>\n
Though it wasn\u2019t in reference to Giuliani\u2019s speech, HBO\u2019s John Oliver (Last Week Tonight, 4\/22\/18) committed a similar oversight two weeks ago, describing footage of an MEK crowd as \u201ca group of Iranian dissidents.\u201d That\u2019s true, in a very narrow, technical sense\u2014in the same way the Westboro Baptist Church could be referred to as \u201cUS dissidents,\u201d which would be equally misleading in terms of the impression conveyed.<\/p>\n
One notable exception was the Washington Post\u2019s Ishaan Tharoor (5\/7\/18), who pointed out the MEK\u2019s cult status, as well as their payoffs to Giuliani, in his breakdown of the event.<\/p>\n
The fact that almost no one else brought up the cult-like nature of Giuliani\u2019s associates indicates that most in US media are entirely uninterested in conveying fundamental facts about what\u2019s going on in Iran. A troubling gap in its own right, but doubly so when the present administration is mounting a well-documented and deliberate effort to undermine and overthrow that country\u2019s government.<\/p>\n
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The MEK has next to no support in Iran itself, where it\u2019s hated for working with Israeli intelligence and fighting alongside Saddam Hussein in Iraq\u2019s war against Iran in the 1980s that killed roughly 500,000 Iranians. The group\u2014which was formerly disowned by the last major protest movement inside Iran<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[52,642,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-8273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-mujahedin-khalq-destructive-cult","tag-paid-advocacy-for-mko","tag-third-view-mek","module-article","ctype-story","blog-western-bloggers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8273","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=8273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8273"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=8273"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=8273"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=8273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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