{"id":9697,"date":"2019-04-29T10:50:28","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T06:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/?p=9697"},"modified":"2021-01-21T19:27:29","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T15:57:29","slug":"spains-vox-party-hates-muslims-except-the-ones-who-fund-it-mek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/posts\/9697","title":{"rendered":"Spain\u2019s Vox Party Hates Muslims\u2014Except the Ones Who Fund It (MEK)"},"content":{"rendered":"

MEK, Iranian friends of the Far Right Spanish VOX<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The upstart far-right party is unapologetically Islamophobic, but without donations from Iranian exiles, it may have never gotten off the ground.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s far-right party Vox launched its 2019 election campaign this month in the tiny town of Covadonga. Situated in a lush valley in the northern region of Asturias, with fewer than 100 inhabitants, Covadonga is sometimes referred to as the \u201ccradle of Spain.\u201d According to the historical narrative of Spanish conservatives, Covadonga was the site of the first victory by Christian Hispania against Spain\u2019s then-Muslim rulers, and the start of the Reconquista, the 780-year process of reclaiming Iberian lands for Christendom.<\/p>\n

\u201cEurope is what it is thanks to Spain\u2014thanks to our contribution, ever since the Middle Ages, of stopping the spread and the expanse of Islam,\u201d Iv\u00e1n Espinosa de los Monteros, Vox\u2019s vice secretary of international relations and a candidate in the April 28 elections, told Foreign Policy over the phone on his way to Covadonga. At the campaign launch, Vox leader Santiago Abascal added: \u201cHistory matters, and we shouldn\u2019t be afraid of that,\u201d to cries of \u201c\u00a1Viva Espa\u00f1a!\u201d<\/p>\n

While Spain\u2019s right-wing has previously been relatively light on anti-Islam rhetoric, preferring to rail against secessionists in Catalonia and elsewhere, Vox has no such compunction. One of the party\u2019s earliest controversies was a wildly Islamophobic video conjuring a future in which Muslims had imposed sharia in southern Spain, turning the Cathedral of C\u00f3rdoba back into a mosque and forcing women to cover up. Recently, Vox\u2019s No. 2, Javier Ortega Smith, was investigated by Spanish prosecutors for hate speech after he spoke of an \u201cIslamist invasion\u201d that was the \u201cenemy of Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given Vox\u2019s staunch Islamophobia, it was an embarrassment for the party when reports of Iranian funding emerged in January.<\/p>\n

Vox\u2019s racist, homophobic, and sexist policies had already provided plenty of ammunition for its critics and rival parties; the claims that Vox had been established with the help of Iranian money in 2013 was less expected. However, Vox was not actually funded by Iran itself. The reality is even more surprising.<\/p>\n

Documents leaked to the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds show that almost 1 million euros donated to Vox between its founding in December 2013 and the European Parliament elections in May 2014 came via supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an exiled Iranian group. The NCRI was set up in the 1980s by Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) and a number of other Iranian dissidents and opposition groups. The MEK\u2019s allies later abandoned the NCRI, making the organization functionally an alias for the MEK.<\/p>\n

The MEK and NCRI dispute that they are synonymous, but many disagree, including Daniel Benjamin, a former coordinator for counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, who refers to the NCRI as the MEK\u2019s \u201cfront organization.\u201d The MEK and NCRI also share the same leader, Maryam Rajavi. The U.S. government and a U.S. Court of Appeals decision affirm that the NCRI is an alias of the MEK, while a 2009 Rand Corp. report sponsored by the U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense refers to the NCRI as an \u201cMeK subsidiary.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MEK is billed by U.S. politicians like Rudy Giuliani and current National Security Advisor John Bolton as the legitimate opposition to the current Iranian government. But the MEK also happens to be a former Islamist-Marxist organization that was only taken off the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in 2012\u2014raising the question of why supporters of such a group would want to back an Islamophobic, hard-right Spanish party like Vox.<\/p>\n

In Spain, much has been made of Vox\u2019s links to U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who met a senior figure from the party in Washington last year, and has promised to tour Spain in the near future. But the mysterious MEK-linked funding points to another controversial relationship.<\/p>\n

With Vox poised to win more than 10 percent of the vote in this weekend\u2019s Spanish elections, the party could end up propping up a new right-wing government, as happened in regional elections in Spain\u2019s southern region of Andalusia in December. It would be the first time a Spanish government has depended on a far-right party since Francisco Franco, and this would send shockwaves through Spain\u2019s entire political system.<\/p>\n

The question of Vox\u2019s funding is now more burning than ever.<\/p>\n

In 1953, a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran and propped up a monarchical dictatorship led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Waves of oppression followed, including scores of executions, thousands of incarcerations, and the choking of civil society. In the ensuing political vacuum, many radical groups popped up. One such group, the MEK, or People\u2019s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, combined both Marxism and Islamism. The MEK set about fighting the Western-backed dictatorship, staging attacks against the shah\u2019s regime and U.S. targets. The shah responded in kind, torturing and executing opposition leaders, including those of the MEK.<\/p>\n

In the months preceding the Islamic Revolution of 1979, thousands of prisoners were set free, including Massoud Rajavi, a prominent MEK figure. Rajavi was a young, charismatic orator, who rejuvenated the organization and even met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution\u2019s leader, hoping to secure his endorsement for the MEK. Khomeini refused. Rajavi then tried to run as a candidate in Iran\u2019s first-ever presidential election, but confronted with Khomeini\u2019s disapproval, he was forced to drop out. The winner of that election, Abolhassan Banisadr, was not an ally of Khomeini either. The MEK saw an opening and allied itself with Banisadr.<\/p>\n

In 1981, Rajavi and Banisadr fled Iran together after Banisadr was impeached and removed from office with Khomeini\u2019s blessing and MEK followers had lost deadly street battles with Khomeini loyalists that had threatened to turn into a civil war. The MEK was now an official enemy of the Islamic Republic, which was at the time fighting a bloody war with Iraq, so the MEK came to see Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein as a viable ally. The MEK started helping Saddam in his war against Iran.<\/p>\n

Since that moment, the group has been widely seen as a pariah among the Iranian public. Later, the MEK reportedly helped Saddam in his massacres of Kurds and Iraqi Shiites. As stated in the Rand report: \u201cMEK officials strenuously deny any involvement in the atrocities against the Shia and Kurds. \u2026 However, the allegations of the group\u2019s complicity with Saddam are corroborated by press reports that quote Maryam Rajavi encouraging MEK members to \u2018take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards,\u2019 as well as the timing of Saddam\u2019s conferring the Rafedeen Medallion\u2014a high honor in the Iraqi military\u2014on Masoud Rajavi.\u201d In return, Saddam gave the MEK near-unlimited funding and a stretch of land to build itself a city, about 60 miles north of Baghdad and just 50 miles away from the Iranian border.<\/p>\n

When the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 overthrew Saddam, the MEK lost its biggest ally.<\/p>\n

The country was now ruled by parties and people the MEK had helped suppress, friends of Iran\u2019s Islamic Republic, and a United States at the height of its global war on terrorism and which had designated the MEK as a terrorist group. What\u2019s more, the MEK had by now morphed into something resembling a cult, according to allegations by various people who have left the group.<\/p>\n

Hassan Heyrani, a former member of the MEK\u2019s political department who defected in 2018, told Foreign Policy about group rituals and routines designed to completely subjugate the individual self, including members\u2019 sexual lives and the slightest hint of free thinking, while forcing near-religious worship of MEK leader Massoud Rajavi. Women were made to adhere to a strict dress code. Members were obliged to record the details of their daily activities and thoughts in personal notebooks and then share them in group meetings, with the risk of public shaming and punishments, according to Heyrani. The MEK did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but its representatives have denied such claims in the past.<\/p>\n

Despite the MEK\u2019s metamorphosis from an opposition group to designated terrorist organization, hawks in the George W. Bush administration decided that they could use the MEK in their redrawing of the Middle East. Instead of apprehending members of the group as terrorists, during the occupation the U.S. Army was instructed to defend the MEK\u2019s base from possible attacks by Iraqi forces, various Iraqi militias, or forces loyal to the Iranian government.<\/p>\n

The MEK quickly seized on Washington\u2019s change of heart. The organization started an intense lobbying campaign to have itself removed from terrorist lists in the United States and European Union. A vast and impressive range of current and former U.S. politicians and officials ended up being linked to this effort, from Giuliani and Bolton on the right to Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez and former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean on the left. In Europe, the list included Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a now-retired Spanish politician, who previously served as one of the 14 vice presidents in the EU Parliament. The MEK was finally delisted by the U.S. government in 2012 and by the EU in 2009.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s Vidal-Quadras went on to help found Vox in late 2013. And supporters of the NCRI provided the funding needed to launch the right-wing party and contest the 2014 European elections, according to El Pa\u00eds.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the day it was founded in December 2013\u2014the same day that it registered as a political party with the Spanish Ministry of Interior\u2014Vox started to receive Iranian funds,\u201d said Joaqu\u00edn Gil, one of the El Pa\u00eds journalists who first reported on NCRI-linked funding of Vox. The donations came from dozens of individual sources, from several countries including the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, and Italy in amounts ranging from 60 to 35,000 euros, totaling almost 972,000 euros, in the period from December 2013 to April 2014, shortly before the European parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n

According to Gil, Vidal-Quadras said he had \u201casked his friends at NCRI \u2026 to instruct its followers to make a series of money transfers.\u201d Vidal-Quadras told El Pa\u00eds that he had informed the current leader of the party, Abascal, about his relationship with the organization and that the NCRI would finance the party. Vidal-Quadras has confirmed that the NCRI organized the international fundraising campaign for Vox and the group was willing to discuss the matter with Spanish journalists. \u201cWe knew that it was a new party, but not a far-right one,\u201d a spokesperson for the NCRI told El Pa\u00eds.<\/p>\n

This money would be fundamental to the launch of the party\u2014without it, Gil suggested, Vox wouldn\u2019t exist. But the NCRI had already achieved the goal of having the MEK removed from the EU terrorist list years earlier, so why did its supporters agree to fund a fringe Spanish party? \u201cIt\u2019s totally surreal,\u201d Gil admitted.<\/p>\n

When asked about the party\u2019s links to the NCRI, Espinosa, the Vox vice secretary of international relations, told Foreign Policy: \u201cWe don\u2019t have any relationship with them.\u201d The funding of Vox by the NCRI came out of a \u201cpersonal relationship\u201d with Vidal-Quadras, who had supported the Iranian organization throughout his stint in the EU Parliament until 2014, when he lost his race to win a seat as part of the newly founded Vox. (Vidal-Quadras had previously been a lifetime member of Spain\u2019s conservative People\u2019s Party, or PP.) \u201cThey supported him,\u201d Espinosa claimed. \u201cNot the party so much as him. And when he left,\u201d Espinosa added, \u201cwhen the campaign was over, they never came back.\u201d Like the NCRI and MEK, Vidal-Quadras did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.<\/p>\n

In December 2013, Spain\u2019s electoral commission reminded the political parties that foreigners were not allowed to finance parties during the 2014 European elections campaign. Spain\u2019s electoral law prohibits parties from receiving money from foreign entities or individuals 54 days before elections, although foreign funding is permitted outside of the campaign period.<\/p>\n

While there is no evidence that Vox has broken Spanish or EU funding rules, Espinosa clearly had no qualms about accepting foreign funding:<\/p>\n

\u201cI try to get as much funding from abroad as I can\u2014not to say that it\u2019s significant, but I\u2019d be lying if I told you nobody from abroad [had made donations].\u201d<\/p>\n

Espinosa, who was part of Vox\u2019s European parliamentary candidates list in 2014 alongside Vidal-Quadras (Vox narrowly missed winning a seat), went on to emphasize that the noncampaign funding was entirely legal, transparent, and came through verified bank wires by \u201cprofessionals\u2014lawyers, bankers, dentists, doctors who live abroad.\u201d Other parties remain suspicious.<\/p>\n

Spain\u2019s ruling Socialist Workers\u2019 Party (PSOE), currently in a minority in the Senate, has asked the Senate\u2019s majority party, the PP, to request that Vox appear in front of the Commission of Investigation for Funding of Parties. The conservative PP, which would likely need Vox\u2019s support to have any chance of forming a right-wing coalition government after the election, has expressed concerns about Vox\u2019s funding but has stopped short of a Senate investigation, instead urging Spain\u2019s Court of Auditors to investigate Vox. Espinosa told Foreign Policy that the party has presented all the related documents to the Court of Auditors.<\/p>\n

Espinosa also insisted that Vox\u2019s funding had never come from \u201cfoundations, organizations, parties\u201d\u2014only individuals. But while the donations to Vox technically came from followers of the MEK rather than directly from the organization, the distinction between \u201cmembers,\u201d as in those actually part of the MEK, and so-called \u201csupporters\u201d outside the organization itself is false, claimed Heyrani. \u201cThose in other countries are also members. They have daily schedules. There are circles led by MEK offices in each country, and they act upon their orders,\u201d he said. NCRI and MEK representatives have not responded to requests from Foreign Policy for comment on this allegation.<\/p>\n

The MEK may have just been returning the favor to a long ally, Vidal-Quadras, who has been supportive of the MEK for years. But as one former member of the MEK executive committee told Foreign Policy, the financial resources the group gained under Saddam Hussein have likely run out\u2014which suggests that it may have another source of funding today.<\/p>\n

\u201cMojahedin [MEK] are the tool, not the funders. They aren\u2019t that big. They facilitate,\u201d said Massoud Khodabandeh, who once served in the MEK\u2019s security department; Khodabandeh defected in 1996, a year before the MEK was designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. \u201cYou look at it and say, \u2018Oh, Mojahedin are funding [Vox].\u2019 No, they are not. The ones that are funding that party are funding Mojahedin as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Khodabandeh said he himself was involved in moving money for the MEK and its funders during the reign of Saddam Hussein. \u201cI went to Riyadh and recovered three trucks of gold bars from agents of [the] Saudi intelligence agency [at that time] led by Prince Turki bin Faisal. We transferred them to Baghdad and then to Jordan. We sold the bars in Jordan,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n

Khodabandeh\u2019s account raises the question of where the MEK\u2019s money is coming from today. Heyrani, the recent MEK defector, also handled parts of the organization\u2019s finances in Iraq and was blunt when asked about the current financial backing of the MEK: \u201cSaudi Arabia. Without a doubt,\u201d he said. Once the MEK was given a safe haven in Albania after U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, with no U.S. Army to defend the group\u2019s camp and the Iraqi government wanting them gone, one of the ranking members of the political department told Heyrani that Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud had finally laid a \u201cgolden egg.\u201d<\/p>\n

The so-called egg was the massive installation, or camp, based just outside Tirana, Albania, which has been used by the MEK as its base of operations since 2016. \u201cHabib Rezaei [a top-ranking member] told me that we will bring some U.S. senators to parade in front of Albanians so that they know who they\u2019re dealing with,\u201d Heyrani said. (In August 2017, Republican Sens. Roy Blunt, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis visited the MEK in Albania and met with Maryam Rajavi.)<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia\u2019s state-run television channels have given friendly coverage to the MEK, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia\u2019s former intelligence chief, even appeared in July 2016 at an MEK rally in Paris.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to topple the regime too,\u201d the prince said, to cheers. It has also been widely reported that the MEK has collaborated with Israel\u2019s Mossad, including in attacks against Iranian nuclear scientists, according to U.S. officials. The MEK has called the allegations of their role in assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists \u201cpatently false.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is evidence that Gulf leaders, fearful of Iranian influence and Islamist movements at home, are warming to anti-Islam parties in Europe, as Ola Salem and Hassan Hassan have argued in Foreign Policy. Khodabandeh agreed. \u201cIt\u2019s all over Europe,\u201d he said. \u201cFar-right, anti-EU parties have support that comes from lots of places. \u2026 There is outside backing. This backing is the same as [those backing] MEK.\u201d<\/p>\n

Experts in the United States have reached similar conclusions about the source of the MEK\u2019s funds. \u201cGroup supporters claimed the money came from the contributions of ordinary Iranians in exile, but the sums seemed far too great,\u201d wrote Benjamin, the former State Department counterterrorism official, who added that some believed Arab governments of the Persian Gulf to be behind the MEK \u201clucre,\u201d as he put it.<\/p>\n

Even so, a fringe party in Spain just getting off the ground does not seem to be a natural destination for supporters of an organization dedicated to overthrowing the Iranian government, much less a party whose ideology was not known to the NCRI and MEK at the time of those donations, according to an NCRI spokesperson quoted in the El Pa\u00eds report. Moreover, Spain\u2019s governments and its royal family have long enjoyed amicable relations with the Gulf monarchies, reducing the likelihood of these governments wanting to prop up an extremist far-right party in Spain.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the revelations by El Pa\u00eds about MEK-linked funding being used to establish Vox leave more questions than answers. As Benjamin wrote in 2016, the removal of the MEK from the list of foreign terrorist organizations ended \u201cany hope of gathering more information from MEK proponents on their financial relations with the group, or where all that money came from.\u201d<\/p>\n

Renowned enemies of the Iranian government may have been happy to see their funding reach a European supporter of the MEK, given that the organization has been promoted internationally by some as the legitimate Iranian opposition-in-exile, but either these alleged financial backers didn\u2019t realize their cash would ultimately be used to fund a far-right party\u2014or they didn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

Sohail Jannessari is a doctoral candidate in political science at Barcelona\u2019s Pompeu Fabra University and a contributor to BBC Persian TV and other Persian-language media. Twitter: @SoJannessari<\/em><\/p>\n

Darren Loucaides is a British writer who covers politics, populism, and identity. Twitter: @DarrenLoucaides<\/em><\/p>\n

Sohail Jannessar, Darren Loucaides, Foreign Policy<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MEK, Iranian friends of the Far Right Spanish VOX The upstart far-right party is unapologetically Islamophobic, but without donations from Iranian exiles, it may have never gotten off the ground.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9442,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[52,85,642,20],"module":[81],"ctype":[17],"blog":[109],"class_list":["post-9697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mujahedin-khalq-proxy-force","tag-mujahedin-khalq-destructive-cult","tag-mujahedin-khalq-terrorism","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\/9697","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=9697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9697"},{"taxonomy":"module","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/module?post=9697"},{"taxonomy":"ctype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ctype?post=9697"},{"taxonomy":"blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nejatngo.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog?post=9697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}