All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show today is Sean Amoey from the National Iranian American Council and the Huffington Post, where he has a blog today called Silencing the Moderate Middle.
You can find the link in the viewpoint section today at Antiwar.com.
It's about the Mujahideen Al-Khalq.
But before I ask you about that, Sean, I wanted to ask you about the National Iranian American Council, what exactly that is and what's your role in it.
But also, by the way, hi, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Thank you for having me.
The National Iranian American Council, NIAC, is it's a relatively new organization.
I personally haven't worked for them, but I've supported them indirectly and I think they do a pretty good job.
It's just private American citizens or this is tied to the Iranian government or how's that work?
It's absolutely not part of the Iranian government, actually.
It's just it's an Iranian American organization, an advocacy organization that tries to advance the interests of the Iranian community as perceived by its membership.
Sure.
OK.
Just wanted to make that clear, you know, as we get started here.
So listen, this is a great article today and it's a matter of the utmost importance.
And yet, unfortunately, as you know, it's a pretty esoteric subject.
The M.E.K., the Mujahideen Al-Khalq, what in the heck is that?
Give us the background, last few years, few decades, if you need to, to bring us up to speed to talk about, you know, the M.E.K. lobby in Washington, D.C. and the progress they're making and what that's going to mean for us.
Well, the M.E.K. was formed in 1965 to oppose the Shah's regime in Iran.
And their strategy has always been one of taking, installing themselves in power, but through violent means.
And this has been especially, this has been especially a policy that they've followed following the fall of the Shah and with the advent of the Islamic Republic.
And the reason that this has been their policy is because they understand that they have virtually no support inside Iran, mostly because of their collaboration with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war.
And so they want to shift the arena, the pro-democracy arena represented by the Green Movement in Iran from a non-violent one to one that involves violent terrorism, because they feel like this is the only way that they can have the upper hand and install their own dictatorship to replace the current dictatorship.
All right.
And now, as far as some of the background there, I was wondering if you could discuss, if you know, the role of Marxism and the role of, you know, holy warrior jihadism in the ideology of this group.
They seem a very strange bunch.
I've read, I think I may have made this up, I think I read it somewhere else, the comparison of the leadership to the Heaven's Gate cult in L.A. where they all drank the Kool-Aid and died and wore identical Nikes and all that.
Remember with Bo and Tee?
Absolutely.
And this is, you know, people refer to the organization as a cult, but this is by no means, it's not my wording, this is the Human Rights Watch and RAND and several other human rights organizations, they refer to it as a cult because whatever the unelected representatives say at the very top, it must be carried out.
They must obey.
And they practice all kinds of psychological and physiological torture on their own members.
And, you know, part of their history, they were founded on a profoundly anti-American and some would say anti-Semitic, you know, platform.
And these were the same people that wanted the hostages to be kept longer, the 1979 hostages, just after the fall of the Shah's regime.
And they actually criticized the current regime in Iran for actually not executing these people.
And they're an ideological chameleon.
Beginning with the Islamic Republic, they strongly backed the Ayatollah Khomeini and they actually nominated him as the most fit person to be the president of Iran.
And so, you know, since then, because of the attempts to capture power, they've been allying themselves with all kinds of anti-Iranian, pro-war entities or countries.
Saddam is one instance and the neocons right now and and so on and so forth.
So right now, so after the invasion of Iraq, they've basically been kept safe at Camp Ashraf there.
Well, more or less safe.
I've read actually about them being expelled and then later about them all being there again without ever having read about them coming back.
But I don't you know, it's pretty hard to keep track from Texas.
But apparently, I guess they're still within the graces of the Americans, if not the Iraqi government over there for now.
But then now, right at this time, there's a big push and it looks like it's successful.
Right.
What are we, days away or days past the removal of the Mujahideen?
I'll call it from the State Department's official list of designated terrorist organizations.
Yeah, and that's actually a profoundly troublesome thing, because I think the decision might be made somewhere between the 10th and the 24th of this month.
And, you know, the MEK in Europe, when they were delisted a couple of years ago, one of the first things they did was they attacked the true opposition.
They don't even consider the Green Movement of Iran to be a legitimate opposition because they reject violence.
And so they have a vast amount of resources, partly because they are a cult and they can rely on something like 30 percent of the annual income of their membership to go to the leadership.
And so because of this vast amount of resources that they have to do for various front groups, they've been able to sort of to the extent that they can crush the actual democratic opposition to the Islamic Republic in the Iranian diaspora, particularly in the United States.
Yeah, well, you know, we come up against this all the time, you know, stupidity or the plan.
And it has seemed for a long time that it is the plan that the American War Party wants to marginalize the moderates and would rather push things to a head rather than have, you know, a reformist face in there.
I mean, after all, when they had Khatami in there, he was a guy that they, you know, could have dealt with in a lot easier way as far as PR goes and dealing with the Congress and all that than Ahmadinejad.
And it seemed like they helped get Ahmadinejad elected by warning the Iranians they better not elect him.
And it just seems like this is par for the course here, that whatever they can do to discredit internal dissent inside Iran by making it look like they're just pawns of the Americans.
And and, you know, especially if they're supporting the MEK and groups like Jandala and blowing things up there and killing people there and they can associate those groups with any kind of dissent in the country.
We know they try and we know it works to at least some degree, right?
Absolutely.
And, you know, one of the things that we should bear in mind is that the MEK has tried pretty hard to, like I said, silence the opposition.
But just beyond that, the work that they did during the election, the last election of the of between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi and even the one prior to that, they've always said that these elections should be boycotted.
And part of the reason that Ahmadinejad actually became president in the first in his first term was because not just the MEK, but other monarchists in the United States.
And I'm sorry, I'll have to hold it there.
We'll pick it up at the election in 2005 in Iran right after this.
OK.
All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Sean Amoy, writer at the Huffington Post blog, and we're talking about the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, the communist terrorist cult of frontmen for Israeli intelligence who oftentimes put lies in the Sunday Times in England and and who are about to be delisted, I guess.
I guess we'll get to that in a second from the State Department's list of designated terrorist organizations.
But when we left off, Sean, we were talking about the election of July 2005, I think is what you're referring to.
And when Ahmadinejad became the president, as I kind of referred to there, I'll note George W.
Bush gave a speech and said, you know, more or less, I'm warning you people of Iran, you better not vote for the right winger in this thing.
And they came out and, of course, did so.
And Ahmadinejad's staffer, you know, Smithers type, came out and gave a statement thanking George Bush and laughing and describing how that worked to their advantage and helping get the vote out.
So anyway, you were also going to mention the role of American-supported monarchists in the election.
That, what George Bush said actually did have some impact as well.
But a lot of Iranians in Iran are tuned into these California-based Persian-language TV stations that are beamed in directly into Iran.
And they're monarchists dominated, but they also give a platform to the MEK as well.
And it was during that election where these people advocated, they actually pushed the idea of a complete boycott of the elections.
So naturally, and a lot of people inside Iran did as well.
So naturally, the more liberal, progressive types, they stayed out.
And that allowed Ahmadinejad to win.
But thankfully, in 2009, they realized, the Iranian people realized the mistake they had made.
So they came out and in full force and actually voted.
Now, again, unfortunately, that was a fraudulent election.
But I'm just trying to illustrate to you the kind of mindset that some of these extremists and MEK and even in the monarchists, who I believe are somewhat more sane.
But these are the kind of policies that they pushed that time after time has been against the interests of the Iranian people as well as the United States.
Well, do you think that's deliberately so?
I mean, because it could be, you know, for the benefit of what they consider long term strategy.
But, you know, it's the perpetual question around here in all different issues is stupidity or the plan, because certainly things never turn out the way the governments or the different groups we're discussing promise they will.
Right.
I think I think there's a differentiation to be made.
The monarchists, I think, are by and large sincere people who want to see a democratic government replace the theocratic government that exists right now.
But they're just sort of an impotent bunch, just like the MEK, their average age.
They came here 32 years ago and now they're upwards of 60 years old and they've never been able to accomplish anything concrete.
But with the MEK, it's actually quite different.
Their strategy, especially in pushing war, which they used to do, and I don't know if they still do, and especially broad sanctions, is meant to create an environment where the people are so disgruntled and angry that there is some sort of violence comes to the surface.
And when that does, they think that's the only way that they can take advantage of the situation since they have, you know, people that are trained that they can use to install themselves as one dictator replacing the other.
So that's been the MEK strategy for the past 32 years, despite their renunciation of terrorism in 2001.
Well, it's completely pie in the sky kind of stuff, though, right?
I mean, there's no way in the world that even if somehow they were parachuted in with all the firepower on earth or something that the people of Iran would let the MEK be the new dictators.
Absolutely.
And that's that's one of the smart strategies that the Green Movement, which I believe is a far more or perhaps the only, you know, legitimate opposition to the Islamic Republic, which has broad based support inside Iran.
And they've made a tactical decision to stay away from violence because obviously the Iranian regime has a monopoly on violence.
And so if they can play this political game on their own terms based on ideas, then they would have the upper hand.
And that's what the MEK doesn't realize or perhaps does realize, but doesn't see its own agenda being advanced through that mechanism.
Now, it seems like the reason that they would want to push so hard to, you know, not just the MEK and their lobby, the NCRI in D.C., but and whatever other front groups they have.
But the American War Party, you know, it's pretty obvious why they would want to delist them, because they want to be able to use them more effectively to lie the American people in a war the way they use the Iraqi National Congress.
And Ahmed Chalabi and his friends who also were from Tehran to lie us into that war.
But they already have the NCRI.
They don't seem to have any trouble laundering bogus Israeli intelligence into the media and the intelligence stream and so forth.
So what difference would it really make to delist the MEK?
Well, you see, what the neoconservatives have done, I mean, we saw this in the run up to the war with Iraq with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi, who had virtually, you know, he hadn't been in Iraq for decades.
And when we talk about the MEK and these monarchists, for 32 years, they haven't stepped foot in Iran.
So they're very unengaged with the reality.
And what these neocons want to do is they want to push their own agenda, which is, you know, war.
And I can give you specific examples like this Hassan Dari character, for example, who's been working very hard to push the MEK agenda over the past couple of years.
He is directly funded by Daniel Pipes.
And these people are all associated with these notorious bigots like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller and so forth.
The same people, by the way, that inspired the Norwegian attacks, the terrorist attacks in Norway.
So, so we're talking about the real dregs of the neoconservative movement, Frank Gaffney and lower, David Horowitz, scum of the neocons.
Timmerman, for instance, this was the guy that said Iran would have a nuclear weapon by 1998 and still maintains that Iran was behind 9-11.
So these are pretty, you know, far, far out there people.
But what they want to do is use part of our community, the Iranian American community, to push their war agenda, but put an Iranian face on it like they did with Chalabi.
And that's just been their strategy the entire time.
So this sort of de facto alliance has has formed, unfortunately.
Well, now, is the delisting at this point imminent or it's already happened?
The decision will be made sometime between the 10th and the 24th of August.
And we're, you know, it's it's very difficult to say if they will at this point, if if they will be delisted or not.
The Bush administration decided that they should stay on the terrorist list for for good reason.
This is the organization that's killed several Americans and Iranians and Iraqi Kurds and Shia and countless others.
Saddam Hussein used them to put down the Great Bay of Pigs in the desert in 1991 after America withdrew.
Right.
And one thing to keep in mind, there are, you know, some of these guys like John Bolton and Dana Rohrabacher and all these people who are actually pushing and they're getting paid, by the way, but they're pushing to help the M.E.K. get delisted.
They've openly said that, you know, the Green Movement, they've belittled the Green Movement by saying that these guys are not brave enough and they're not willing to engage in violence.
And if we delist the M.E.K., we could perhaps use them.
And what he means by that, obviously, is through covert operations.
Rohrabacher said that outright, huh?
He said it outright.
It's documented.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Good deal.
Well, yeah, of course.
I mean, that's the deal.
And I guess there have been credible reports by the likes of Seymour Hersh and Andrew Coburn, some of the best reporters in the world.
And even Brian Ross, I guess, is a confirming reporter with his sources at ABC about American financial support for Jundala.
I guess Andrew Coburn even traced the money back to the Democrats in the Senate that passed it.
They've been abducting and killing people and blowing things up there for a couple of years now, huh?
I'm sorry.
I guess that's really a whole other.
That's a whole other radio show.
And we're out of time for this one, unfortunately.
Jundala terrorists.
We'll have to get back to that one sometime.
Anyway.
Thank you very much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
That's Sean Amouy, everybody.
HuffingtonPost.com.
