Iran: Counselor to Mullahs’ Chief Justice Attacks the West and the MEK

Written by
Amir Taghati
Iran: Counselor to Mullahs’ Chief Justice, Ali Bagheri Kani
The mullahs’ regime has put aside the policy of keeping silent about the Iranian Resistance and is charging full speed against the main democratic opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI, Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK).

The regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has, on several occasions, expressed fear that the MEK influences the hearts and minds of Iranian youth.

At the same time, senior officials take to the stage one after the other to attack the MEK.

The mullahs’ Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi lamented, two days ago, that the young generation “does not know the truth about the MEK.” He tried to heap accusations on the opposition.

 

Still, one truth the youth might not be aware of is that, as a member of a four-person “death committee,” in 1988, Raisi had ordered the execution of 30,000 MEK members serving different prison terms.

On June 3, his advisor on Human Rights, Ali Bagheri Kani, tried his chance against the MEK while attacking “Western standards” of human rights.

Bagheri first revealed that the mullahs had left no stones unturned to make the EU relist the MEK as a “terrorist entity” after the EU’s highest courts delisted the latter in 2009.

“Our ambassador in one European country once met with an EU authority and talked to him on this. He reasoned that the MEK was the great violator of human rights… The EU authority had no answer. He said that ‘we have several exigencies in the nuclear area, and you do not listen to them, so we are obliged to use all instruments that we dispose of,’” Bagheri said in an interview with the official TV’s Channel Five on June 3.

Like his master, Bagheri refrains from telling the truth about the MEK. He was a member of the mullahs’ negotiating team with the P5+1 on the 2015 international nuclear deal. The mullahs asked their partners to relist the MEK in return for signing of the nuclear agreement. But unlike 2005, their counterparts refused to give in to their intimidations.

An AFP dispatch dated October 21, 2004, states that the EU troika proposed that if the mullahs accepted to suspend uranium enrichment, then they would “continue considering the MEK as a terrorist organization.” So clearly, the listing was the result of a deal to make the mullahs stop their nuclear adventurism, not human rights’ violations by the MEK, as claimed by Bagheri.

“This is how they look upon us in Western systems. We have to exploit inherent potentials in these countries, as well as capacities beyond those local possibilities,” ‌Bagheri elaborated, without explaining what those capacities were.

Historically, the mullahs have used terrorist attacks and hostage-taking efficiently against western countries in the past to intimidate them against the opposition.

But the boot went on the other leg when his interlocutor raised the human rights issue, asking why the world condemns the mullahs for not respecting those rights. Unusually, when he asked him to give Iran’s rating in the affair on a world grading, he answered: “What they call human rights, we do not accept a lot of it. What they call human rights is in contradiction with our religious, as well as our historical and nationalistic basics. We do not accept them, and there is no reason why we should adapt our actions to their standards. We are an old nation boasting a historical civilization.”

“If we would rate our action according to their criteria, why did then we carry out a revolution? The West and the US want us to behave according to their standards, and we do not accept this.”

As a reminder, one of the most ancient standards in human rights belongs to Cyrus the Great. He acknowledged the rights of the Jewish community he liberated from Babylon in 540 BC and other ethnic minorities under his rule in the vast Persian Empire.

The standards Bagheri points to as “our standards” are standards belonging to a medieval regime and not the Iranian people who have a history of respecting human rights.

After all, Bagheri is a counselor to Ebrahim Raisi, considered as the perpetrator of a crime against humanity for his leading role in the 1988 massacre of Iran’s political prisoners.

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