The Untarnished Truth: Regime’s Forty-Year Battle to Discredit the MEK
Written by
Shahriar Kia
free iran panel demonization mek june 30, 2023
The clerical regime in Iran has faced a formidable adversary in the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MEK/PMOI), an entity with a longer history and greater resilience. Despite the regime’s extensive security-intelligence apparatus and numerous repressive institutions, forty years of dedicated efforts to eradicate the MEK from Iran’s political landscape has failed. This elimination campaign has been characterized by extreme cruelty and the use of brutal methods. The regime has resorted to various forms of torture, terrorism, and executions, to the extent that even Hossein-Ali Montazeri, who held the position of second-in-line to the Supreme Leader, voiced his opposition to the 1988 massacre and engaged in a debate with Ruhollah Khomeini:
“In essence, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq represents more than just individuals; they embody an ideology and a school of thought. They espouse a logical framework, and countering flawed logic requires presenting sound logic. Killing will not resolve this issue; it will only further propagate and amplify it.”
When the use of force failed to achieve the desired outcome and instead resulted in counterproductive consequences, the regime resorted to softer tactics such as deception, demonization, and psychological warfare. These strategies involved incidents like the bombing of the Imam Reza shrine, a revered Shiite holy site in Mashhad, which was falsely attributed to the Mujahedin. Additionally, the regime orchestrated the murder of Christian priests, attributing the acts to the Mujahedin, and portrayed the residents of Ashraf (a location associated with the Mujahedin) as heartless and abandoners of their families. They were labeled as a fifth column in Iraq and accused of being a cult-like terrorist group, among other unfounded allegations.
When these methods failed to achieve the desired goals domestically and the Mujahedin continued to attract new recruits from those seeking to challenge the clerical regime, the regime shifted its focus to tarnishing the organization’s image beyond Iran’s borders. By diverting Iran’s national resources to garner economic interests in the West and resorting to various forms of coercion, Tehran sought to incentivize governments on both sides of the Atlantic to blacklist, bomb, disarm, relocate, and defame the Iranian Resistance. However, the Resistance persists and continues to attract young individuals both inside and outside of Iran.
10,000 MEK-affiliated Resistance Units in #Iran send messages to Free Iran World Summit 2023: Onward to a Democratic Republic, voicing support for @Maryam_Rajavi's Ten-point Plan for a free, democratic, secular republic in #Iran. pic.twitter.com/fLGe4wrHB5
— Ali Safavi (@amsafavi) July 6, 2023
As part of the ongoing demonization campaign, fallacies are being disseminated, such as the claim that “the Mujahedin-e-Khalq has no presence or popularity among the Iranian population”, or that “the Islamic Republic lacks a credible alternative.”
However, these endeavors have garnered significant criticism from experts in national security and prominent figures who have held influential positions in democratic nations. Recently, on June 30, during a conference held in Paris, former officials from the United States and European countries who possess extensive knowledge and experience in studying and collaborating with the Iranian Resistance, convened to deliberate upon the regime’s campaign of defamation. The conference shed light on the adverse implications of the Western approach towards this matter, emphasizing its detrimental impact on global peace and security.
At the conference in Paris, former Canadian Conservative Party Leader Candice Bergen told about her experience how she was targeted on social media following her participation at an event organized by the Iranian Resistance.
“I was attacked, not for saying anything about the Iranian regime, not for exposing what they had been doing to women, but for being part of the conference. And that became for me, really a big red flag,” Mrs. Bergen said. “The agenda here is to discredit the opponents of the regime, to divide, to stigmatize, to cause disunity, to cause fear, in me as an elected representative… Well, thankfully I know I’m supporting and part of an incredible organization that is working with so many others for freedom in Iran and democracy in the beautiful country of Iran.”
Mrs. Bergen also explained how civil servants in Canada have been influenced by Iranian diplomats and criticized the Canadian government for refusing to designate the Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist entity.
Mr. Struan Stevenson, a former MEP from Scotland, shared his observations regarding the influx of Iranian diplomats in Albania after the safe relocation of 3,000 refugees from the MEK. He noted that known agents of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) were seen in Albania in company of journalists from prominent European newspapers. These agents were running a website funded by the MOIS and publishing articles that later appeared in outlets like The Guardian and Der Spiegel, defaming the NCRI and MEK. Stevenson identified a pattern where defectors recruited by the MOIS would make false claims about torture, kidnapping, and murder in Camp Ashraf. He concluded that the articles were pure propaganda without grounded in real facts.
Citing the recent Iranian dissidents’ takeover of the clerical regime’s servers and evidence that came to light about the regime’s propaganda war against the MEK, Mr. Stevenson added, “They got an avalanche of papers and documents from the MFA in Tehran and we discovered the mother of one of these people who had defected from the MEK and who had been recruited by the MOIS in Albania. The mother was writing to the Minister of Foreign Affairs saying her son has done everything he was told and he has told all these lies about the MEK. He had tried to get other people from the MEK to defect and to join the ministry. He had said that as you told him that the MEK are a terrorist Islamic Marxist cult. She had urged the Iranian MFA to allow him to go home to Iran. So, all the things that we were saying were happening here was the evidence coming straight from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh also clearly laid bare the difference between systemic propaganda that is taking place in democratic countries and those being used by rough states like Iran.
Regarding his experience with the terrorist designation of the MEK by the US States Department, Director Freeh stated: “When we were working with the State Department years ago to remove the NCRI and the MEK from the terrorist list, you know we ran smack into embedded propaganda that people I think of goodwill in the State Department had just automatically incorporated into official government files and findings. So, we had a very, very difficult time on doing that. For instance, we made the point that everybody in Ashraf 1 was interviewed by the FBI to see whether they had pro-terrorism links or intentions, and nobody was found to be in that category. So even though the information was transmitted several times to the State Department, it kept getting played back to us in a number of different ways.”
“U.S. policy has been impacted by that, not just in the delisting, which finally occurred, not because the State Department decided to correct its files and its perspective, but a court of appeals was ready to hold the government before it and not only hold it in contempt, but also make findings that the organization should never been placed on the list. Placed on the list, by the way, without the FBI ever being asked to look at the facts,” former FBI Director added.
Mr. Steve McCabe, an MP from the United Kingdom, also told the conference how the clerical regime spends hundreds of thousands dollars on disinformation against the MEK and the NCRI.
“I remember I was in my office in the House of Commons, this is many years ago now, when I first became quite active with the Iran Freedom Movement,” Mr. McCabe said. “I had a message from the desk at the House of Commons saying that there was an Iranian gentleman there and he wondered if I could spare him a few moments. And of course, rather naively, I kind of assumed it was something to do with the NCRI. And it was only as I started to listen to this gentleman that I realized that it was a put up job. And the one area where he failed down was that, and I think this is a danger sometimes with propaganda, it’s a good clue if you’re on the receiving end, there tends to be quite a repetition of phrases that you begin to recognize. I don’t know if it’s done by AI or if it’s just limited intelligence, but sometimes you do spot there is a similarity.”
Adding that he has lost track of the many emails he’s been bombarded with on behalf of the Iranian regime, Mr. McCabe stated, “It’s not just the left in this country, in the UK, that they’ve penetrated. It’s also the right wing and the right wing media. There’s a newspaper some of you will be familiar with called The Mail on Sunday, which is certainly a very pro-Tory party right wing newspaper. I remember them describing me as a terrorist sympathizer and describing the NCRI as a bunch of terrorists. Again, based on information they’d received from so-called ordinary Iranians who had given them stories.”
Debunking propaganda against People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK)
Former US Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. explained in length about the history of the clerical regime’s psychological warfare against the American public opinion and how Tehran managed to coerce many US administrations with its hostage-taking strategy throughout the years.
Amb. Bloomfield then explained how the Shah used propaganda to picture an intellectual progressive movement like the MEK as “left-wing extremist” to scare off the public. After narrating how the 1979 Revolution was hijacked by Ruhollah Khomeini and how his followers cracked down on the MEK, Amb. Bloomfield added: “The Americans missed this story. So of course, if you see that you have gotten away with all of this, then you can propagate all sorts of narratives that can be believed. I studied the terrorism reports for 19 years out of the State Department. For the first part, they weren’t so bad, but then along came the time when they put the MEK on the terrorism list in 1997. As Director Freeh explained, the FBI wasn’t consulted. It had nothing to do with a dossier of terrorism.”
“We are being influenced by agents of influence in our midst, in the universities, in the think tanks, and in some places in government. I think we can fix this, but we have to stand up for the truth. We have to point a finger. We have to demand that the media organizations have professional pride, do the brave thing. You’re not going to get any more visas to Tehran. Sorry. Tell the truth. And when we do that, the regime will be exposed as the weak and illegitimate entity of ruthless and unprincipled people that they surely are,” Amb. Bloomfield concluded.
The Untarnished Truth: Regime’s Forty-Year Battle to Discredit the MEK