What to Learn from Tehran’s Celebratory Rhetoric Following West Targeting the Resistance

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Written by
Mehdi Oghbai

Friday, June 22, an undeclared festive mood expanded at the Iranian regime’s Friday prayer sermons, a stage traditionally used by the extremist clerical regime to offer belligerent rhetoric for the nation and the world. Friday prayer leaders, who are the representatives of regime supreme leader Ali Khamenei, took pride and ownership of what happened in Albania and France in the previous days.

After citing the attack against the MEK in Ashraf 3, Allahnour Karimitabar, the Supreme Leader’s representative in Ilam, added, “for the first time in the history of these miserable people (referring to the MEK), we see that France has submitted to the will of the Islamic Republic and prohibited them from holding their rally.”

The triumphant oratory was widely shared among his peers in different cities while other state officials and military commanders held similar speeches citing reports from state media covering both incidents.

“From our point of view, the terrorist group of the hypocrites (the regime’s pejorative to slander the MEK in Iran’s society) is completely a terrorist group and has not given up its terrorist nature. The countries that host the hypocrites are responsible and should be held accountable,” Kazem Gharibabadi, secretary of the Judiciary’s High Council for Human Rights, boasted.

For nine consecutive months, despite the regime’s claims of “prevailing over the riots”, state officials and media had been using their platforms to warn against the MEK and the new generation that allegedly “has been deceived” by them. Their target audience, be it the regime’s declining tight-knit follower base or the growing dissenting public, are well aware of how the regime has been trying to use executions to silence protests. Meanwhile, its security forces are being targeted every once in a while across the country.

As a police official in Paris strangely cited “geopolitical” reasons for banning the Iranian Resistance rally, a geopolitical autopsy of these events is well deserved. In hindsight, the clerical regime has always told the West it considers the MEK the most serious threat to its existence.

On June 17, 2003, following a secret deal between Tehran and Paris, 1,300 French counterterrorism forces raided the Iranian Resistance headquarters in France to “find weapons” and “dismantle a web of criminal conduct”. Nonetheless, after dozens of court cases that cost the French taxpayer millions of euros, the government of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy came out embarrassed and the MEK turned June 17 into an annual Free Iran Rally. The anniversary clearly reminds Iranians of the sacrifice of those who laid down their lives so that the Resistance could survive and thrive.

In 2018, Tehran’s top intelligence officer in Europe was caught while trying to bomb the same “Free Iran Rally”. He and three of his accomplices were tried in Antwerp Court and troves of evidence proved how the regime’s leadership, including then President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif’s image, is willing to risk everything to strike the MEK.

Yet again, no lesson was learned. It took the regime some hostage taking, nuclear extortion and regional hostility to get those in the West unlearn what their predecessors did at a huge cost of their own people.

The very reason Tehran is pushing the West to unleash a full-fledged offensive against the Iranian Resistance is not MEK’s legal, political or even structural strength or perseverance. Khamenei has a bigger problem. His international isolation, which of a great part he rightly blames on the MEK, has deprived him of the resources that once enabled him to effectively fund his oppressive apparatus at home and terror machine in the Middle East. This problem has had severe consequences domestically.

Since 2017, he has been fighting numerous nationwide and provincial uprisings, outnumbered by an entire nation that slips further under the poverty line by the day. With MEK’s network gaining ground, four decades of investment in slandering the organization is fading away slowly but surely. While Khamenei wants to make sure the revolting nation doesn’t get to see this year’s Free Iran Rally, it is clear that those who it deems its arch enemies will not give up easily.

Having survived multiple massacres, bombings, blacklisting, disarmaments, prosecutions, raids… the Iranian Resistance continues to build up and inspires an uncompromising nation. Despite today’s celebratory tone, the ruling clerics have learned quite well that the MEK will not stop until they have brought change in Iran. It remains an open question if those who have traditionally heeded Iran’s dictators want to learn their lesson and stop inflicting pain to their own people as well as those in Iran.

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