Iran Lobby

Exposing the Activities of the lobbies and appeasers of the Mullah's Dictatorship ruling Iran

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

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Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

The Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, have been busy hurling attacks and invectives at John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the new national security advisor, calling him everything from being crazy to a war monger to an extremist or child of Satan.

The accusations have seemed to take on a life of their own as Iranian regime loyalists such as NIAC’s Trita Parsi empty out the thesaurus in an effort to try and find something that will stick and either derail his nomination or throw cold water on the administration’s plans to revisit the Iran nuclear deal.

In either case, it seems apparent the trains have already left the stations and on Capitol Hill, it appears Democrats are only pondering going after President Trump’s CIA director nominee, Gina Haspel, for past involvement in the interrogation of terror suspects, with Bolton and secretary of state nominee, Mike Pompeo, looking like solid confirmations.

This new troika of national security, intelligence and diplomatic heads represents a significant shift in the president’s thinking as it relates to the challenges of Iran, North Korea and Islamic extremist terrorism.

Far from trying to swat individual terror suspects like so many mosquitos, it appears the administration maybe looking for a more strategic approach in draining the swamp so-to-speak by dealing directly with the sources of terrorism; more specifically nation states.

The terror attacks of 9/11 served as a reminder that safe harbors such as a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, provide training, security, funding and logistical support for terrorists to plan and execute their attacks.

The rise of ISIS out of the wreckage of a Syrian civil war and Iraqi sectarian conflict borne out of Iranian regime’s meddling carved out a caliphate which provided ISIS with everything from oil to sell and ready recruits to satellite broadcasts and a news magazine.

The Iranian regime set the template when it built Hezbollah to a formidable terrorist operation and shock troops for proxy wars. Iran mullahs utilized Hezbollah and a safe harbor in Lebanon.

But now the mullahs in Tehran are confronted with a rapid flurry of problems that have escalated nearly out of their normally iron-fisted control.

  • The explosion of U.S. fracking for oil turned it into the top oil producer in the world and forced prices to plummet on the open market, crushing revenues the mullahs were expecting from the lifting economic sanctions following the Iran nuclear deal. Coupled with the drain on cash reserves for propping up the Assad regime in Syria and spending heavily on military equipment, including building a ballistic missile program, Iran soon became a pauper nation;
  • A free-falling economy gave ordinary Iranians a gut-punch with stagnant wages, limited job opportunities and a deeply corrupt government that controlled almost all facets of the economy. Couple that with deep dissatisfaction over the increasing divide of haves vs. have-nots as those with ties to the Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force or the ruling mullahs profited handsomely; and
  • Massive protests swept the nation as the combination of punishing economic conditions and dissatisfaction with oppressive rule, including morality laws specifically targeting Iranian women, drove ordinary Iranians to extraordinary acts of defiance unheard of in Iran. This included women launch the hijab movement with the mullahs responding by passing laws criminalizing it on the basis it promoted “prostitution” and calling for 10 years imprisonment.

These trends are unmistakable and more importantly, unassailable by the Iran lobby, which for the most part has stayed silent on these domestic protests; choosing only to blame the economic conditions on the U.S. not fully complying with the terms of the nuclear deal.

Apparently Parsi and his friends think we should empty out Ft. Knox on behalf of the mullahs.

What is apparent though is that the accusations being flung by the Iran lobby at Bolton’s nomination miss an inescapable truth which is Bolton is not setting the stage for war when Tehran has already been at war with the West ever since it supplied explosives to kill Marines in Beirut or U.S. troops in Iraq.

Ivan Sascha Sheehan, incoming executive director of the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore, makes that point in a strongly worded editorial in The Hill.

“Those who are concerned about the potential for war with Iran should embrace Bolton’s appointment and support the administration’s efforts to confront Tehran’s destabilizing regional influence by taking its theocratic regime to task. The regime’s misbehavior only worsened in the run-up to Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office, and particularly under the prior administration’s cooperative policies that engendered an even greater sense of impunity than the Islamic Republic was used to,” Sheehan writes.

“Trump’s assertiveness during his first year in office is paying small dividends. U.S. Navy officials recently reported that close encounters between their vessels and those of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which were commonplace over the previous two years, halted abruptly in August,” he added.

But what the Iran lobby is most fearful of is not a simple knee-jerk tearing up of the nuclear deal by President Trump, but rather a consensus among U.S. allies to rework the deal, toughening provisions on terror support, ballistic missile development and human rights improvement, in an effort to save it.

Using the deal as a leverage against the Iranian regime is fair turnabout since the regime and Iran lobby have used its continued existence as a blunt instrument against any calls to rein in the regime’s excesses.

The Economist outlined some of the intense deal-making going on now from Great Britain, France and Germany to compel the Iranians to accept new restrictions; restrictions that should have been included in the original deal in the first place.

“Sir Simon Gass, a former British ambassador to Tehran who led the British team negotiating the deal, says that it might be possible to get an agreement from Iran not to develop an intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of hitting America. An ICBM, he points out, only makes sense if it carries a nuclear warhead, so testing one should prompt broad economic sanctions. Patricia Lewis of Chatham House, another London think-tank, believes that the Europeans may already be talking to the Iranians about a future regional missile-deal that would ban long- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles,” the Economist editorial said.

Ultimately the real rub for Parsi and his fellow travelers is that new restrictions, coupled with worsening economic conditions will once again rollback Tehran back to 2009 when massive street protests nearly toppled the regime.

As the president’s new team take their place, it’s clear the era of appeasing the mullahs is dead.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

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Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

Monday morning dawned across the U.S. to see the news dominated, not by talk of a Final Four match-up featuring Cinderella Loyola of Chicago and Sister Jean, but instead with an intense debate blowing up over President Donald Trump’s selection of former UN ambassador John Bolton to succeed H.R. McMaster as national security advisor.

The loquacious and quotable Bolton has been a frequent commentator and critic of the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal on Fox News and other media outlets and now finds himself in a key policy position to act on those beliefs.

Predictably the response from the Iran lobby was swift, vicious and stupefying. Leading the anti-Bolton charge was the National Iranian American Council, once a ley architect of Iranian appeasement and now finding itself virtually alone on an ever-shrinking game of foreign policy “Survivor” as it allies leave the scene to a newly muscular and empowered Trump administration.

Trita Parsi, NIAC president, issued a blistering statement condemning Bolton and blaming for everything short of triggering the Apocalypse.

“Bolton is an unhinged advocate for waging World War III. He has explicitly called for bombing Iran for the past ten years and has suggested the U.S. engage in nuclear first strikes in North Korea. Bolton’s first order of business will be to convince Trump to exit the Iran nuclear deal and lay the groundwork for the war he has urged over the past decade. Additionally, he has has called for ending all visas for Iranians, shipping bunker busting weapons to Israel, and supporting the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization and other separatist groups inside of Iran. The Iranian-American community and our pro-peace, pro-human rights allies will organize to stop Bolton’s plans from becoming a reality,” Parsi said.

In one paragraph, Parsi has managed to regurgitate virtually every false and misleading key message point the NIAC has articulated over the past five years.

  • Parsi calls Bolton “an unhinged advocate for waging World War III,” but neglects to parse any blame on an Iranian regime that has launched three wars on its own in Iraq, Syria and Yemen in the past three years;
  • Bolton has never called for nuking North Korea or Iran, but he has called for serious discussion about strike first policy options should Iran or North Korea move forward in developing nuclear capable ballistic missiles; a position virtually all Republican and Democratic congressional representatives have supported;
  • Bolton’s urging of the exiting the Iran nuclear deal is not a prelude to war—unless the mullahs in Tehran decide first—but rather a recognition that the deal did little to stymie Iranian extremism, halt terrorism or even delay Iran’s ability to lob nuclear weapons on missiles thousands of miles;
  • Parsi again takes a shot at one of the leading Iranian dissident groups in the MEK, using the “terrorist” label that has already been discredited. It’s also no coincidence Parsi refers to Iranian dissident and democracy groups as “separatist” groups refusing to acknowledge the widespread dissent and protests by ordinary Iranians sweeping across the country.

Parsi’s statement goes on to attack Bolton’s support of Iranian dissident groups as emblematic of war mongering, but Parsi doesn’t recognize the vast coalition of humanitarian, political, ethnic, religious and gender groups opposed to the Iranian regime including Amnesty International, members of the Bah’ai faith and virtually all Iranian women.

His focus solely on the MEK indicates the Iran lobby’s fears of recognizing the broad and deep resentment of the mullahs, especially the ever-unpopular rule of Hassan Rouhani.

Parsi’s hope that somehow slinging the MEK name around might somehow diminish Bolton’s chances for confirmation is a slim one since the MEK and the umbrella group of Iranian dissident and human rights groups it is part of, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, has become an important source of information smuggled out of Iran about protests and the activities of the regime such as the secret development of its nuclear program in the first place.

Intelligence services in the EU and the U.S. have commended the quality and veracity of information supplied by these dissident groups, often at great risk to sympathizers in Iran who smuggle out photos and videos, including the most recent Iran protests across the nation.

Parsi and the rest of the Iran lobby know the end is here for their policy of appeasing the regime. Pompeo and Bolton are only vocal supporters of ending it. The real architect of getting tougher with Iran is the president himself who used the Iran nuclear deal as a potent message point with American voters on the campaign trail; most of whom were disillusioned in the wake of massive terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists inspired by Iran’s war in Syria.

For most Americans, the memories of Orlando, San Bernardino and Paris and Nice mingle with vivid images of handguns, trucks, bombs, knives and virtually any other tool grasped by terrorists to kill innocent people.

Parsi is never one for understatement so his statements aimed at Bolton are only natural, but the only unhinged one making crazy statements is Parsi which diminishes his authority and reasonableness in the eyes of many news organizations.

That of course hasn’t stopped the NIAC as it made Parsi and fellow staffers Reza Marashi and Jamal Abdi available to news media to talk Bolton. Considering the only news outlets that seem to have picked their comments are Russian and Iranian publications and an occasional Iranian regime advocate blog like Lobelog, we are heartened to see that fewer and fewer journalists frankly care what NIAC has to say.

The problem with the histrionics of Parsi and his Iran lobby colleagues is that when you consistently scream at the top of your lungs and sound deranged, no one ends up listening to you.

In fact, the much-vaunted echo chamber of the Iran lobby only seems to echo with their own voices and no one else is listening.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

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Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman, heir to the Saudi throne, kicked off a two-week tour of the U.S. with a meeting with President Donald Trump which highlighted the close relationship the administration shares with the Kingdom that began with the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia shortly after his inauguration.

Part of that relationship is centered on restoring stability in a Middle East riven asunder by the Iranian regime which has plunged three countries into war in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The latter of most concern to the Kingdom because of its common border and a hail of Iranian-made rockets and mortar shells falling on it.

The Saudi Crown Prince has moved quickly not only to take the reins of foreign and defense policy for the Kingdom, but also to move it into a more progressive era by instituting changes and reforms especially aimed at empowering Saudi women in culture, politics and the economy.

Changes that are anathema to the mullahs in Tehran and evidence of the growing divide between the two countries.

Of course, that has not stopped the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, from consistently attacking Saudi Arabia and attempting to portray it as a bloodthirsty state sponsor of terrorism.

Ironically, while Iran occupies almost permanent status on the U.S. State Department’s target list of state sponsors of terrorism, Saudi Arabia has moved quickly to identify and eradicate radicalized Islamic elements in its society, especially those adhering to the Iranian regime’s principles.

But that hasn’t stopped the NIAC’s Trita Parsi from issuing a statement attacking the Crown Prince because of his public statements warning of spreading Iranian extremism.

“While the Saudi effort to drag the US into war with Iran was blocked by previous administrations, Riyadh now appears to be pushing an open door,” Parsi said. “The tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran are destabilizing the Middle East and necessitate strong diplomatic efforts to defuse the conflict before it escalates into a wider war.”

Parsi and the rest of the Iran lobby have consistently banged the war drum in order to stoke fears, but the source of that tension has always been blamed on someone else rather than the mullahs in Tehran; be it the U.S. or Saudi Arabia or Israel, according to Parsi someone else is always to blame.

In Parsi’s worldview, the Iranian regime’s sponsorship of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah is not to blame. Nor has been the arming of Shiite militias in Iraq or Houthi rebels in Yemen. Neither can blame be laid at the launching pads of dozens of ballistic missiles fired off by the Iranians, nor their leaders’ threats to blast its enemies out of existence.

In his statement, Parsi also takes a stab at the president and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has developed a close relationship with bin Salman.

Parsi claims that the Saudis are eager to start a war against Iran using American service personnel. It’s frankly an absurd claim since no one, not President Trump, nor the Saudi royal family, have ever mentioned a war or the prospect of one. In fact, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have started and participated in nearly a dozen peace initiatives aimed at defusing the conflicts Iran has started included several peace conferences aimed at halting the bloodshed in Syria and in each case, Iranian regime’s reluctance to accept any terms that diminish its military or political advantage have torpedoed all of these talks.

In fact, rather than turning to the U.S. for help, the Saudis have taken it upon themselves to fight against Iranian-backed Houthi incursions along their border, as well as use their own navy to intercept Iranian fishing vessels trying to smuggle fresh arms into Yemen.

The portrayal of the Saudi position towards Iran by the Iran lobby is just more evidence of the effort to throw smokescreens up at any effort to affix blame on the Iranian regime for the chaos enveloping the Middle East.

It is also a recognition that the new world order in a post-Obama world has changed radically.

No longer is the U.S. content to try and appease the mullahs in Tehran. No longer will the U.S. bind itself to a flawed nuclear deal that did not attempt to rein in the regime’s ballistic missile program or fundamentally abusive human rights record.

Most importantly, the Iranian people themselves are expressing their own frustrations and desire for change in their oppressive government as protests have swept the country before being ruthlessly put down; crackdowns that drew almost not a whisper of protest by NIAC ironically.

The Saudis know the Iranian playbook because they have seen it put into effect in Lebanon and Syria where Hezbollah was built into a powerful military proxy that eventually served to take over both countries.

All of which rightly worries the Saudis in Yemen as Iran looks to create another Hezbollah with the Houthis it backs. A viewpoint shared by Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

He told CNN that Iran wants to destabilize Saudi Arabia, and that it poses a threat to the entire region and international security.

“Here’s what happening in Yemen: (Iran is trying to create) another Hezbollah in Yemen, which will not just threaten our security and Yemeni security, but also regional security.”

“We’ve been focusing on the weapon of mass destruction, the WMD. What we should really be focusing on is the MD, the mass destruction that Iran is committing in the region.”

He stressed to CNN that Tehran was stirring unrest and said the so-called “nuclear deal” between Iran and Western powers needs “to be fixed.”

It is ironic that while Saudi Arabia is moving to open up the Kingdom to benefit women and seek diplomatic overtures to contain the Iranian regime, the regime keeps oppressing its citizens and uses terror and military force to achieve its aims.

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

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NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

Apple reportedly shutdown access to its App Store to users and developers in Iran last week raising intense speculation as to why the tech giant restricted access, although Iranian users reported being able to access the store by the weekend.

Speculation ranged from potential U.S. sanctions looming on the horizon to the announcement of CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace Rex Tillerson as U.S. Secretary of State.

The Iran lobby weighed in predictably as well, with the National Iranian American Council leading the blame game with a statement it issued in which it again displayed the irony of decrying Apple’s move, while at the same time never criticizing the Iranian regime’s weaponization of those some smartphone apps to identify and arrest potential dissidents and protestors.

Earlier this month, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the largest Iranian dissident group in the world, issued a report detailing how the Iranian regime has launched a sophisticated cybercampaign to deploy apps on Apple and Google’s app stores that mimic more well-known apps and allows the regime’s security services to monitor the activities of Iranian citizens, as well as export malware cyberattacks against U.S. citizens.

Starting with the massive election protests of 2009, smartphones have played a vital role in organizing opposition to the Iranian regime and helped share video, photos and audio of the brutality of the regime as it has arrested, beaten and even killed protestors over the years; culminating to the most recent protests that have rocked Iran over the past two months.

These include protests over poor economic conditions, rampant corruption within the regime and even over morality codes by women who have abandoned head scarves and posted photos on social media in a form of soft power protest that has landed many of them in prison.

Nearly 48 million Iranians have smartphones with about 70 percent of them having access to the internet, making Iran one of the more connected nations in the Middle East, but the regime has struggled to restrict Internet access and have tried to disrupt the usage of popular messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp by protestors.

The move by Apple, while not publicly commented on by the company yet, highlights the precarious nature of technology in Iran. The regime uses it as a prolific tool for cyberwarfare while the rest of the free world views it as an engine of change, commerce and communication.

The NIAC highlights this in its statement saying:

“Access to communication technology is important for both humanitarian as well as U.S. strategic interests, which is why exemptions for Internet communication tools were put in place under the previous Administration. Allowing these exemptions to fall by the wayside helps no one except those who seek to keep the Iranian people silent.”

It’s a laudable position to take, but hollow and empty when we consider how the NIAC has never criticized the Iranian regime for its manipulation of technology to restrict protests.

“We have already been in communication with the U.S. government about decisions late last year by Apple and Google to block Iranian developers from hosting applications on their platforms. We have emphasized the need to broaden exemptions to reverse such decisions and will redouble our efforts to address these new challenges,” the NIAC statement said.

It’s a twisted piece of logic by the NIAC since the NCRI report, as well as similar reports by national intelligence agencies, have long documented the Iranian regime’s use of Iranian programmers to create apps that have malware embedded in them and efforts to crack the encryption of apps such as WhatsApp.

But this exclusion of Iran from the Apple App Store is not the first time. Back in August of 2017, Apple removed all apps created by Iranian developers from its App Store as a result of U.S. economic sanctions.

Iran’s own Telecommunication Minister said the ban of Iranian-made apps would probably have a limited effect on the country’s economy and tech industry, as the US company had only an 11 percent market share in the country, according to a report from the New York Times, but the move was bound to hurt the regime’s intelligence gathering efforts.

Far from hurting Iranians, as the NIAC suggests, restricting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps access to these app stores benefits those Iranians who rely on clandestine technology to spread, share and collaborate in their dissent.

This is why the NIAC continually misses the mark in its position papers and statements because of its slavish devotion to the Iranian regime and an uncompromising reluctance to ever criticize Tehran on anything.

The NIAC should be focused on the cyberwall the regime operates allowing it to monitor virtually all Internet activities of the Iranian people. The NIAC should be calling on the regime to end its use of bogus social media apps to monitor its own people. The NIAC should call for the release from Iranian jails any Iranian being detained for posting a video or photo that violated the regime’s draconian morality codes.

The NIAC should speak on behalf of freedom and democracy and not try to support a regime that is slowly dying from the corruption that is rotting the core of the Iranian government.

That rot has become so apparent to the Iranian people that they have been motivated to post online their own protests and Apple and other Western companies should be encouraged to do more to obstruct the Iranian regime and aid these people in their quest for freedom and democracy.

Michael Tomlinson

US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

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US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

US Pressure on Iran Missile Program Pushing Europe to Act

The Trump administration has been applying diplomatic pressure on the Iranian regime over its ballistic missile program and support for terrorism and has consistently raised the specter of invalidating the Iran nuclear deal by certifying the regime as being out of compliance with its provisions.

For those efforts, the administration has been roundly and harshly criticized by the Iranian regime’s allies, especially within the Iran lobby by groups such as the National Iranian American Council and individuals such as Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former regime nuclear official who now masquerade’s as an academic at Princeton University.

The vitriol being thrown at the administration over this new pressure on Iran has only been matched by the depth and breadth of misinformation and fake news being pumped out by the Iran lobby.

What is becoming clear though is that the central issue at the heart of the Trump administration’s complaints—that Iran’s ballistic missile program posed a serious international threat and its support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah was destabilizing the Middle East—have finally gotten the attention of European leaders and serious traction throughout European capitals.

During the Obama administration’s negotiation of the nuclear deal, little emphasis was placed on Iran’s missile program, nor its abysmal human rights record or support for terrorism. That lack of negotiating prowess essentially left the Iranian regime off the hook and gave it carte blanche to rapidly build its missile program and gain strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Yemen through proxy wars.

Many EU leaders that had lauded the nuclear deal as paving the war towards Iranian moderation have been left in more precarious political situations as nearly four million Syrian refugees flooded into Europe in the greatest refugee crisis since World War II and cities such as Paris, Berlin and Brussels were rocked by terrorist acts inspired by the Islamic extremism espoused by the mullahs in Tehran.

That has forced many of them to make a decision to head off a potential move by the Trump administration to kill the nuclear deal and that is to apply more pressure on the Iranian regime on these issues they once considered unimportant.

One example has been French president Emmanuel Macron, who has taken a more public and aggressive stance towards Iranian military actions and human rights.

Macron told the Iranian regime’s Hassan Rouhani in a telephone call this weekend of his support for the nuclear accord and his concerns over Iran’s other activities according to the Financial Times.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, French foreign minister, is due to hold further talks in Tehran on Monday as the clock ticks towards a May deadline set by the US president for European countries to “fix” the nuclear agreement.

The EU and the bloc’s three signatories to the deal — France, Germany and Britain — are urgently trying to craft a solution that will placate the Trump administration’s without destroying an accord they argue is working.

Macron also asked for “clear responses” from Iran over “problems” outside the deal relating to its ballistic missile program and its destabilizing role in the region, particularly in Lebanon.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, will visit Tehran this week and call upon the regime to address the West’s misgivings about its ballistic missile program and Middle East military activities, according to Reuters.

The growing threats posed by the Iranian regime are now being scrutinized more openly as evidenced by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal authored by Jose Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, and Stephen Harper, former prime minister of Canada, in which they both urged Europe to act more decisively in containing Iranian expansionism.

“Despite Tehran’s quest for regional control, popular protests in December and January showed that most of the nation’s citizens don’t share their leaders’ designs. The regime’s destabilizing actions have also triggered resistance from Saudi Arabia and other regional powers. Iran’s own citizens and neighbors are convinced of Tehran’s malice, and all concerned nations should heed their warning,” Aznar and Harper wrote.

“Thankfully, the U.S. has demonstrated its ability to rally its Middle Eastern partners in stabilizing the region. Iranian theocracy appeals mainly to a few neighboring Shiite Islamic factions, and Iran’s long-term conflicts with other sects have made many states eager to cooperate in restraining its influence. Numerous allies can be mobilized in the struggle against Iran, from the Kurds and tribal elements to many Sunni Arabs and Shiite forces not co-opted by Tehran. These factions must collaborate to contain Iran’s hegemonic ambitions,” they added.

They go on to warn that “if left unchecked, Iran’s aggression will ultimately threaten Europe and North America as well. All should urgently work together to counter this threat to global security.”

Their warnings should be heeded by the EU since the evidence has been so overwhelmingly against the claims of the Iran lobby and the Iranian regime.

The most serious threat facing the U.S. and in its allies is the high probability that Iran is quickly building permanent military bases in Syria and planning to move ballistic missiles there; placing most of Europe within range and providing almost no warning time for regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Israel any advance warning to detect, let alone shoot down, any Iranian missiles.

President Trump understood the geopolitical ramifications of the Iran nuclear deal better than anyone and now sees its potential certification as battering ram he can use to drive home the point of the threat Iranian regime missiles and its military poses to Europe.

It remains to be seen how many other European nations heed the wake up that French president Macron seems to be trumpeting more urgently now, but we hope they all take action soon.

Michael Tomlinson

Amnesty International Blasts Treatment of Protesting Women in Iran

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Amnesty International Blasts Treatment of Protesting Women in Iran

Amnesty International Blasts Treatment of Protesting Women in Iran

The wave of people’s protests that swept across Iran beginning the end of 2017 and through the start of 2018 have been marked by demands for essentials such as job creation, food and water, as well as increased freedoms for a long-suffering and oppressed people.

Within the fabric of all those protests was the noteworthy and remarkable scene played out in cities and villages throughout Iran as women uncovered their heads by removing the proscribed hijab headscarves in silent protests.

Those iconic protesters were met with typical violence and brutality by the Iranian regime and human rights organization Amnesty International blasted the regime for its cruel treatment of women protestors to stifle dissent.

Amnesty International took note of a warning coming from Iranian regime police in a statement put out by the Mehr news agency warning that women could be jailed for up to a decade for joining any and all protests against veiling.

Amnesty International called it “an alarming escalation of the authorities’ violent crackdown on women’s rights.”

The group noted that more than 35 women have so far been violently attacked and arrested in Tehran alone since December 2017 for participating in peaceful protests. On the day that the regime issued its warning, one of the protestors, Narges Hosseini, was put on trial before an Ershad (Moral Guidance) court in Tehran on charges that included this new charge.

“This is a deeply retrograde move by the Iranian authorities in their ongoing persecution of women who dare to speak out against compulsory veiling. It places many women at serious and immediate risk of unjust imprisonment while sending a chilling message to others to keep quiet while their rights are being violated,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

The history of violence against women runs deep and long in the Islamic state where the mullahs issue hardline edicts designed to suppress women in areas such as domestic affairs, the job market, education and popular culture.

Restrictions placed on Iranian women have included bans on riding bicycles, the inability to gain divorces from abuses husbands, being forced into child marriages with much older male relatives and having scores of careers barred for women.

But the women thrown into Iranian prisons have endured some of the worst treatment.

At least one other woman, Shaparak Shajarizadeh, has been informed that she faces the charge of “inciting corruption and prostitution.” She is currently held in solitary confinement in Shahr-e Rey prison in Varamin, near Tehran. Her lawyer has said that she was subjected to torture or other ill-treatment, including beatings, in Vozara detention centre in Tehran following her arrest and was also injected with an unidentified substance several times by force and against her will.

The statement issued by regime police coincides with a recent upturn in police brutality against women’s solo protests – which see women take off their headscarves in busy public places and silently wave them on the end of a stick while standing on top of raised structures, according to Amnesty International.

Last Thursday, February 22, a video went viral on Persian social media showing a police officer recklessly pushing Maryam Shariatmadari off a concrete structure on which she was standing without a headscarf. Her friends have reported that the fall resulted in injuries requiring surgery. She is also held in Shahr-e Rey prison, without access to adequate medical care.

In recent weeks, the Iranian authorities, including the Chief Prosecutor of Iran and the Head of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, have insulted women protestors by calling them “morons,” “infantile,” “deceived,” “perverted” and “wicked” and accused them of association with “foreign enemies.”

Iran’s judiciary spokesman Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i has said that the women protesting against compulsory veiling are “acting under the influence of “synthetic drugs” or receiving instruction from “organized criminal groups.”

“The Iranian authorities must hold law enforcement officials to account for human rights violations, including torture and other ill-treatment and refrain from making any statements that incite further violence and abuse,” Mughrabi said.

While Amnesty International has focused on this latest round of abuses directed towards Iranian women, the latest episodes come as no surprise to seasoned Iranian dissident groups who have long championed the suffering of Iranian women by the regime, such as Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the head of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the largest Iranian dissident group.

By comparison, key Iran lobby members such as the National Iranian American Council, which is supposed to be an advocate for the human rights of Iranian-Americans, has stayed deafeningly silent on these latest abuses, as well as on the abuses suffered by dual-national women taken prisoner and held such as British social worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

The pattern of abuse and intimidation, especially within regime-controlled media, encourages violence against women on the streets and makes liberal use of the morality police and paramilitaries to assault and beat these women.

Amnesty International noted that the regime’s policies stretch far back and have been a hallmark of the theocratic rule of the mullahs in Tehran in meeting any dissent with violence.

While these brave women continue their often lonely quests for equality and rights, it should be noted that the Iran lobby and NIAC are not supporters of theirs, nor defenders of those basic human rights.

Laura Carnahan

As Iran Targets Environmentalists, Iran Lobby Finally Criticizes Regime

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As Iran Targets Environmentalists, Iran Lobby Finally Criticizes Regime

As Iran Targets Environmentalists, Iran Lobby Finally Criticizes Regime

Kavous Seyed Emami, an Canadian-Iranian sociology professor, joined the ignominious list of prisoners to have died in the Iranian regime’s notorious Evin prison, including being the second Canadian citizen to die in Iranian custody.

The regime claimed that Seyed Emami hanged himself in his prison cell although virtually none of his friends, family or the Canadian government believe it.

Seyed Emami was co-founder of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, a nongovernmental organization fighting for the protection of indigenous animals, including the rare Asiatic cheetah, of which there are believed to be only about 50 remaining in Iran.

He had been arrested two weeks earlier along with seven other environmental activists who were accused of using their work as a cover for passing intelligence to foreigners, regime officials said.

The public prosecutor of Tehran, Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, said that Seyed Emami killed himself after confessing to wrongdoing, but did not offer details according to the Los Angeles Times.

“Since he knew that many confessions had been made against him, and he himself had made confessions, he has unfortunately committed suicide in prison,” Dolatabadi was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the national security committee in Iran’s parliament, said he watched closed-circuit video showing Seyed Emami changing clothes in his prison cell. That indicated he was “getting ready to commit suicide,” the lawmaker was quoted as saying by Mizan, the mouthpiece of Iran’s judiciary.

Several other people with ties to the foundation were also arrested, according to reports in Iranian media. Among them were Hooman Jokar, vice chairman of the board and head of the cheetah desk at Iran’s Department of the Environment, and Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian American businessman and board member.

The pattern of arrests follows similar arrests of dual-national citizens under the administration of Hassan Rouhani and has become a favored tool of international blackmail and negotiating leverage for the mullahs.

In the case of Seyed Emami and his colleagues, the shift to targeting environmental activists results from the larger problems the regime faces as its gross mismanagement of Iran’s natural resources has turned much of the once-fertile countryside into a parched wasteland.

Historic lakes have dried up and farmland has turned to dust bowls, while entire villages and provinces lack water and food prices have skyrocketed; all of which has contributed to the spark of rebellion and protests sweeping across Iran.

The regime’s policies have bordered on criminally negligent with an excessive building of dams that have disrupted natural watersheds and diverted dwindling water supplies from recharging wetlands and aquifers to urban centers and major cities.

Things have gotten so bad, that much of Iran’s countryside joined in national protests sparked by the lack of food and water, representing then gravest threat to the ruling mullahs since the Islamic revolution.

For the Canadian government, the list of its citizens who have been imprisoned, raped, tortured and murdered grows ever longer and has stirred some Canadian leaders to call out the Iranian regime.

The Globe and Mail editorialized the fates of Canadians in Iran:

“Zahra Kazemi. Hamid Ghassemi-Shall. Homa Hoodfar. And now Kavous Seyed-Emami. All four are Iranian-Canadians who were imprisoned and maltreated by the Iran government after their arrests on dubious charges of espionage,” the newspaper said.

“But Mr. Seyed-Emami died on Friday in Tehran’s Evin Prison, the same chamber of horrors in which Ms. Kazemi was raped, tortured and murdered in 2003.”

“There is a hollow familiarity to Mr. Seyed-Emami’s death, and to Iranian officials’ claims as to how it came about. They say he committed suicide, but they are so unsure of their ability to defend that claim that they told Mr. Seyed-Emami’s family that there would be no autopsy, and ordered them to quickly bury his body without ceremony on Tuesday,” the newspaper noted.

The newspaper went on to cite other instances of brutality visited on other dual nationals and warned that Ottawa should press for answers and hold the regime accountable for the deaths.

The blatant nature of Seyed Emami’s death and the link to silencing environmental critics, just as the regime has targeted members of the Iranian resistance movement, journalists, students, artists and religious and ethnic minorities in such spectacularly public ways that even the Iran lobby cannot help but criticize the regime without looking like pathetic shills for the mullahs.

Chief among the Iran lobbyists forced to say something is the National Iranian American Council which released a statement on its website on Seyed Emami’s death:

“The death of Iranian-Canadian Kavous Seyed-Emami while in custody at Evin Prison on vague charges of espionage is deeply concerning. NIAC calls on Iranian authorities to allow an independent autopsy and uninhibited investigation into the circumstances that led to Seyed-Emami’s death in order to determine whether his human rights were violated and to hold accountable those responsible.

“Iran is facing major and serious environmental issues which have worried the population at large, and the government needs to take those concerns seriously. Instead, given the treatment of Seyed-Emami and other environmental activists by Iranian authorities, it appears that Iran’s government is intent on securitizing the environmental sphere like so many other parts of Iranian society,” the NIAC said.

It is worth noting that an autopsy is unlikely since the regime buried the body quickly and has no plans on resurrecting it for scrutiny, which makes the NIAC statement a nice PR stunt, but little more effective than a polite cough.

Far more effective than the toothless NIAC statement was the joint letter written by four leading Iranian academic societies to Rouhani demanding answers to Seyed Emami’s death.

The academics’ letter was published on Sunday by four leading associations in areas of political science, sociology, peace studies and cultural studies, which include professors from Iran’s top universities.

They wrote: “Our minimum expectation is that you take immediate and effective action to seriously investigate the case … and make the institutions involved in this painful loss accountable.”

As Iran’s leading scientists join with the working poor in condemning the regime’s actions, the scope and depth of dissatisfaction within all levels of Iranian is becoming increasingly apparent.

We can only hope it spreads and strengthens in the face of more reactionary actions by the mullahs.

 

Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protesters

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Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protestors

Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protestors

The McGill International Review (MIR), an online publication of the International Relations Students’ Association of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, seems to be one of the few publications reading statements by Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council.

In a story trying to characterize the chances of Iran’s latest protest movement’s long-term success, MIR lifted Parsi’s January 1, 2018 description of the protestors as appearing “much more sporadic, with no clear leadership and with objectives that have shifted over the course of the past four days.”

MIR took Parsi’s bait in trying to compare and contrast these current protests against the more widely publicized 2009 Green Movement protests that were crushed by the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

“This contrasts the 2009 protests which were mostly limited to Tehran. The new wave of protests are also nowhere near as large as the 2009 protests which numbered in the millions, whereas the recent protests have been estimated to be in the tens of thousands,” wrote Ethan Fogel in MIR.

The effort to compare and contrast these two sets of protests is another tactic and messaging point from the Iran lobby to diminish the current protests as being less significant and largely irrelevant.

What is especially disappointing in the MIR article is to take what Parsi says at face value without seriously questioning why he is taking these positions in the first place and the veracity of his assumptions.

In his January 1st statement, Parsi claims to have gotten an overview of these new protests by speaking to “witnesses.”

“According to witnesses I’ve spoken to, the protests were initiated in Mashhad by religious hardliners who sought to take advantage of the population’s legitimate economic grievances to score points against the Hassan Rouhani government, which they consider too moderate,” Parsi writes.

Let’s first ask the most basic question: What “witnesses” was Parsi talking to? Considering his loyal and faithful service in carrying the mullahs’ water, we sincerely doubt he’s talking to any genuinely aggrieved Iranians and because of his close government contacts with the regime, it is more likely his witnesses are actually regime officials.

Since he tries to frame the episode as an effort by “hardliners” to embarrass “moderate” Hassan Rouhani, he simply rehashes one of his tried and true message points from the nuclear agreement debate, which is that there exists a political death-struggle in Iran between moderate and hardline political forces fighting for the future of Iran.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the regime since 2009 has ably demonstrated that it acts with one voice and one truth: It remains solidly in lockstep in preserving the extremist state and the mullahs control over the levers of government, the economy and military.

The only disputes that have arisen within the regime has been fighting over the dividing of the spoils resulting from the lifting of economic sanctions as the Revolutionary Guards and Quds Forces fought for and got the lion share of wealth in starting wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and funding terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

Secondly, we have to ask the question, has Parsi ever really talked to a genuine Iranian dissident? Has he even traveled to Iran and gone to the notorious Evin prison to speak to any one of the thousands of Iranian political prisoners languishing and undergoing brutal torture there?

The answer is a glaring and obvious “no” and that places Parsi’s comments squarely in the suspect column since its hard to take anything Parsi says about the dissident movement in Iran with any confidence.

Parsi has tried to build his career from denouncing the Iranian resistance movement, whether it came from established groups such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran or Iranian youth protesting the regime with selfies on Instagram.

Parsi reminds readers that Rouhani won re-election with 57% of the vote in a massive turnout (his characterization), but neglects to mention how the regime disqualified virtually every competitor from the ballot.

There is irony in Parsi’s January 1st statement where he notes Rouhani’s restraint in calling in troops to suppress the protests. Unfortunately, we now know that indeed regime forces were called in to beat, arrest and even kill scores of protestors in a violent repeat of 2009.

Parsi is proven wrong again in his analysis by unfolding events, which makes MIR’s use of his quotes even odder.

It doesn’t take much effort to research the veracity of Parsi’s history and background and recognize his deep-state ties to the Iranian regime. Those ties instantly make him suspect as an objective news source, which MIR would be wise to avoid using again.

It is disappointing to see the MIR article buy into the perceived hardline vs. reformer fight that Parsi and the Iran lobby has tried to foster since that only helps keep some international support focused on Rouhani as a leader of the “reform” movement and continue to buy the regime time.

While more and more mainstream media outlets are avoiding using Parsi as a quoted source in their stories, that same skepticism has so far not reached Montreal’s halls of higher education.

We hope that changes soon.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

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Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

The Iran Lobby must be sweating the protests in Iran and their impact on Trump administration’s views on whether to kill the Iran nuclear deal. In many ways one of the key things holding the Trump administration back from killing the deal outright is how to manage the aftermath with mullahs desperate to hold onto power who may choose bloody violence to instead of diplomacy or giving up their hold on power.

Deciding to kill the nuclear deal is not a knee-jerk reaction, nor should it be done without an end game in place to help manage some sort of peaceful regime change and transition from theological dictatorship to peaceful democracy.

The mullahs have already evidenced their willingness to use brute force and mass murder to hold onto power. They demonstrated it after the disputed 2009 elections and they showed it again this year with the populist movement that grew from deep dissatisfaction among ordinary Iranians over their impoverished state of living.

Now the mullahs are faced with threats on multiple fronts, not the least of which is a new U.S. administration largely skeptical of them and their false promises.

What have the mullahs done?

They’ve put the Iran lobby into overdrive to defend the nuclear deal and throw as much mud as possible at President Donald Trump.

Leading the charge has been Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, but he has been joined by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian regime nuclear official who relocated to a position at Princeton University refashioning himself as a Middle East security expert/

While Parsi has been busy shooting off editorials at a rapid clip, Mousavian joined him in the literary parade with a recent commentary in Reuters.

Like Parsi, Mousavian trots out the usual defense of the nuclear deal as being set on a foundation of the “highest standards on nuclear transparency and inspections ever negotiated,” but there is a yawning chasm between reality and fantasy.

He also echoes almost verbatim Parsi’s key messages on the deal’s terms being only temporary after which Iran would fall under safeguards from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

He of course neglects to mention that the IAEA failed to detect Iran’s clandestine nuclear development program in the first place. Similarly, he fails to mention how the IAEA failed to halt North Korea’s march to nuclearization and that both Iran and North Korea could and did opt to throw inspectors out and disable cameras and monitoring equipment.

What is to stop Iran from doing the same thing now? Harsh language? The reality is nothing.

Mousavian also criticizes the Trump administration’s effort to link Iran’s ballistic missile program to nuclear sanctions as well as question whether or not the mullahs should ever possess the right to develop nuclear technology.

While Mousavian claims Iran has a “sovereign right” to do so, he ignores the broader and more strategic question being raised by President Trump: Why does a violent, religiously-governed dictatorship ever need a nuclear program?

Iran has always claimed its nuclear program is peaceful and designed for energy development, but those claims ring hollow given the economic conditions in Iran and the global energy map in which nuclear power is rapidly becoming obsolete. In the U.S. alone, the nuclear power industry has been decimated by renewable energy sources, the low cost and abundance of natural gas and the conversion of industries to solar and off-peak battery storage have made it irrelevant.

More importantly, the maniacal nature of the mullahs’ governance makes development of nuclear power an idiotic choice for any nation to allow. Mousavian claims peaceful intent but the true intentions of the regime have been clearly demonstrated and that is to develop a militarized nuclear capability so it can dominate its neighbors, especially chief rival Saudi Arabia.

Mousavian grasps at straws when he claims the killing of the nuclear deal will only spread global distrust of the U.S. and make any deal with North Korea impossible.

With all due respect, that is an idiotic statement to make. No one on the planet sincerely believes that North Korea’s meglo-maniacal leader has any intention of real negotiations with the West over his nuclear toy kit.

The Iranian regime has worked diligently to undermine the nuclear deal right from the start by eradicating all traces of its nuclear work at suspected sites before inspection, restricting access by inspectors from any military sites, only allowing collections of soil samples by regime officials and not dismantling centrifuges that refine uranium.

More worrisome, Mousavian never takes up the issue of the Islamic dictatorship itself. It is cruel, barbaric and actively engaged in supporting terrorism and involved in wars and insurgencies in three countries.

If a government acts in a way that is openly hostile to its neighbors and places little value on the lives of its own people—even murdering them on a mass scale for political disobedience—why on earth would we ever allow them to possess a capability to develop a weapon of mass destruction?

The greatest historical lesson parallel to Iran is Nazi Germany. If Hitler’s Germany raced to develop a nuclear capability prior to World War II, we might all be living an episode of the “Man in the High Castle” on Netflix given how the West tried to appease Hitler by giving away Czechoslovakia, Austria and the Sudetenland.

Following the same approach to Iran and its bloodthirsty leaders such as Ali Khamenei is the same kind of lunacy that plunged the world into a global war that lasted six years.

Mousavian clinches the irony trophy when he writes:

“Rather than challenging his predecessor’s legacy Trump should endeavor to use it as a model to bolster multilateral diplomacy and resolve crises in places such as Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. Today more than ever, the world needs a balanced and rational White House to promote peace and security rather than to flout international norms.”

Mousavian mentions conflicts that Iran is directly responsible for starting and expanding. It is not the White House that needs to be balanced and rational, but rather it is Tehran that needs to be dragged kicking a screaming into normalcy and peace.

Michael Tomlinson

Trita Parsi’s Myths

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Five Myths About Trita Parsi

Five Myths About Trita Parsi

Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council, has been hard at work pushing the mythology of how the U.S. and President Donald Trump are really aiming for all-out war with the Iranian regime.

His beating of the war drum is nothing new. He’s been doing it ever since the administration of President George W. Bush and while he found a receptive audience during President Barack Obama’s tenure, he’s finding it tough sledding these days.

A prime example of his fake news narrative is in an editorial he wrote in the Washington Post in which he outlines “five myths about Iran.”

It’s notable that he does admit—finally—that the Iranian regime has been demonizing the U.S. for the past four decades with “Great Satan” characterizations and other false claims, but that is just cheap throwaways to help in aiding his perception of being a “moderate” when in fact all he cares about seems to be preserving a badly flawed nuclear deal.

Of course his top myth is about that same nuclear deal. Parsi posits that it’s a myth that the deal only delays the inevitable building of a nuclear weapon by the mullahs.

While Parsi admits that restrictions on advanced centrifuges and other technology to make weapons-grade uranium expires after only 10-15 years, he argues that inspections are enough to tamp down the threat.

The real myth from Parsi is that inspections alone are enough to stop the mullahs. He neglects to mention how prior inspections regimens failed to halt Iran from beginning a nuclear program in the first place and in the case of North Korea, inspections failed spectacularly.

Parsi’s second myth is that killing the Iran nuclear deal would not help the protestors in Iran. He argues that killing it would actually hurt protestors striving to break free from the rule of the mullahs. The reality is that Parsi’s “do-nothing to rock the boat” advice goes all the way back to the fierce election protests in 2009 in which the Obama administration stood on the sidelines as regime police mercilessly killed scores of protestors.

The reality is that killing the deal would cement for Iranians that the nuclear deal was a complete failure and that Hassan Rouhani basically lied to the Iranian people when he promised reforms and economic improvements with its passage. In fact, the billions Iran received in sanctions relief went to fund war efforts and line the pockets of the ruling mullahs and Iranians know it and they are pissed.

Parsi’s silly myth is that the Green Movement was a failure. He argues that it, in fact, was a success and helped usher in an era of liberalization in Iran. He even says that Rouhani’s election is proof of that liberalization.

If he wasn’t so serious, his claim would be hilariously funny.

Rouhani’s administration has made his predecessor’s reign look like a picnic. More Iranians have been executed under Rouhani than at any time since the Islamic revolution. Iran has been plunged into wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen and it accelerated the spread of radical Islamic terrorism across the globe. Furthermore, the Iranian people have no illusions about any reform and/or moderation within the mullah’s hierarchy. This could well be hear in the slogans of the protesters chanting: “Hardliners, Reformers, game is over”.

Some moderation.

Parsi’s last myth is that “Iranians hate Americans.” Another ridiculous idea to try and stir controversy since Parsi knows full well that Americans don’t hate Iranians and Iranians don’t hate Americans.

The conflict has always been about Iran’s mullahs and the ruling theocracy and the Revolutionary Guards they control.

The frustration of American presidents and Congress has always been embodied by people such as top mullah Ali Khamenei and the vast network he controls that does his bidding.

Parsi tries mightily to frame this debate as American leaders provoking Iran and beating a war drum with heavy-handed views aimed squarely at ordinary Iranians.

The reality is far and away nothing close to what Parsi tries to paint. The myths he cites are in fact not myths Americans have about Iran. In fact, Americans view Iran through a much more discerning and educated view.

They have had two years since the Iran nuclear to judge Iran’s mullahs on their actions; not their promises and have found them wanting.

The trail of destruction left behind by Iranian regime’s policies are proof enough. The smuggling of weapons into Yemen and the incitement of a revolution to topple a lawful government and push Saudi Arabia to the brink of war.

The wholesale slaughter of Syrians while supporting the criminal regime of Bashar al Assad and producing the largest refugee crisis since World War II.

These are just some of the actions taken by the Iranian regime that has put Parsi’s myths to rest and instead provided living proof of why his fake news is no longer finding an audience among the American people.

Laura Carnahan