Iran – Iran Lobby

Iran Starts Off Year by Banning Instagram

January 3, 2019 by admin

New Year’s Eve filled the social media airwaves around the world as millions of revelers shared pictures and videos of fireworks, champagne toasts, concerts and the inevitable cute pet pictures.

The memes, viral videos and emojis have become a global fixture as recognizable as the crystal ball dropping in Times Square.

And just as predictable, the Iranian regime kicked off 2019 by moving to ban Instagram – adding to its already considerable list of banned social media platforms – in the name of national security concerns.

The regime’s National Cyberspace Council approved steps to block the popular photo-sharing app in a move following similar crackdowns against Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Telegram with internet providers ordered to block access to these services.

Resourceful Iranians however have often been able to evade the restrictions through the use of virtual private networks which redirects to overseas internet addresses; bypassing local blocks.

The irony of the regime’s move to block Instagram comes as President Hassan Rouhani posted his own messages on his own Instagram account which has over two million followers.

Regime officials similarly use banned social media apps such as Twitter to communicate to the outside world even though ordinary Iranians may face jail time for using them. Even top mullah Ali Khamenei has an official Twitter account.

The move to block Instagram removes the last major social media account still active in Iran. Even though the regime cited “national security” concerns.

The protests swelled and were soon joined by other protests aimed at government corruption, the stagnant economy and the endless cycle of wars and terrorism plaguing the country since the mullahs opted to go all-in to support the Assad regime in Syria.

Even innocuous acts such as Iranian women riding bicycles in open defiance of the mullahs’ edicts became fodder for Instagram stories and a constant sore spot for the regime.

The regime had previously tried targeting individual Iranians with high-profile Instagram followings.

The regime TV special showed them all tearfully repenting their actions in what can only be deduced as coerced confessions.

Apparently, those strong-arm tactics didn’t work, which points up a growing problem the mullahs are having which is the widening age gap in Iranian society and the technological savvy of Iran’s young people.

Even as Twitter has been banned, it’s use has remained at center stage recently as ongoing protests over a bus crash at Tehran’s Azad University killing 10 students have been fueled and covered on Twitter.

A video on Twitter showed students at a campus in Tehran chanting slogans and demanding the resignation of the chairman of the university’s board of trustees, Ali Akbar Velayati, an aide to supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Social media had been utilized by Iranians and dissident groups to convey images and videos of protests and crackdowns within Iran, which explains the most recent efforts to expunge social media, another repressive measure to prevent the flow of information from Iran.

More than half of Iran’s 82 million people are under 35 years old with almost 40 percent under the age of 24; a staggering baby bubble that poses problems for a ruling elite well in their geriatric age.

In many ways the efforts to curb social media are likely to only fuel greater ingenuity by Iranian youth to evade the restrictions. For the Iranian regime, the knee-jerk reaction to ban social media only covers up a growing demographic disparity posing significant political problems for the mullahs.

Laura Carnahan

Iranian Diplomats Expelled from Albania in Another Murder Plot

December 21, 2018 by admin

The obsession by the Iranian regime to exterminate any dissenting Iranian opinions reached into the Balkan nation of Albania, resulting in the expulsion of two Iranian diplomats who were tied into an alleged plot to attack an Iranian dissident group that has long plagued the mullahs with calls for democratic reform and political freedom.

Albanian officials decided to kick out Iran’s ambassador to that country and another diplomat for “violating their diplomatic status” in another unfolding chapter in the Iranian regime’s ongoing vendetta against any Iranian dissidents.

According to reporting by The Independent, a source with knowledge of the matter said the expulsions were connected to an aborted March 2018 scheme by two alleged Iranian members of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, its foreign secret operations branch, caught planning “an explosive” attack against the base or personnel of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK.

Tirana’s move follows diplomatic rebukes of Iran by Denmark, France, and Netherlands amid allegations of using diplomatic facilities to carry out alleged terrorist operations targeting dissidents living in Europe, including the MEK and Arab exile groups.

In France, an annual gathering of the MEK and related human rights and dissident groups was being held outside Paris and was apparently targeted for a similar explosive device before being stopped by security forces in the Netherlands.

US officials on Wednesday praised the decision by the NATO country to expel the diplomats. US National Security Adviser John Bolton wrote in a Tweet that the move signaled to Iranian leaders that “their support for terrorism will not be tolerated.”

President Trump thanked Prime Minister Edi Rama in a letter for his “steadfast efforts to stand up to Iran and counter its destabilizing activities and efforts to silence dissidents around the globe,” according to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana.

Predictably Iranian regime officials denied any plot and tried to portray the expulsions as an effort by the U.S. to pressure Albania as part of its ongoing sanctions movement as a result of pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian officials even trotted out the old charge that Bolton had previously spoken at MEK events and was therefore unable to be an impartial party on the issue. A silly charge to make considering this is now the third attempt the regime has mounted in the past year to kill MEK members on foreign soil.

But close observers of Iran describe a resurgence of clandestine operations across Europe and elsewhere targeting Iranian dissident groups. Others have noted Iran’s burgeoning efforts to establish clandestine networks in the Balkans. Albania in particular has a Bektashi religious minority with ties to the Shia branch of Islam practiced as the official religion in Iran.

“What’s happening in Albania has only proved how big Tehran’s networks in the Balkans are,” Ruslan Trad, a researcher and journalist focusing on Iranian influence in the Balkans, told The Independent.

The MEK in Albania were re-located from refugee camps in Iraq after being consistently targeted by Iranian intelligence agents in a series of attacks killing scores of unarmed men and women, with the help of Iranian-controlled Iraqi Shiite militias who subsequently fueled a sectarian conflict in Iraq and fought in the Syrian civil war on the side of protecting the Assad regime.

Past media coverage of the MEK compound – fueled by innuendo by the Iran lobby – criticized the heavily fortified nature of the facilities there for MEK members and tried to cast the group as cult-like in its security preparations.

In light of these most recent efforts at bombings, those precautions now seem not only prudent, but life-saving.

The MEK has drawn the particular ire of the mullahs in Tehran for its long history of revealing secrets such as the existence of the previously secret Iranian nuclear program, as well as the recent surge in protests by Iranians over depressed economic conditions and rampant corruption within the government through smuggled pictures and videos.

Most worrisome is the fact that the MEK represents an alternative voice to the regime in Tehran. The existence of any dissident voice among fellow Iranians is a galling sore point for the regime which demands near total obedience and a cult-like adherence to the whims of the supreme mullah, Ali Khamenei.

The growing strength of the protest movement within Iran among ordinary, working-class Iranians has worried the regime as it has worked to try and put down the demonstrations.

Furious Iranian steelworkers in the city of Ahvaz in oil-rich Khuzestan province, southwest Iran, are continuing to strike in defiance of President Hassan Rouhani’s brutal regime, according to The Express.

Earlier this week, dozens of workers were arrested during raids to their homes, as they pleaded for their basic human rights. But the protests continued and workers chanted: “Imprisoned workers should be freed.” The demonstrations took place despite the heavy presence of security forces attempting to thwart freedom of expression and intimidate the demonstrators.

The ultimate fear of the regime is that the MEK could become an active political force within Iran and marshal the disgruntled Iranian people in a serious challenge to the mullahs rule.

As long as the MEK exists, the mullahs will continue their efforts to attack it.

Michael Tomlinson

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

March 16, 2018 by admin

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

“War!” The talking point pours out of the mouths of Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council about as often as he tweets it seems. Parsi and his colleagues have always waved the banner of war as a means of distracting from the key issues continually dogging the Iranian regime such as its miserable human rights record.

During the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, the specter of war was a near-constant theme sounded by the NIAC, even though there was never any real prospect of a conflict with the Iranian regime under the Obama administration.

It was however a convenient tool to use in the so-called “echo chamber” of public opinion created by the NIAC in collaboration with a White House intent on landing a PR win at almost any cost, including appeasing the mullahs in Tehran.

Even after the deal was struck and the Iranian regime launched a series of wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, the chorus of the Iran lobby continued to warn that any effort to take action against Iran would inevitably result in war.

It was a silly argument; akin to saying that trying to stop the burglar robbing your house would only lead to more violence so one should leave him to his thievery.

After President Donald Trump took office and installed an administration openly skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal, the Iran lobby continued to warn that any effort to rein in Tehran’s militant actions would only lead to war. This included doing everything in the PR/lobbying handbook to preserve the nuclear deal that delivered billions in cash to the mullahs to help fund their wars and ballistic missile program.

Now the president has decided to shuffle his cabinet by moving Mike Pompeo from the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency to become Secretary of State, replacing the outgoing Rex Tillerson.

The change represents a potential realignment of U.S. foreign policy hewing more closely to the promises made by candidate Trump on the campaign trail when he called the Iran nuclear deal the worst deal ever made and vowed to tear it up for a new one.

Predictably, Parsi and the NIAC went on the offensive in near hysterical warnings of war. The NIAC issued a statement that blasted the appointment of Pompeo, a noted and vocal critic of the Iran nuclear deal.

“Mike Pompeo’s nomination for Secretary of State could have profound implications for the fate of the Iran nuclear deal and the prospect of a new war in the Middle East. While serving in Congress, Pompeo’s positions on foreign policy were often ideological and tended towards militarism rather than diplomacy. His opposition to the Iran deal – including the political hijinks he engaged in to undermine U.S. negotiators – and his comments suggesting that military strikes would be more effective than diplomacy, raise serious questions about his fitness to serve as America’s top diplomat,” the NIAC statement read.

“It may result in a dramatic escalation of tensions in the Middle East and a war with Iran.”

Of course, Pompeo’s position as CIA director provided him with the ultimate access to the most conclusive information on whether or not Iran was truly adhering to the terms of the nuclear deal, as well as the full scope of the regime’s activities, especially its support for proxy terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

His elevation by President Trump sets the stage for what Iranian dissidents have been calling for all along which is an honest, unabashed focus on the Iranian regime’s conduct and not the false promises being made by the mullahs and their cheerleaders in the Iran lobby.

In this case, actions speak louder than words and the regime’s actions over the past two years since the deal was approved lay bare the lies that have been consistently spouted.

It’s no secret that Pompeo has been a harsh critic of the Iranian regime, calling out its brutality towards dissidents and use of its police forces to crack down on protests.

“Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are the cudgels of a despotic theocracy,” Pompeo said in a speech last October. “They’re the vanguard of a pernicious empire that is expanding its power and influence across the Middle East.”

A week later, he told the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) that Trump is of the same mind.

“The president has come to view the threat from Iran as at the center of so much of the turmoil that bogs us down in lots of places in the Middle East, right? Whether it’s Lebanese Hezbollah, the threat that it presents to both Lebanon and to Israel; whether it’s the Shia militias—you can see the impact that they’re having today,” Pompeo said.

That kind of tough talk and brutal honesty is what has driven a recalcitrant North Korea back to the bargaining table after three years of brazen missile launches and should prove to be equally effective against the mullahs in Tehran.

Appeasement has never historically worked. It didn’t work against Hitler in Munich and it certainly didn’t work against Ali Khamenei in Geneva.

Seeing little hope of finding anymore receptive audiences in the U.S., Parsi and the NIAC have increasingly turned their message to European audiences and the regime has followed suit as regime-controlled media have already begun trying to shape the narrative about Pompeo by urging Europe to act as a balance against the Trump administration.

“Pompeo is very interested in waging a war similar to the Iraq war by citing international regulations,” said Alo Khorram, a former Iranian envoy to the United Nations, in the daily newspaper Arman. “European powers will play a role in balancing his desire.”

While the NIAC continues to panic, the clock may finally be running out on the reign of the Iranian regime.

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Tries to Defend Iran Missile Program Again

February 21, 2018 by admin

NIAC Tries to Defend Iran Missile Program Again

Just when you thought there might be the tiniest of cracks in the unified armor of the National Iranian American Council’s mind-numbingly strict defense of the Iranian regime with its recent statement criticizing the death of Canadian-Iranian environmentalist Kavous Seyed Emami, the NIAC went full-bore again in defending the regime’s ballistic missile program with an “analysis” of it.

Prepared by the NIAC’s Ryan Costello, the paper makes the argument that Iran’s ballistic missile program should not be a concern to the U.S. or anyone else (except maybe Saudi Arabia and Israel) and in fact ought to be viewed as benign.

He makes these arguments because the regime’s missile program has proven problematic for supporters of the Iran nuclear agreement. It is the inconvenient truth that no matter how much Iran lobby supporters say the deal is good for the world, the regime’s display of aggressive missile firepower boldly mirrors that of North Korea and frankly, scares the daylights out of the rest of the world.

It also doesn’t help that the Iranian regime fomented wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen and is busy brutalizing its own people, as well as snatching citizens from other countries such as the U.S., U.K. and Canada.

That tends to make people have less faith in your word.

Which is why our good friend Ryan Costello is busy trying to reassure everyone that missiles with the throw weight necessary to carry a large warhead with a present range of over 2,000 kilometers is nothing to worry about.

“Despite this flurry of activity, there have been subtle shifts in Iran’s missile program that could reduce the program’s threat. In particular, Iran’s articulation of a range limit to its missiles and a shift toward short-range solid fueled missiles signals an interest in conventional, regional deterrence, not long-range nuclear missiles,” Costello writes.

Costello bases his argument that solid-rocket motor propelled missiles are somehow shorter range and less of a threat than liquid-fueled ones.

He obviously doesn’t know anything about missile technologies.

Solid-fuel boosters are the Holy Grail of ballistic missiles because they require no fueling, which can often be a laborious and time-intensive process. Solid-fuel capable missiles can be launched instantly and since they require no fueling facilities, can be siloed, transported or placed in virtually any location making them harder to detect and destroy.

The reason why Iran and North Korea for that matter are aggressively pursuing solid-fuel boosters is because of the cut down in response time. If you are looking to blast your neighbors to smithereens, it helps to be able to do so without warning.

Costello also bases his claims on statements made by top mullah Ali Khamenei that Iran would halt its development of longer range missiles and stick to the 2,000 km limit. It’s a dubious claim to stake global peace and security on given that Khamenei’s past track record of reliability has been just short of Adolf Hitler’s in 1938.

Costello credits all this to the Iran nuclear deal in shifting away from longer-range missiles, an absurd contention since he offers no proof other than to say the regime hasn’t fired as many test missiles as North Korea.

That is not a reassuring statistic.

The mere presence of a growing ballistic missile fleet, especially one being converted to solid-fuel boosters, represents an enormous destabilizing influence in the Middle East. Let’s remember that Costello and his brethren at the NIAC all claimed that passage of the nuclear deal would promote moderation within Iran and help stabilize the region.

The past three years have flatly proven them wrong as Iran has been at the very center of chaos in the region.

Costello also fails to address the elephant in the room, which is how can you trust a regime to not develop longer-range missiles when there is no agreement in place to prevent that from happening in the first place!

The argument the Iran lobby made for the Iran nuclear deal in the first place was that it was necessary to have an agreement and structure in place to hold Iran accountable and provide leverage through an inspections regime, but no such structure exists to blunt Iranian development of these weapons.

In essence, Costello is making the argument that we simply shouldn’t worry about them because hey, the mullahs will only fire them in self-defense!

This also explains why Costello’s boss, NIAC head Trita Parsi, has been busy trying to drum up the fear of war again by blaming Israel for exacerbating tensions with Iran, including the recent shootdown of an Iranian drone in Syria.

“Instead of a showdown in Syria, the showdown will move to New York and feed into an ongoing effort by Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration to use any pretext – missiles, drones or violating the ‘spirit’ of the Iran deal – to pass a Chapter VII UN [Security Council] resolution,” said Parsi, who supports the 2015 nuclear deal.

Parsi goes on to expand that idea in an editorial he authored in Defense One claiming that Saudi Arabia is manipulating the United Nations to punish its long-time regional foe.

“Such a resolution would once again put Iran in the penalty box, with its economy sanctioned and its political pathways for influence in the region blocked — i.e., an all-out containment of Iran. In Riyadh’s calculation, this will thwart Tehran’s rise and shift the regional balance in favor of Saudi Arabia and Israel,” Parsi writes.

It is mind-boggling how the NIAC will try any argument, no matter how far-fetched, to shift blame away from the mullahs and cast it on anyone else.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

January 25, 2018 by admin

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

Iran Lobby Pushing More False Narratives Against Protests

January 21, 2018 by admin

Iran Lobby Pushing More False Narratives Against Protests

As the mass protests in Iran surged during its first week, the various groups comprising the Iran lobbying effort stepped up their own efforts in trying to find any message that might prove effective in blunting the awful scenes of ordinary Iranian citizens battling regime security forces.

The National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi was one of the busiest regime boosters in that period, appearing on a glut of news programs in an effort to portray the protests as less a response to the mullahs’ brutal policies, but rather a manipulation by outside forces such the Trump administration, incidentally, almost exactly what Ali Khamenei, Iranian regime’s supreme leader claimed at the end of the 2^nd week of uprising in Iran.

In Huffington Post, Parsi blamed a nuclear deal that was overwhelmingly supported by the Iranian public, but failed to deliver on its economic promises because of obstruction by the U.S. and conservative Republicans hawkish against the regime.

On MSNBC, Parsi took aim at Weekly Standard founder Bill Kristol’s calls for the U.S. to support the protests, by claiming Kristol actually wanted war against Iran.

In the Hill, Parsi claimed that President Trump’s calls to support the protestors was meaningless because the president’s opposition to the nuclear deal made him lose credibility with the Iranian people.

“He has no popularity, no credibility on Iranian streets,” Parsi said.

Parsi added that the president would better demonstrate his support for the Iranian people by lifting any travel restrictions against Iran.

Meanwhile in Politico, Parsi claimed that the president was taking advantage of the situation to boost his own flagging political fortunes.

The dizzying number of appearances and competing messages and theories put out by Parsi could leave even experienced foreign policy analysts baffled, but this is Parsi’s only strategy left to him and his allies.

The fact that Parsi is offering different ideas on how to react to the protests in Iran lays bare that Parsi has no rational ideas to accurately describe what is happening there without validating the real reasons for these protests: the Iranian people have had enough of the mullahs.

These protests grew organically and spontaneously. They are not being led or organized by any political figure from within the regime’s power structure like the 2009 protests.

These protests are being staged by ordinary Iranians from middle and working classes who have borne the brunt of the wartime economy top mullah Ali Khamenei has mandated and have offered up their sons, brothers and fathers to fight in distant wars far from Iranian interests.

In many ways, these protests represent the most serious threat to the Islamic regime because they are coming from the bedrock base of the country who comprise the farmers, laborers, workers and small business owners that make the Iranian economy run.

This explains why Parsi is in a pickle. He cannot discount the source of these people’s discontent without looking like a complete idiot and he cannot affix any real blame to the regime leadership’s inept and corrupt governance since they are his titular bosses.

Which is why Parsi and the rest of the Iran lobby are busy trying to blame anyone except the regime itself.

Parsi’s NIAC colleague, Reza Marashi, has been just as busy as this all-hands-on-deck exercise has NIAC staffers churning out commentary at a level not seen since the heady halcyon days of the Iran nuclear deal’s debate two years ago.

“The lessons of 2009 very much apply in 2017,” Marashi said in the Washington Post. “The protests as they stand today remain leaderless. There’s a problem with creating a leaderless revolution.”

Marashi claims that his experience at the State Department during those protests gives him a unique insight into these protests and he believes that these protests will fail since they lack “leaders.”

Of course, in the same breath, Marashi and his allies denounce long-time representatives of the Iranian resistance movement, such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran, from having any part in these protests and if they did, it would only serve to de-legitimize them.

Marashi then is trying to have his cake and eat it too in claiming no leadership to these protests and denying that any leadership it might have is in fact illegitimate.

Khamenei meanwhile was busy trying to blame President Trump for all of his regime’s ills even as protestors were busy tearing down posters bearing his likeness; an almost unthinkable act where such actions are punished harshly.

Marashi, in a CNN interview, even tried to split hairs by saying “I don’t think you can separate the economic from the political,” when describe the source of protests stemming from people’s desperation over high food costs and a moribund economy.

It is no surprise that when Marashi was at the State Department during the landmark 2009 protests that were brutally put down with regime security forces ruthlessly shooting and killing protestors in the streets, the U.S. government’s official response was to do nothing and allow the mullahs to kill their opponents.

Now that the Iran lobby finds itself on the outs of a U.S. government led by President Trump firmly opposed to the rule of the mullahs, Parsi and Marashi are casting about wildly for any defense of the regime and hoping U.S. journalists are too dim-witted to see the falsehoods in their comments.

But not everyone is bought into the regime lines of attack. A columnist for Bloomberg, offered up a litany of actions the U.S. and its allies could take to help support protestors and pressure the mullahs including boosting efforts by banned social media platforms such as Telegram, Instagram and WhatsApp to work around the regime’s blackout efforts.

The article also took to task the Iran lobby and its efforts to cover for Hassan Rouhani and Khamenei saying “this network, based primarily in Washington, includes the National Iranian American Council, the Ploughshares Network and the many journalists and experts titillated by U.S.-Iranian diplomacy. For years they told us Rouhani was a reformer. Today they whisper that these demonstrators are really a ploy of Rouhani’s ‘hard-line’ opposition. They celebrate ‘elections’ that have the legitimacy as those for student government. They want Trump to be silent today.”

Let’s hope the U.S. never stays silent in supporting Iranians fighting for their freedom.

Michael Tomlinson

Devastating Report Shows Obama Blocked Hezbollah Sting

December 20, 2017 by admin

Devastating Report Shows Obama Blocked Hezbollah Sting

Politico published a devastating story of how the Obama administration derailed a Drug Enforcement Administration operation aimed at Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based, Iranian-backed terrorist group, which used trafficking in drugs and weapons to fund its operations, in order to prevent jeopardizing the Iran nuclear deal.

The blockbuster revelation came in an exhaustive three-part series by Politico’s Josh Meyer who delved deep into Hezbollah’s criminal and terrorist operations, its support from the Iranian regime and the Obama administration’s desperate moves to keep the DEA’s investigation from jeopardizing a flawed nuclear deal alive.

Known as Project Cassandra, the DEA’s extensive campaign was aimed at toppling the terrorist group’s elaborate network smuggling and selling narcotics and weapons around the world; whose profits were used to fund the terror network worldwide.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, who helped establish Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst in 2008, told Politico. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

When Project Cassandra leaders, who were working out of a DEA’s Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, sought an OK for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, Justice and Treasury Department officials delayed, hindered or rejected their requests, according to Politico.

Project Cassandra members said Obama officials blocked or undermined their efforts to chase down top Hezbollah operatives, including one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers who was also a top supplier of conventional and chemical weapons used by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his own citizens.

Former Obama administration officials told Politico their decisions were guided by improving relations with Iran, stalling its nuclear weapons program and freeing four American hostages held by the country.

According to Politico, the DEA followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

It is ironic that the other countries involved in the smuggling operation include countries such as Venezuela who is closely tied to the Iranian regime.

It is even more ironic that the Iran lobby has been deaf, dumb and mute on the disclosures since they fly directly in the face of the claims made by Iran advocates such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council who extolled the virtues of the nuclear deal as a moderating force within Iran and throughout the Middle East, but now we know that the promise of the deal in fact persuaded the Obama administration to give Hezbollah a free pass in shipping narcotics to Western nations and arms to proxies who later used them in conflicts stretching from Syria to Yemen to Nigeria.

The Obama-led Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested, according to Politico.

In hindsight, the Obama administration’s Pollyanna-ish view of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah since at best naive, and at worst deliberately obstructive.

Obama’s then CIA director, John Brennan, even recommended that Obama “has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.”

The logic that believed the mullahs in Tehran could be trusted to act in a civilized manner also seemed to guide the belief that Hezbollah could be assimilated into a normal political party in war-torn Lebanon.

The disclosure that Brennan actually believed that “moderate elements” within Hezbollah could be cultivated is a shocking echo of the same arguments made about empowering “moderate elements” within the Iranian regime through a negotiated nuclear agreement.

It is clear now that the pervasive idea of appeasement was hatched almost from the day President Obama was sworn into office and guided U.S. policy moving forward and eventually set the stage for the carnage and bloodshed Iran has unleashed over the past three years.

Politico cited the example of Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, who was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014.

But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.

We know that the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement has been a complete failure in reining in Iranian extremism. It has made the world a much more dangerous place and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

We can only hope that the Politico story revelations will serve as a harsh reminder for the Trump administration not to make the same mistakes.

Michael Tomlinson

Fake News and False Promises of Iran Regime

December 14, 2017 by admin

Fake News and False Promises of Iran Regime

The Iranian regime’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, authored an editorial that ran in the New York Times which has been receiving some play in social media circles and it is worthy of closer examination because of the litany of falsehoods it perpetuates.

Zarif’s editorial recounts the completion of the Iran nuclear accord and the benefits it has brought the region, specifically to Europe as it has opened Iranian markets to European Union companies.

He warns that all that demanding work has been put at risk by President Donald Trump’s assertive stance towards the regime, especially its ballistic missile program which the U.S. views as a strategic threat to its forces and allies in the region.

While Zarif waxes longingly about the crisp Vienna air two years ago, he neglects to mention what Iran has accomplished in that same span of time that might now make his list of accolades.

There is little surprise in his editorial running in the New York Times which has long been a staunch advocate of supporting policies easing the burden on Iran during the Obama administration and Zarif repays its support in literary license by equating President Trump’s opposition to the regime to the threat of climate change.

Ultimately though, Zarif’s editorial is aimed squarely at the capitals of EU nations that may be wavering in their wholehearted support of the opening economic channels with the Iranian regime; some have already made the shift such as France under incoming French President Emmanuel Macron’s strong denunciation of Iran’s ballistic missile program.

What Zarif and his mullah masters have recognized is that support throughout European capitals is thinner than they think. The past two years of Iranian involvement in several conflicts have had a detrimental effect on Europe, especially the Syrian civil war which widened only after Iran stepped in with cash, arms and troops to save the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

That conflict alone set in motion one of the largest migrations of refugees into Europe since the end of World War II and helped give rise to the radical extremism of ISIS which has plagued Europe of terrorist attacks in London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and elsewhere.

European leaders, while attracted to the idea of accessing Iranian markets for investment, are realizing that doing a deal with the devil is no deal worth doing in the long run.

History may also be playing a role since the diplomatic history of Europe has been littered with many failed efforts to rein in extremism such as the Munich Accords which failed to bring Adolf Hitler to heel. Those reminders serve to pointedly give EU nations pause when considering what to do next with Iran.

Zarif didn’t help his cause when he attempted to push some silly false narratives in his editorial, especially extolling the defensive virtues of Iran’s ballistic missile program, insisting their pinpoint accuracy should not cause concern.

His claim that Iran’s desire for a vast military buildup is only fueled by history such as the Iran-Iraq War rings hollow when taken in the context of how the regime has invested so heavily in weapons that can strike well beyond its own borders and threatens Europe itself.

This may explain why leaders such as Macron are quick to push back against Iran now since they already have a model of ballistic futility to follow in the standoff with North Korea and the rest of Asia.

Macron can probably envision how France may end up in the same proverbial boat as Japan is now with North Korea lobbing missiles over its airspace and Iran demonstrating it will soon be able to achieve the same thing.

Zarif’s blaming of the revolt in Yemen on Saudi Arabia is even more outlandish since Iran was the one responsible for inciting the Houthis to revolt in the first place and arming them with weapons that include shooting missiles at targets within Saudi Arabia.

He also mentions Iranian regime’s “partners” but while he means to include Russia and Turkey in that description, the regime’s real partners are terrorist proxies that fight its wars, including Hezbollah in Syria, Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen.

These are hardly the partners that “labor to put out fires.” If anything, the Iranian regime’s partners are more like the arsonists he decries, and they have thrown matches that have caused vast tracts of the Middle East to be consumed in bloodshed.

But if Zarif wants to talk about Turkish partners, he might want to mention Resit Tavan, a 40-year old Turkish businessman, being charged by U.S. prosecutors for illegally smuggling U.S.-made engines and boat generators to the Iranian navy in violation of sanctions.

Or possibly Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who is accused of using his position at Turkey’s state-run HalkBank to design a system of money transfers to help Iranian regime access cash.

Of course, Zarif also neglected to mention the fates of several European citizens currently languishing in regime prisons, including a British-Iranian aid worker which the Iranian regime will treat as an Iranian citizen and she will serve her sentence as determined by the judiciary, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman said on Monday.

The fates of her and other European citizens, who have been treated as hostages to be used as political pawns by the mullahs, only reinforces the perception that is growing in Europe that the Iran nuclear deal was a bill of goods and Iranian regime used to gain much-needed cash to fund its military activities while strangling any hope of democratic reforms domestically.

This sentiment has been on display with the large numbers of European Parliament members now meeting with members of the Iranian resistance movement to decide on how best to confront the Iranian regime.

If Zarif’s editorial is any indication, the mullahs in Tehran are deeply worried that Europe may soon be following the lead of the Trump administration.

Michael Tomlinson

Reasons for Comparing Iran Top Mullah to Hitler

November 27, 2017 by admin

Reasons for Comparing Iran Top Mullah to Hitler

In an escalating verbal war of words, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman called the Iranian regime’s top mullah, Ali Khamenei, “the new Hitler of the Middle East” and warned that like the history of Europe, “appeasement doesn’t work.”

“We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East,” bin Salman, told The New York Times in an interview published last week.

What is remarkable is not that the crown prince made those comments, but that news media treated it as earth-shattering. Human rights groups, Iranian dissidents, families of prisoners languishing in regime prisons have long called out Khamenei and his procession of handpicked presidents such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Rouhani as tyrants long modelled on the bloody blueprint of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

It is also remarkable that for once the Iran lobby was virtually silent on the crown prince’s remarks. Maybe Trita Parsi at the National Iranian American Council is finally getting the hint that shamelessly defending Khamenei is a useless exercise.

The comparison to Hitler is really neither extreme, nor shocking given the Iranian regime’s bloody history and the comparisons don’t start and stop with two megalomaniacal dictators who were power hungry for an apocalyptic vision for their countries.

No, the comparisons between the Iranian regime and Nazi Germany extend far into policies, military intervention and political propaganda.

The Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria is eerily like Iranian regime’s moves into Yemen and Syria, even using the pretext of fighting ISIS the same as the Nazi’s used the excuse of Bolsheviks to invade its neighbors.

But where the two regimes share the most is in their respective preferences for oppressing minorities and making liberal use of state courts to weed out less desirables from their societies.

For the Nazis, their policies of “racial purity” not only targeted Jews for extermination, but sent millions of Russians, Poles, gypsies, the mentally ill, gays and countless others to their deaths.

For the Iranian regime, its litmus test is religious where the mullahs view anyone not adhering to their branch of extremist belief an apostate and worthy of elimination. This explains why the regime has historically targeted minorities such as the Baha’i, Kurds, Christians and Sunnis for imprisonment and oppression.

Also, while the Nazis relied on the dreaded Gestapo and SS to enforce security at home and wage war abroad, the Iranian regime relies on its morality paramilitaries and zealous Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force to achieve the same goals.

The resemblance between the two regimes is eerie and the crown prince does not make the comparison lightly.

Just as Nazi Germany gained appeasement with the West through the much-maligned Munich Agreement, Iranian regime did the same with the Iran nuclear deal; both documents weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and both launched a period of global unrest as the Nazis and mullahs took the opportunity to pursue their ambitions.

The Saudi crown prince has recognized that failure to act in defiance of the Iranian regime will only beg for another potential for war. The need for confronting the mullahs has long been a key talking point for Iranian dissidents who have warned repeatedly that failure to act to restrain the Iranian regime only emboldens the mullahs into acting more aggressively.

It is no coincidence that after Rouhani was elected to his first term and widely lauded as a “moderate” by news media that the regime undertook one of its most brutal crackdowns on dissent rounding up and imprisoning thousands of journalists, students, artists and activists.

Now the world is left to pick up the wrecked pieces of the Middle East that sees the Iranian regime now in control of Syria and Lebanon outright and having a pervasive influence over Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

It’s almost like comparing Iran to Nazi Germany after the blitzkrieg of 1940 that saw it claim most of Western Europe.

But like Great Britain, Saudi Arabia has offered itself as a regional bulwark, opposing Iran in Syria, Yemen and the Gulf region and loudly calling on the rest of the world to recognize the danger the regime poses.

If the crown prince’s words are not enough, the Iranian regime added fuel to the fire when the regime’s deputy head of the IRGC warned Europe that the regime was increasing the range of its missiles to over 2,000 km, allowing it to strike at the heart of Europe.

The comments come as the French president has warned of the threat Iranian regime’s missile program poses and the Trump administration expands its sanctions list to include elements of the IRGC and those connected to its missile program.

The warning from Iran should not be considered superfluous, but rather a clear threat to the continent and an unmistakable shot across Europe’s bow.

The irony of Iran’s actions to Hitler’s speeches to blaming its enemies for driving Germany into the ground in the aftermath of World War I is striking and serves as a reminder that repeating the mistakes of the 1930s today will only lead down a path of regional conflict and even more suffering for the Iranian people.

Laura Carnahan

Why the Iran Earthquake Illustrates Shortcomings of Regime

November 18, 2017 by admin

In this photo provided by the Iranian Students News Agency, ISNA, people look at destroyed buildings after an earthquake at the city of Sarpol-e-Zahab in western Iran, Monday, Nov. 13, 2017. A powerful earthquake shook the Iran-Iraq border late Sunday, killing more than one hundred people and injuring some 800 in the mountainous region of Iran alone, state media there said. (Pouria Pakizeh/ISNA via AP)

This past Sunday night a massive 7.3 Richter magnitude earthquake struck the mountainous border region between Iran and Iraq, shaking many provinces and killing over 530 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless as winter weather conditions set in.

In terms of power and sheer destructiveness, this earthquake surpassed the recent temblor that hit Mexico City last September. For most people around the world, televised scenes of devastation, heartbreak and loss caused by these natural disasters are common fare on news programs, as well as appeals for help to the international community.

But in Iran, under the strict rule of the mullahs, such normally ordinary actions are often difficult at best and impossible at worst as the Iranian regime seeks to project an air of competent government response, while struggling with massive incompetence that costs lives daily.

It is the sad testimonial of ineptness that often runs rampant within the theocratic state that values global reputation more than actual results on the ground.

By accident of geography and tectonic plates, Iran sits in one of the most active earthquake zones on the planet with a long history of devastating earthquakes. Some of the more notorious earthquakes and their subsequent death tolls include:

11, 2012: Iran’s East Azerbaijan province, magnitude 6.4; Over 300 killed
26, 2003: Southeastern Iran, Bam, magnitude 6.5; Over 26,000 killed
28, 1997: Northeast Iran, Ardabil, magnitude 6.1; Over 1,100 killed
May 10, 1997: Eastern Iran, Birjand-Qaen, magnitude 7.3; Over 1,560 killed
June 21, 1990: Northwest Iran, Rudbar, magnitude 7.4; 50,000 killed

What is remarkable given this history of seismic disaster is how utterly incompetent the regime has been in pushing tougher building standards and inspections to protect its citizens from these kinds of devastating losses.

In similar earthquake-prone areas such as Japan and California, strict building codes have historically minimized loss of life, property destruction and disruption to infrastructure and public services.

Even massive quakes measuring over 6 on the Richter scale often leave local residents yawning with minimal disruptions. Why then is Iran so different?

Much of the fault lies at the footsteps of the mullahs who have built a government based on intimidation and fear and riven deep with corruption, nepotism and lack of transparency. Agencies that track transparency and government corruption have consistently ranked Iran at or near the bottom.

Most ordinary Iranians are all-too aware of the corruption that infests all levels of Iranian society where the families of powerful mullahs or members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps have access to capital and favorable influence through the myriad number of shell companies they control that cover most of the Iranian economy.

What this often means is the pursuit of profit to skim and line their family bank accounts often takes precedence over the need to spend more on construction materials to build earthquake resistant and fire-safe buildings.

The history of shoddy construction and lax accountability is well documented in Iran with a high-rise tower recently catching on fire and collapsing last January killing scores of firefighters inside. The building was owned by the Mostazafan Foundation, an extension of the IRGC, which apologized for its role in the building’s collapse, but no officer or member of the foundation was ever arrested or put on trial.

A report issued the following April stated that regime ministries had failed to enforce a reported 22 violations of national building regulations leading up to the fire and collapse.

With this weekend’s earthquake, the regime has again demonstrated how it values its own grip on power rather than show any signs of weakness as it declared it would not accept aid offered from other nations even though an estimated 30,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

“We are hungry. We are cold. We are homeless. We are alone in this world,” a weeping Maryam Ahang, who lost 10 members of her family in the hardest hit town of Sarpol-e Zahab, told Reuters by telephone.

“My home is now a pile of mud and broken tiles. I slept in the park last night. It is cold and I am scared.”

Her story is all-too common in the Iranian regime and demonstrates the undercurrents of deep anger, frustration and desperation that has been seeping into the Iranian population for years now; hungry for regime change and more freedom and accountability.

The torrent of angry and desperate pleas for help have flooded social media as journalists reporting from the disaster area have shown interviews of homeless residents and local officials blasting the relief effort and complaining of little media attention from the tightly controlled state media.

Even the hardline Fars news agency posted a video of angry residents in Sarpol-e Zahab, complaining of what they described as a lack of attention and news coverage of their plight. “People need water and food. Help us,” a man says in the video from the town, which is located in a largely Kurdish-populated area.

“There’s not even a good team covering the news about us, and there’s no one removing the debris, people here are not part of Iran? Are we not part of this nation?” another man asks.

“A gentleman in a suit comes here and tells the media that all has been resolved,” alleged another.

Interestingly enough, the Iran lobby led by the National Iranian American Council took the opportunity to use the natural disaster to take a swipe at the economic sanctions levied against Iran for its missile program and support for terrorism by blaming the lack of aid flowing to the region on sanctions.

The NIAC conveniently ignores the regime’s refusal to let in any foreign assistance and its own ineptitude in handling the response.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Reza Marashi of NIAC, said he expects Iranians to rally behind the country’s leadership amid the disaster.

“I think you are going to see a more robust government response in the coming days,” Marashi told Al Jazeera.

“If you don’t see that response from the government, then you will start to see outrage from the people, which is the last thing the Iranian government is going to want.”

Clearly Marashi got it wrong.

Laura Carnahan