Iran Lobby

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

Fierce Debate on Iran Obscures Pain of Hostage Families

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Fierce Debate on Iran Obscures Pain of Hostage Families

File photo shows an Iranian soldier walking in a corridor of Evin prison during a journalist’s visit to the prison in Tehran, Iran on June 13, 2006. Esha Momeni, 28, an Iranian-American student from Los Angeles is imprisoned in Tehran and is not being allowed to talk to her family, her attorney says. Momeni, described as a researcher looking into the status of women in Iran, was pulled over for a traffic infraction in Tehran on October 15 and is now being held at the notorious Evin prison. Momeni has been allowed one phone conversation since her arrest, which her attorney says may have been related to the One Million Signatures campaign, in which women in Iran are pressing for more rights. Several Iranian-Americans were held for months in Iran last year because the government suspected them of working for a “velvet revolution,” and were eventually released without being charged, the BBC reported. (UPI Photo/Mohammad Kheirkhah) (Newscom TagID: upiphotos893509.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

The debate that rages over U.S. policy towards the Iranian regime under the Trump administration has been marked by a near-constant war of words on social media, editorial pages and blogs with the Iran lobby rising up to challenge every assertion made by Iran critics, as well as deflect from any horrific act committed by the mullahs in Tehran.

The rancor has obscured one important and painful reminder of personal suffering which is the plight of dual-nationals being held as hostages in Iranian prisons by the regime.

These citizens of other countries were arbitrarily snatched up by the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, tossed into prison, and in some cases given secret trials without access to counsel, while others have simply been held without charge or trial.

Most have been subjected to physical, emotional and mental abuses that we would find appalling and even denied much needed medical care as their health has deteriorated as in the case of a British mother who works for a charity organization.

There are five Americans reportedly being held in Iran who were arrested almost immediately after another batch of American hostages were released shortly after the nuclear deal was agreed to and pallets of cold hard cash were flown to Tehran on Iranian jets in a blatant swap.

Iranian officials even boasted of not selling these new hostages for less than $1 billion.

The Iran lobby has been quick to gloss over their plight, only issuing the briefest of rebukes at the beginning and never raising the issue again. The National Iranian American Council has been the most ridiculous in playing this game even through its founder, Trita Parsi, claims one of these hostages, Siamak Namazi, as a close personal friend.

If this is how hard Parsi fights for a friend, I’d hate to see what he does for a relative.

But for the families of these hostages, their pain is real and the struggle to maintain hope is often elusive. They petition the world’s media and beg for the release of their family members from regime officials who ignore them.

This week though, attention has shifted back as family members press their cases again in the media and we observe the passing of the grim decade milestone of one missing American, Robert Levinson.

“I ask myself and my fellow American neighbors: Where is the justice I have come to associate with America?” Robin Shahini, 46, wrote to his family from an Iranian jail.

Shahini was convicted of collaborating with “a hostile government,” the U.S – an accusation his family denies. He was reportedly sentenced to 18 years in prison.

“This charge is unjust and the Iranian government intended to commit this wrong against me, an innocent American citizen, for political purposes. I ask of you, please to not let Iranian government use me,” Shahini wrote in his letter.

“I ask you beloved citizens and all human-loving individuals to not leave me alone and defend my rights, which is also the right of each and every one of you. Defending me is defending yourselves. Do not let me be alone.”

The number of arrests and detentions of visitors…especially dual-citizens… has spiked, warns Lisa Daftari, the editor of the website “The Foreign Desk,” who has followed Shahini’s case.

“In the aftermath of the nuclear deal with Iran, we would expect things to get better,” she said. “But we’ve seen an increase in executions, we’ve seen an increase in crackdowns against journalists, against dual-citizens, against academics, political dissidents, women’s human rights leaders. And this is not what we expected.”

Daftari also said the arrest and trial of Shahini, and other dual-U.S. citizens like him, serves as a broader propaganda purpose for Tehran, according to Fox News.

“The Iranian regime is delivering a stern message to Iranians living abroad, not to get involved in political activity, not to speak out against the regime, and they want Iranians to know that they are in fact being watched.”

Dan Levinson, the son of missing former FBI agent Robert Levinson, penned an editorial in the Washington Post, lamenting his father’s disappearance in Iran for the past 10 years.

“The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which investigates cases of arrest that may be in violation of international human rights law, did something in January that the previous two U.S. presidents failed to do: It announced a finding that my father, retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, was arrested by Iranian authorities without any legal grounds in March 2007 on Kish Island, and it called on the Iranian government to release him immediately,” he writes.

“In finding that Iran has violated international law — and fundamental human decency — by detaining a U.S. citizen and providing him no rights whatsoever, the U.N. working group is being far more aggressive than our own U.S. government has been in 10 years. This is shameful,” Levinson added.

Levinson went on to encourage the new president to pressure Iran for his father’s release.

“If Iran continues to deny holding him and fails to act, Trump can pressure it with tools such as sanctions — which he demonstrated his willingness to use already – or labeling Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was very likely involved in my father’s detention, a terrorist organization. Trump can put my father at the center of every single discussion he has with or about Iran and finally make him a top priority — not just in words like the previous administration, but in action,” he said.

We hope these families can be reunited with their loved ones soon and believe that is only going to happen by applying heavy pressure on the Iranian regime and its leaders.

Laura Carnahan

In Iran the Plight of Women Contradicts International Women’s Day

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In Iran the Plight of Women Contradicts International Women’s Day

Iranian demonstrators march after weekly Friday prayers in Tehran on July 8, 2011 during a protest asking the government to intensify its crackdown on women and men to enforce the Islamic dress code. AFP PHOTO/ATTA KENARE (Photo credit should read ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images)

The world is taking part in International Women’s Day in a myriad of ways; some of it commercial offering to donate $100 to the cause of your choice, and other’s political with marches planned in the U.S. protesting a wide range of issues from reproductive rights to opposition to administration’s policies.

Women the world over are gathering to reinforce their solidarity with their gender and to support issues of concern to them. It’s an annual spectacle that for many celebrates the freedom and opportunities women are now enjoying everywhere…except in the Iranian regime.

Although International Women’s Day has been around since 1908, its origins as a fight for equal pay and voting rights has morphed into the hashtag #IWD and lost some of its fervor. It’s also at times celebrated not as a call to political arms, but now used to tout corporate branding campaigns emphasizing a product or company’s openness to women.

Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that in many places in the world, women continue to be treated as second-class citizens or even property of their husbands and fathers. Nowhere is that more brutally explicit than in Iran where the ruling mullahs have consistently passed laws that would make any Western feminist breath fire in reaction.

The Iran lobby has tried to cover up this fact by praising window-dressing efforts to empower women in Iran, but those efforts have rung hollow in the face of escalating brutality aimed specifically at women.

Shahriar Kia, a political analyst and member of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, outlined some of these practices in a piece for American Thinker.

“Iranian regime President Hassan Rouhani has recently been making remarks about women’s rights (!) in an attempt to cloak his portion of the Iranian regime’s misogynist report card,” Kia writes. “In his own memoirs, from page 571 to 573, Rouhani explains in detail how in 1980 he began enforcing mandatory hijab regulations as the mullahs began their historical campaign against Iranian women.”

Rouhani’s tenure has also been the hallmark home of systematic oppression against women, workers, college students, writers, journalists, dissident bloggers; imposing poverty and unemployment on a majority of Iranians; continuous threats made against the media; punishment of political prisoners have increased significantly even in comparison to the years of Iran’s firebrand Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. During Rouhani’s human rights violations-stained tenure, an average of two to three people have been executed on a daily basis, Kia adds.

The mistreatment of women in Iran extends also to non-Iranian women citizens as in the appalling treatment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British charity worker who was sentenced to prison for five years by a secret Iranian regime court and has been abused and denied much-needed medical care and given the option of only be able to see her child in prison.

Last year a UN body of human rights experts described her detention as “arbitrary” and said she had been denied a fair trial, according to the Telegraph.

This week, the UN released a new report on human rights in Iran, written by Asma Jahangir, the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Iran.

From the outset, it is clear that there has been no marked improvement in human rights in the Gulf nation, despite President Hassan Rouhani signing a Citizens’ Rights Charter in December 2016.

The 14,000-word report discusses both ongoing cases of abuse (like the execution of juveniles) and urgent situations (like the fate of political prisoners denied medical care).

Jahangir, who spoke to non-governmental organizations, intellectuals, lawyers and victims to ensure the accuracy of this report, also covers torture, the bias judicial system, free speech and women’s rights and clearly details just how far human rights, especially for women, have sunk in Iran.

For its part, the Iranian regime as usual blasted the UN report and defended the indefensible in its human rights situation.

In an address to a high-level meeting of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi denounced a recent resolution raised in the council as “totally baseless and unacceptable,” claiming that political use of human rights by certain countries would pose a real challenge to the council’s goals and undermine and discredit the UN body, according to regime-controlled Tasnim News.

The UN report stated that “the Islamic Republic of Iran has reportedly executed the highest number of juvenile offenders in the world during the past decade. Despite an absolute ban on the practice under international law, the penal code continues to explicitly retain the death penalty for boys of at least fifteen lunar years of age and girls of at least 9 lunar years for qisas (retribution in kind) or hudud crimes, like homicide, adultery or sodomy.”

“The Special Rapporteur urges the Islamic Republic of Iran to take proactive steps to promote the full realization of the rights of human rights defenders and to refrain from any acts that violate the rights of human rights defenders because of their human rights work. The government should take strict measures to ensure that the security and intelligence apparatus does not use reprisals against families of those who monitor or campaign against human rights violations or express views that are contrary to government policies,” the report added.

Aside from the cruelty of human rights in Iran, which includes severe punishments for even minor infractions such as not wearing traditional hijab head coverings, Iranian women are denied economic growth and access to good paying jobs.

According to a Pew Research Center analysis of labor force statistics from 114 nations from 2010 to 2016, the median female share of a nation’s workforce was 45.4%, but in the case of Iran, women made up only a paltry 17.4% of the workforce, ranking near the bottom among all countries.

For all of the talk of empowerment and moderation in Iran by the regime and its Iran lobby supporters, the truth is dismal and the outlook for women even bleaker.

The next time women march for Women’s Day, it might be worth remembering the millions of Iranian women who are denied their futures and can’t even march in protest for fear of arrest and imprisonment.

 

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

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Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Banging Loudly for Iran Regime

It seems that the “echo chamber” created by members of the Obama administration and the Iran lobby is still alive and kicking and trying desperately to keep support flowing to the Iranian regime in light of increasing calls to get tough on Iranian regime because of its continued support for terrorism, brutal human rights abuses and flagrant violations of international sanctions with ballistic missile launches.

The Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, has been especially busy making excuses every time Iran hangs a dissident, puts down a protest or sentences a dual national to prison.

Many of those “experts” sympathetic to the regime and preserving the nuclear deal at all costs continue to push false narratives like a used car salesman pushing a clunker with a rolled back odometer.

One example is a piece authored by Jeffrey A. Sinclair in Foreign Affairs in which he argues that President Trump needs to strengthen Iran’s “moderates.”

“The goal should be to guard against any further escalation of hostilities. After all, unless the administration is willing to wage war with Iran, this confrontation won’t achieve anything useful for the United States. What it will do is further strengthen the hardliners in Tehran, a process that is already underway, and undermine moderates such as President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif less than three months before Iran’s presidential election,” Sinclair writes.

Rarely has a paragraph been loaded with more inaccuracies than that one.

First of all, Trump has made it clear with his criticisms of the war in Iraq during the campaign that he is not in favor of nation-building by military force, but he has also made clear he was not going to offer a blank check to regimes such as Iran and Syria to do whatever they wanted since the end result of those kinds of actions has brought chaos to the Middle East.

Trump has laid out a belief that ignoring Iranian regimes’s militant actions does little to ensure regional stability and peace. Confronting the regime on issues such as human rights, proxy wars or provocative military acts are the right policy if Trump’s administration takes up that road, but saying that such a path only leads to war is one of the boldest falsehoods of the echo chamber.

Trump has at his disposal of plethora of tools, many used successfully by previous administrations, to force Iran to the bargaining table which is exactly what happened recently. The only problem was that the Obama administration fumbled the ball by caving in to every demand the Iranian mullahs had and getting little in return.

Contrary to Sinclair’s missives, confronting Iranian regime is exactly the right course of action since to do nothing except issue paper condemnations does nothing to rectify the situation. Using harsh language as Iran’s Quds Forces supply Houthi rebels in Yemen with arms so they can destabilize the country and risk a regional war between Saudi Arabia and Iran breaking out is not only bad foreign policy, it’s stupid.

Also, when Sinclair calls Rouhani and Zarif “moderates” the only polite thing to do is to keep from laughing hysterically out loud.

The only real moderates in Iran sit in Iranian prisons or have been driving out of the country as political refugees. As a religious theocracy, Iran’s mullahs maintain an iron grip on power. Rouhani did not become president to push a liberalizing agenda for reform. He was hand selected by Ali Khamenei to present the West with a more benign face in order to trigger negotiations to ease crippling sanctions.

The world is not going to see any competition during these upcoming presidential elections in Iran. Nothing is left to chance by the mullahs, which is why the vast majority of political dissidents, journalists, artists, filmmakers, students and anyone else stepping out of line has already been rounded up in advance of the elections.

“Because other U.S. and Western sanctions relating to Iran’s alleged terrorist activities remained in place, and because international banks remained highly skittish when it came to dealing with Iran, economic relief did not come quickly enough,” Sinclair said. “Overall, the administration made too few efforts to help Iran economically, as other terrorism-related sanctions were kept in place. The Obama team, it seemed, had taken its eye off the ball. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others knew that Iranian moderates needed a post-deal economic boost to secure their position.”

This is another fallacious argument being made that the U.S. somehow was responsible for jumpstarting an Iranian economy that ranks almost dead last in the world in transparency and corruption. Also, since sanctions related to terrorism were not part of the nuclear deal, the U.S. and Trump are under no obligation to lift them, especially since Iranian regime regularly supports terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Shiite militias responsible for wholesale slaughter of Sunni villages in Iraq.

Sinclair also criticizes discussions to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization and contends such a move would “escalate tensions.”

It’s hard to imagine how much worse tensions can get when Iranian regime’s navy detains American sailors, American citizens are being held in Iranian prisons and Iran’s proxies are causing the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Sinclair—and the rest of the Iran lobby—seems to place its collective hopes on the few wispy strands of less intensive anti-American actions than in the past as positive signs for change.

“For now, signs from Iran are somewhat positive. The yearly celebration of the founding of the Islamic Republic (expected to be a bonanza for the hardliners) turned out to be muted—excessively so, which was a clear sign of at least momentary moderation from the top leadership,” he writes. “In addition, a series of prominent hardliner clerics—including some of the leading clerics in Qom—have in recent days publicly expressed their support for keeping the nuclear deal in place.”

The claimed positive step is at a time that the Iranian regime test fired another Ballistic missile during this period and of course the mullahs are going to express support for the nuclear deal since its amounts to a giant ATM card the regime has been using to buy billions of dollars in new weapons from Russia.

These are not encouraging signs no matter what the echo chamber says and it’s about time we ignore it.

Michael Tomlinson

Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

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Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

Hypocrisy of Iran Lobby Extends to Criticizing Trump Speech to Congress

There is no doubt that President Donald Trump is a polarizing figure and has become a lightning rod for criticism for everything ranging from his affinity for tweeting to his policies such as his roll back of regulations and imposition of a temporary moratorium on visas from several countries in the Middle East.

The jury is still out on much of his agenda since he has yet to collaborate with Congress to bring forth specific legislative proposals, but that has not stopped the torrent of criticism being directed at him by the Iran lobby as it works to oppose anything that might be perceived as upsetting the goals and plans of the mullahs in Tehran.

This was true when Iran lobby advocates such as the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi blasted Trump’s decision to impose fresh sanctions on members of the regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps for its support for ballistic missile launches that violated United Nations sanctions.

It has also been true of the Iran lobby’s efforts to deflect attention away from the Iran regime’s litany of problems at home with increasing mass demonstration and protests to issues abroad as it encounters growing calls for resistance amongst its Sunni neighbors such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States; alarmed at the turmoil surrounding them caused by the Iranian regime.

The Iran lobby has been particularly focused on the debate over Trump’s immigration policies leveraging it to its advantage to raise funds and maintain its ties to progressive Democratic groups that it previously aligned with in the efforts to support the Iran nuclear deal.

The reasons for these efforts are simple: In a post-Obama world, the Iran lobby is desperately trying to stay relevant.

Since the electoral sweep that not only saw Trump elected, but also radically changed the complexion of the Congress, the Iran lobby has been on the defensive ever since. It has found little support within the much-vaunted “echo chamber” of support previously cobbled together to help push for negotiations with the regime.

Iranian regime’s ever growing militant actions in launching ballistic missiles, supplying proxy wars in Yemen and Syria and flexing its military muscle in expansive war games have proven to be almost impossible for the Iran lobby to defend.

Predictably, after President Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress, the NIAC’s Jamal Abdi sent out a statement criticizing the speech, but in his criticism he revealed the bias and hypocrisy of the NIAC and the Iran lobby.

Abdi makes the claim that “no Iranian has ever been implicated in a terrorism-related death inside America,” which is a convenient distinction since it ignores the fact that the Iranian regime has been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and in IED attacks throughout the Iraqi war.

In each case, Iranian regime controlled, supplied, participated or directed the attacks directly resulting in the deaths of Americans. In fact, several court decisions have held the Iranian regime responsible for these deaths and injuries and confiscated financial assets of the regime as part of court settlements to the victims and their families.

Abdi also fails to mention the violence fueled by the Iranian regime’s efforts to export its brand of extremist Islamic vision that has sparked sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites all across the Middle East, including the Syrian civil war, the Houthi coup attempt in Yemen and the expansion of ISIS arising out of the dissolution of the coalition government in Iraq.

All of these debacles were fueled by the Iranian regime and have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and Abdi and his colleagues have remained stonily silent.

But the hypocrisy of criticizing Trump’s policies while ignoring the much harsher realities of the regime’s policies echoes the same treatment given by regime foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif who lauded the protest by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi who won the Oscar for best foreign film against Trump’s immigration policies, yet at the same time did not acknowledge the regime’s imprisonment and torture of several prominent Iranian filmmakers for engaging in acts against the Islamic state.

The rank hypocrisy of the Iranian regime and Iran lobby was taken to task by prominent journalists such as CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Human Rights Watch.

“Farhadi’s movie deserves the praise it has received – and much more. Iranian cinema has a long-established and well-earned reputation for providing a powerful, nuanced perspective into Iranian society,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director for Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division in an editorial. “Yet while Iranian officials bask in pride on the international stage, their rhetorical support does not translate into respect for filmmakers at home, where they have harassed and jailed movie directors and other artists for work they find displeasing.”

“In the aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections, authorities arrested Jafar Panahi, a prominent director, for allegedly attempting to make a movie about protests that followed the vote. In December 2010, Tehran’s revolutionary court sentenced Panahi to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on all his artistic activities. Following international outcry, the government did not execute Panahi’s sentence but kept the ban in place, forcing him to make movies without an official permit,” Whitson added.

“These filmmakers could serve as powerful messengers for the diversity and talent in Iran today. But until the authorities stop censoring and imprisoning them, they put into question the Iranian government’s expressed commitment to supporting the country’s millennia of “culture & civilization,” she warned.

Michael Tomlinson

 

While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

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While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

While Iran Regime Throws Roses It Denies Medical Treatment

Nothing illustrates the cold, calculating nature of the Iranian regime than two incidents happening this week.

On the one hand, an American wrestling team was welcomed with open arms, red roses and a barrage of social media selfies as it arrived in Iran for a tournament that had been threatened in response to President Trump’s visa moratorium.

The two-day tournament began Thursday, when U.S. wrestlers faced off against Georgia, Russia and Azerbaijan. The Iranian regime didn’t miss the opportunity to stage photos of the Americans being surrounded by well-wishers and flooding social media with comments praising the team, but deriding the U.S. government.

“Welcome to Iran champ!!!!” one Iranian user, Saeed Mohammadi, commented on an Instagram photo.

Another, Nima Jan, said he was traveling to the stadium to cheer for the Americans,

“You proved that you are a noble man.… This is a big chance for us,”Nima Jan commented on an Instagram. “We do not pay attention to the behavior of America’s government” toward Iran, according to the Washington Post.

Widely considered a national sport, wrestling has been one venue to maintain a cultural channel between Iran and the U.S. In fact, a U.S. wrestling team became the first American sports team to visit Iran since the revolution.

In contrast to that public photo opportunity, in the dank, dark confines of Evin prison, a British-Iranian mother and an aid worker languishes, falling ill and being denied medical treatment by the regime.

According to the Times of London, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38, who has been held in prison since April last year, was denied urgent medical treatment for a neck injury sustained in prison that has left her unable to lift her arms or carry her child.

Prison officials last week refused to refer the charity worker to a neurologist, despite an X-ray and MRI scan revealing that vertebrae in her neck were out of place.

She is unable to move her arms beyond a certain point or lift her two-year-old daughter Gabriella, who is also trapped in Iran after regime authorities confiscated her British passport.

The cruelty of Ratcliffe’s continued incarceration and denial of medical care has earned sharp rebukes from the British government and human rights groups, but it follows a typical pattern of abuse heaped on detained dual national citizens by the regime.

Repeated incidents like this, depict an essential truth of the Iranian regime which is that it is without compassion or mercy and utilizes innocent people to its political advantage on the world stage. It will willingly use a sports team to stage a photo opp to protest moves designed to restrict the movement of terrorists supported by the Iranian regime and it will also put the screws to an ailing mother to put pressure on a British government balking at opening up trade with the regime.

The mullahs are cruel and callous and any press releases or news interviews by Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council cannot hide that simple truth.

The mullahs calculate every move and weigh every opportunity. They are less religious leaders and more like accountants and they count up the ill-gotten gains they receive from their various black market channels, especially with the nuclear agreement which opened up additional sources of funding to them.

Heshmat Alavi, an Iranian activist, penned a piece in Forbes looking at how the regime was benefitting from the nuclear agreement.

“Now in early 2017, however, signs indicate the main winners in Iran are none other than state-owned companies. This means Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the terrorist-supporting Revolutionary Guards are enjoying JCPOA benefits,” Alavi writes.  “At least 90 of the nearly 110 agreements, totaling nearly $80 billion, involve such state-controlled companies. This includes the National Iranian Oil Company, parallel to others run by regime pension funds and massive conglomerates of semi-public nature.”

“It is a known fact that Tehran maintains a heavy hand over the economy, providing circumstances allowing state-controlled firms to acquire most business deals made possible after sanctions were lifted. The private sector makes up a mere 20% of Iran’s economy, according to official estimates,” he added. “To this end, private companies have received a dismal 17 deals, including a hotel management contract sealed most probably because of the French partner’s chief executive being the brother of Eshaq Jahangiri, Iran’s vice president.”

For the Iranian regime, decision-making is all about perception, economic benefits and exporting its extremist brand of Islam.

Unfortunately, until the world joins together again to confront the Iranian regime, innocents such as Ratcliffe will continue to pay the price.

Laura Carnahan

Campaign of Disinformation by Iran Regime Revealed

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Campaign of Disinformation by Iran Regime Revealed

Campaign of Disinformation by Iran Regime Revealed

Besides the much-discussed “echo chamber” that arose out of the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal utilizing a network of so-called experts in academia and organizations such as the National Iranian American Council to push false narratives about the benefits of the deal, the Iranian regime itself has undertaken several initiatives to push other false and misleading narratives to defame the Iranian dissident movement.

At the center of that disinformation campaign lays the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence Services. If Hitler relied on Joseph Goebbels to help spread Nazi propaganda, the mullahs in Tehran rely on the MOIS to do the same job.

To say the MOIS is a shadowy organization is like saying grease is slippery. The MOIS was created out of the former Shah of Iran’s infamous SAVAK intelligence service which had been notorious for its brutal methods.

The mullahs opted to keep much of the former intelligence services more ruthless elements in support of the founding of their religious theocracy. As part of its first missions, it sought to infiltrate many of the democracy and opposition groups in those early years and insidiously target and even assassinate many of its leaders to help secure the mullahs’ rule.

Since then the MOIS has blazed a trail that included an infamous series of assassinations of dissident writers and intellectuals and Iranian political dissidents both inside and outside Iran. Of special importance were members of resistance groups such as the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran otherwise known as the Mojahedin-e Khalq.

For the MOIS and the mullahs it serves, nothing is more galling than to have fellow Iranians actively and aggressively resist their rule because as long as Iranians oppose their rule, the pathway exists for regime change and a transition to freedom and democracy.

One of the more aggressive tactics the MOIS has employed to distort the discussion about the Iranian regime’s policies has been the use of former dissident members who were either recruited or coerced into denouncing opposition movements.

Col. Wes Martin (US), former Anti-terrorism/Force Protection Officer of all Coalition forces in Iraq and a frequent news contributor, wrote about the MOIS use of disinformation in the U.S. in a piece in The Hill.

A report commissioned by the Pentagon and released by the Library of Congress provides an alarming look into the operations of Iran’s MOIS right here in the United States, he writes.

“MOIS recruited former members of the (People’s Mujahedin of Iran-PMOI, also known as MEK) in Europe and used them to launch a disinformation campaign against (PMOI),” the report reads.

Among those named in the Pentagon report are Massoud Khodabandeh and his British wife, Anne. They were recruited by the MOIS in the mid-1990s and used as assets against the opposition before launching the ‘Iran-Interlink’ website explicitly under Tehran’s orders, Martin adds.

“The MOIS resorts to character assassination against lawmakers and reporters who hold positive views of the Iranian opposition, aiming to silence their voices,” he said.

Martin cited a 2014 report by iSight Partners which uncovered a three-year espionage campaign, originating in Iran, that used an elaborate scheme involving a fabricated news agency, fake social media accounts and bogus journalist identities to deceive victims in the United States and elsewhere.

Martin went on to cite other fake news sites operated by Khodabandeh such as mesconult.com are hosted by Ravand Cybertech, an entity run by the Iranian regime directly. It is not a coincidence that postings from these sites are often cited in Iranian state-controlled media as “news sources.”

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh, an Iranian-American scholar, author and U.S. foreign policy specialist and president of the International American Council, also wrote about the more direct introduction of Iranian regime lobbyists and operatives into the U.S. and Europe on the ground to push the regime’s agenda.

“Many argue that some of Iran’s lobbyists work in plain sight and had access to top officials at the White House and State Department; they lobbied for the lifting of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, top state sponsor of terrorism, and subsequently lifting of sanctions against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), while demonizing Iranian-Americans who called for firmness against Iran’s ruling clerics and ayatollahs,” he writes.

“Cutting to the chase, it seems that the lobbyists and advocates for the Islamic Republic, next dismiss anyone suggesting the US should respond to this appalling conduct with firmness as a warmonger. But nobody appears to want, or ask for, armed conflict with Iran, so that is not an option,” he adds.

The disconnect between the claims of the Iranian regime’s lobbyists and supporters and the reality of the day grows larger every day. Unfortunately, those who are capable of setting a new standard for disagreeing with the regime even on a subtle level seem to cave to the Iran lobby’s arguments.

One example was a visit by a delegation from Sweden’s self-declared “first feminist government” which folded and enshrouded themselves in head coverings as they met with Hassan Rouhani in a blatant blow to Iran’s feminist movement, which has been under severe attacks by the mullahs.

UN Watch declared in a press release its concern over Sweden’s failure to promote a “gender equality perspective.”

In doing so, the Swedish female politicians ignored the recent appeal by Iranian women’s right activists who urged Europeans female politicians “to stand for [their] own dignity” and refuse to wear the hijab when visiting Iran.

“European female politicians are hypocrites,” says one activist. “Because they stand up with French Muslim women and condemn the burkini ban—because they think compulsion is bad—but when it happens to Iran, they just care about money.”

The scene in Tehran on Saturday was also a sharp contrast to Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin’s feminist stance against Trump, in a viral tweet and then in a Guardian op-ed last week, in which she wrote that “the world need strong leadership for women’s rights.”

Linde “sees no conflict” between her government’s human rights policy and signing trade deals with an oppressive dictatorship that tortures prisoners, persecutes gays, and is a leading executioner of minors, UN Watch declared.

We can only hope that world media attention is more tightly focused on the real machinations going on with the Iran lobby and its MOIS taskmasters.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Going Full Bore to Support Iran Regime

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Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Going Full Bore to Support Iran Regime

Iran Lobby Echo Chamber Going Full Bore to Support Iran Regime

With the Trump White House announcing a series of new sanctions aimed at officials of the Revolutionary Guard Corps for the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile program, as well as contemplating broad new sanctions stemming from a possible designation of the IRGC as a terrorist organization, the Iran lobby and supporters of the regime have launched an all-out PR effort to prop up the faltering regime.

In a campaign similar to the infamous “echo chamber” of academics and advocates furiously penning editorials and giving interviews to sympathetic media outlets, the Iran lobby is trying anything to deflect attention on the regime’s militancy and instead claim anything aimed at punishing the regime is somehow racist or a prelude to armed conflict.

But the effort to come to the aid of the mullahs in Tehran isn’t just limited to the usual assorted Iran sympathizers as European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini met with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and spoke “at length” about the Iran nuclear deal according to Reuters.

Mogherini helped negotiate the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, along with diplomats from Iran, the United States and other major world powers. The deal curbed Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief said Reuters.

Trump has said the deal is terrible, and Flynn put Iran “on notice” last week for test-firing a ballistic missile, raising the prospect of spiking tensions between Iran and the United States.

Since the deal, Mogherini has visited Tehran while the regime commenced a series of ghastly executions of men and women; none of which were protested by the EU.

Even Russia Today weighed in as well by publishing an opinion piece by John Wright, an outspoken supporter of the Iran nuclear deal, who took the Trump administration to task for focusing on Iran instead of the world’s “number one terrorist state” in his mind—Saudi Arabia.

“The Trump administration’s consistent and ongoing demonization of Iran flies in the face of reality in which Iran has stood, alongside Syria, Russia, the Kurds, and the Iranian-backed Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, as a pillar against the very same Salafi-jihadist terrorism that poses a threat to the American people,” Wright said in a splendid example of mimicking the very same messages consistently uttered by the National Iranian American Council and other Iran lobby members.

Wright went on to hammer Saudi Arabia, while essentially excusing the vile acts of ISIS and downplaying anything the Iranian regime has done by comparison. His logic or lack thereof defies commonsense and represent the intellectual vacuum that characterizes much of the Iran lobby’s arguments.

In a more flimsy example of casting doubt on efforts to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization, the Chicago Tribune offered up a story with the dubious headline of “Warnings for White House on terror designation for Iran Revolutionary Guard” and goes on to hint at warnings from defense officials, but neglects to mention anyone specifically, nor offer a single quote against the planned designation.

It does however rehash the discredited story of the terror designation of Iranian dissident groups in a message point repeatedly endlessly by the Iran lobby as part of the smear campaign against opposition groups.

Another Iran lobby message point was trolled out by William O. Beeman, an anthropology professor and not a national security expert, who nevertheless offered up the same silly arguments that folks like Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi of NIAC put forth, in an editorial.

“The tiny issue on which the US objection rests is whether the Iranian missiles are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. Iran says: no! The United States (and Israel) say ‘maybe,’ because they can’t know for sure whether this is the case. In the latest missile test, the missile blew up, so no one can say one way or the other,” he writes.

Beeman should stick to teaching about dead civilizations.

The issue of ballistic missiles is not a “tiny” one. Iran’s development of longer-range missiles based on illicitly acquired North Korean designs has produced missiles with over a 2,000-km range, giving it intercontinental reach. Tie this with the development of solid fuel boosters and you now approach the threshold weight necessary for a nuclear weapon. But put that aside, it is more than enough thrust and range for a chemical or biological weapon to be aimed at Eastern Europe, North Africa and India and China.

The Economist went even further claiming that Trump’s punitive actions against the Iranian regime were actually helping it.

Most incredulous of all was the opening line from the piece which claimed “the ritual chants of ‘Death to America’ had grown fainter in recent years. The feverish crowds had thinned. Some demonstrators seemed to wave Uncle Sam banners less to jeer America than to cheer it. Yet thanks to Donald Trump this year’s annual rally to commemorate Islamic Revolution Day on February 10th in Tehran looks set to be one of Iran’s biggest.”

The Economist fails to mention that the regime can ramp up attendance any time it needs to with help from the Basij paramilitaries to round up supporters under threat of beatings and the chants aimed at America have not stopped and will never stop under the mullahs.

It also makes the same mistake all media make who do not understand the dynamics of the mullahs’ hold over Iran by continuing to make a distinction between “hardliners” and “moderates” in Iran’s government.

Let’s set the record straight: There are no moderates in Iran’s government. Moderation within the regime is akin to making distinctions between the SS and Brown shirts in Hitler’s Reich. It’s only variations on the theme of extremism. One could say that compared to ISIS, Al-Qaeda looks like a Boy Scout troop.

The argument that Trump only emboldens the “hardliners” is a self-fulfilling prophecy since the hardliners have been and always will be in control of Iran.

Michael Tomlinson

Possible Designation of IRGC as Terror Organization Huge Step Forward

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Possible Designation of IRGC as Terror Organization Huge Step Forward

Possible Designation of IRGC as Terror Organization Huge Step Forward

The Trump White House’s deliberations over designating the Iranian regime’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) is a monumental and long overdue step on the road to finally blocking the expansion of extremism in the region.

For too long, past administrations have placed sanctions on aspects of the IRGC, including specific leaders and even units within it such as the Quds Force, but none had been willing to seriously raise the question about designating the IRGC as a whole.

For the U.S., this administration’s team is making a series of calculations based on the fundamental truth about the IRGC, which is that to solve the puzzle of rising Islamic extremism, you cannot nibble at the edges, but have to attack it at its center.

The White House is likely to move more quickly on the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which could be less of a challenge to implement, one person familiar with the discussions said. It was unclear when a decision would be made on that designation, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Revolutionary Guard is the Iranian regime’s elite military unit and reports directly to top mullah, Ali Khamenei, with a command separate from Iran’s traditional military. It was established following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and over the past decade has also grown to dominate Iran’s economy, with holdings in property, oil and gas and telecommunications. U.S. officials estimate the IRGC controls as much as 50% of Iran’s economy.

The Trump administration last week imposed new sanctions on more than two dozen Iranian individuals and entities in retaliation for the country’s latest ballistic missile test launch, in January.

Taking the step of designating the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization would give the U.S. further latitude to target the IRGC’s finances and companies, which would affect large sectors of Iranian regime’s economy.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who supports the move to designate the IRGC, said it would go beyond efforts by the Bush administration to more narrowly target the military group’s illicit trade and funding for terrorism.

“The net effect would be more significant. It would cast the net more widely,” he said.

According to the Journal, there is broad and bipartisan support within Congress to designate the IRGC and levy additional sanctions much to the chagrin of the Iran lobby which went into full-defense mode and scrambled to block this latest in a string of moves aimed at the regime.

Loyal regime ally, the National Iranian American Council issued talking points opposing the designation which was a verbatim regurgitation of past defenses of the regime and offered nothing new; hanging its hat on the sole prospect that the nuclear deal would be jeopardized.

The move to designate the IRGC strikes at the very heart of the economic engine that fuels the mullahs rule and expansion of terrorism in the region.

Without access to the ill-gotten gains they secure from the industries controlled by the IRGC, the mullahs could not support their proxy wars, could not upgrade its military and could not continue to funnel cash to the Assad regime in Syria or keep Hezbollah afloat.

As pointed at in a piece for the Daily Caller, targeting the IRGC is the culmination of a long series of militant actions by the IRGC that has resulted in loss of U.S. lives.

Iran and elements of the IRGC were implicated several times in assisting in the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress a year ago, “I know the total number of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that were killed by Iranian activities, and the number has been recently quoted as about 500.”

It could also cripple the Iranian regime to a point where the prospect of true democratic reforms could finally emerge.

Of course all of this is only hopeful speculation at this point, but the prospect of aggressive action against the regime after years of trying to appease the mullahs bore no fruit is a welcome turnaround for critics of the regime and should provide a valuable morale boost to the long struggle against the regime waged by Iranian dissident groups.

 

Shahriar Kia, a political analyst and member of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI, also known as the MEK), wrote in the Hill that the Kayhan daily, the known Khamenei mouthpiece, revealed the Iranian regime’s terrified status quo, describing this as a “historic turn.”

“There are times when developments take such an unprecedented pace, making any forecasting about the future quite difficult,” the piece reads.

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said in a recent TV interview Tehran’s foreign policy will face serious crises with Donald Trump coming to the White House.

Ali Khorram, an Iranian Foreign Ministry official, suggested the mullahs’ regime should use “common sense” and keep a low profile during such times.

The state-run Iran daily wrote, “This measure by Iran provides an excuse for Trump to take actions against Iran, increasing his intention to disrupt the status quo resulting from the Iran nuclear deal.”

That has to be pretty disturbing to them.

Laura Carnahan

Time for the NIAC to Pack It Up

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Time for the NIAC to Pack It Up

Time for the NIAC to Pack It Up

The National Iranian American Council was born out of an idea hatched by Trita Parsi to develop a US-based group that could serve as an effective lobbying force for the interests of the Iranian regime. It could help provide “cover” for the mullahs by pushing a narrative seeking to reshape the public image of the Iranian regime.

It did so through editorials and press releases and through the use of NIAC staffers as so-called Iranian “experts” to news media. The intelligentsia and academia were regaled with lofty tales of how Iranian regime could be a friend to the US instead of an enemy and how the intractable problems of the Middle East could be solved through a moderate and willing Iranian partner.

The NIAC became part of the “echo chamber” created by the Obama administration to help push that narrative as it sought a nuclear deal with the mullahs in Tehran. NIAC staff such as Reza Marashi and Tyler Cullis obligingly offered up these fantasies even as Iran mullahs essentially set the stage for the Syrian civil war by jumping in to prop up the Assad regime.

The NIAC deepened its efforts by creating NIAC Action, a direct lobbying arm so it could knock on the doors of Congressmen and Senators and pressure them into supporting a badly flawed nuclear deal and promise them political cover by offering to say “Iranian-Americans” supported it.

Even as the death toll mounted by the thousands in Syria at the hands of Iranian forces and the barrels of Iranian guns and refugees flooded into Europe by the millions, the NIAC was resolutely pushing ahead to preserve the deal by blaming Saudi Arabia and other enemies of Iran for these problems.

Against the dubious backdrop of midnight flights of pallets loaded with cash in exchange for American hostages, the NIAC still kept at the narrative, ignoring the risk to Iranian-Americans and other dual nationals being arrested in Iran at an astonishing rate and Hassan Rouhani’s flat out refusal to recognize dual nationalities.

While the NIAC argued for loosening of restrictions to allow the freer flow of cash to Iran, the regime cracked down even harder on dissent at home with over 3,000 executions in four years and arrests of journalists, students, artists, bloggers and dissidents by the scores.

Even the US news media were getting the idea that NIAC did not have much to offer being apologists for the Iranian regime every time anything went wrong as NIAC staffers found less ink and air time on mainstream media and found themselves relegated to self-publishing blogs and fringe websites more prone to fake news than real news.

The election of Donald Trump and the sweep of Republicans into both houses of Congress put an even bigger damper on NIAC’s prospects to help the Iranian regime any more, which raises the most logical question: Is it time for the NIAC to close shop?

The question is not just rhetorical, but should prompt a serious discussion among supporters of the NIAC and its donors. What role will the NIAC play in a Trump presidency?

The same question must be vexing Parsi and his colleagues since we’ve seen a noticeable shift in their public comments on items. Instead of slavishly towing the party line of the mullahs in Tehran, the NIAC now has been busy commenting on issues related to Trump’s immigration proposes.

Some might argue that these topics should be the more traditional and appropriate topics for support and debate by an organization putatively claiming to support Iranian-Americans.

Unfortunately, the shift has less to do with genuine and sincere attention to a legitimate issue, but probably rather a need to justify the continued existence of NIAC.

One benchmark of that imperiled future will be the NIAC’s Bay Area fundraiser scheduled for February 12, 2017. The NIAC website states that the proceeds will be used “to support immediate efforts to combat discrimination, support civil rights, protect the US-Iran Nuclear Deal, and prevent war.”

Given the NIAC’s track record, virtually all the funds will be used to preserve the Iranian regime’s interest? Parsi and the NIAC have no real interest in the concerns and issues facing Iranian-Americans. They are more concerned about all facets of the Iranian regime and how to keep maintaining support for it. The NIAC’s checklist is absurdly limited given the state of the world:

  • Preserve the Iran nuclear deal so Iranian regime does not suffer renewed sanctions;
  • Oppose any new or re-imposition of sanctions on Iran;
  • Denounce and defend any accusation against the Iranian regime for sponsoring terror or human rights abuses;
  • Tie any effort to rein in Iran as a pathway to war and empowering “hardliners” in Iran; and
  • Keep the money flowing to Tehran and the mullah’s coffers at all costs.

These should not be the priorities of any group concerned with Iranian-American issues. They are the concerns only of an organization dedicated to doing the bidding of the mullahs in Tehran.

It’s time for the NIAC to go away and for a legitimate group to rise in its place to be a true advocate for Iranian-Americans and not a mouthpiece for Tehran.

Michael Tomlinson

Obama White House Logs Disclose Access to Iran Lobbyists

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Obama White House Logs Disclose Access to Iran Lobbyists

President Barack Obama makes Thanksgiving Day phone calls from the Oval Office to U.S. troops stationed around the world, Nov. 24, 2016. The President’s Coast Guard military aide, LCDR Ginny Nadolny is at right.
(Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Washington Free Beacon disclosed that a former Iranian regime official and a leader in the Iran lobby enjoyed unprecedented access to the White House under the Obama administration.

The two were hosted at the White House for more than 30 meetings with top officials at key junctures in the former administration’s contested diplomacy with Iran, according to White House visitor logs that provide a window into the former administration’s outreach to leading pro-Iran advocates, according to the Free Beacon.

Seyed Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and head of the regime’s national security council, was hosted at the White House at least three times, while Trita Parsi, a pro-Iran advocate long accused of hiding his ties to the Iranian government, met with Obama administration officials a stunning 33 times, according to recently updated visitor logs.

Sources familiar with the nature of the meetings told the Washington Free Beacon that both Parsi and Mousavian helped the White House craft its pro-Iran messaging and talking points that helped lead to the nuclear agreement with Iran. These efforts were part of a larger pro-Iran deal “echo chamber” led by senior Obama administration officials who were tasked with misleading Congress about the nature of the deal.

Mousavian, who also served as Iran’s spokesperson during negotiations with the international community on the Iran deal, visited with White House National Security Council official Robert Malley, who advised the former president about the Middle East and the Islamic State terror group.

“Mousavian was Iran’s ambassador to Germany back in the 1990s, when that embassy was the central node of Iran’s European terror network and those in Germany were murdering dissidents in Berlin,” one veteran Iran analyst who frequently works with Congress on the issue told the Free Beacon. “Later he came to the U.S., where he’s being paid for with tens of thousands of dollars from the Ploughshares Fund, which funded the Ben Rhodes echo chamber.”

Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council, a group tied to the broader Iran lobbying movement and tied to the Obama White House that helped spearhead a pro-Iran narrative, met with several senior Obama administration officials during dozens of visits to the White House, the logs show.

This included private, one-on-one meetings with Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, who helmed what he described as the White House’s pro-Iran deal “echo chamber,” as well as meetings with Malley and Colin Kahl, national security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden. Parsi also met with the White House NSC’s director for Iran, its senior director, legislative liaisons, and public engagement officials, according to sources familiar with the nature of these meetings.

In one instance, Parsi was signed into the White House by Solomon Tarlin, a West Wing intern and supporter of the Middle East advocacy group J Street.

Free Beacon quoting an expert on Pentagon writes: “Talk about letting the fox into the hen house. Letting the head of an organization whose foreign policy positions are indistinguishable from the Islamic Republic more than 30 times would be analogous to letting the Soviet Union’s chief lobbyist help guide policy during the Cold War.”

“During the Bush administration, Parsi thought nothing of dining with [Former Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his private emails, released as part of a court-ordered discovery process, show that he lied to the U.S. press and coached Iranian officials in order to weaken sanctions and promote the Islamic Republic,” The expert said.

The visitor’s logs reveal the depth of Parsi’s involvement in building the false narrative of the Iran nuclear deal and also may explain why the Obama administration was quick to appease the mullahs in Tehran, by forgoing linking such important issues as ballistic missiles, human rights and terrorism.

With the incoming Trump administration, it is almost assured that Parsi’s access to the White House and key advisors has been reduced to zero, which explains why Parsi now has taken to authoring editorials in a tedious effort to influence a monumental shift in American foreign policy.

In many ways Parsi efforts are more akin to the Little Dutch Boy sticking his finger in dike than his previous august position as White House visitor.

In a piece for Foreign Policy, Parsi trotted out the same, tired talking points: Iran is good. Saudi Arabia is bad. Hard liners will be empowered in Iran. Trump’s cabinet picks are war mongers. Iran does not support proxies.

Parsi’s efforts to try and convince everyone that Iran does not fund and control Hezbollah or Shiite militias in Iraqi or Houthi rebels in Yemen is pathetic and patently false. All anyone has to do is follow the trail of cash and arms from Tehran to all parts of the Middle East and you can see how the Iranian regime sits at the center of the proxy wars in the region.

But Parsi’s efforts may be waning as he and his Iran lobby colleagues shift chaotically from issue to issue in an effort to keep up with the wide ranging agenda of the Trump administration which called for a moratorium on Syrian refugees pending verification of their backgrounds in a nod to the Islamic extremist terror attacks taking place across Europe in Paris, Nice, Brussels and Berlin.

A new poll revealed in the Wall Street Journal that support for Hassan Rouhani among the Iranian people has plummeted as years of war and economic stagnation coupled with unrelenting human rights abuses had sapped his favorability.

The survey results paint a picture of an Iranian public wary and skeptical about the economic benefits they thought it would bring as a result of the Iran Deal.

Conducted in December for the University of Maryland, the survey is based on telephone interviews with 1,000 Iranians and provides a gauge of public opinion in a country where independent polling is rare.

“Rouhani’s popularity is taking a hit primarily because he is perceived to have failed to deliver on his campaign promises,” said the president and chief executive of Toronto-based company which conducted the survey on the school’s behalf.

About 51% said the country’s economic conditions were worsening, up from 43% in June. Almost three-quarters of the Iranians surveyed said the deal hadn’t improved people’s living conditions.

With the presidential election looming in May, it is almost assured that the regime will once again rig the election to deliver a candidate in lock-step with the mullahs’ policies and those of top mullah Ali Khmenei.

Michael Tomlinson