Iran Lobby

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

Trita Parsi Delusions and Victimhood Reach New Highs

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Trita Parsi Delusions and Victimhood Reach New Highs

Trita Parsi Delusions and Victimhood Reach New Highs

In picking through the debris field of losses suffered by the Iran lobby under the Trump administration—namely the death knell of an Iran nuclear deal that gave the mullahs billions and gave the rest of the world Syria, chemical weapons attacks, terrorism and ballistic missiles—Trita Parsi, the leader of the Iran lobby’s most faithful foot soldiers at the National Iranian American Council sought to place blame on a shadowy effort to smear his good name.

In the effort to be fair, we should mention that Parsi doesn’t have much of a good name left after shamelessly shilling for the mullahs in Tehran for the past 15 years. During that time, he has relentlessly defended even the most horrific human rights abuses by the regime on its own people, let along the hostage-taking of Iranian-American citizens.

He’s also barely batted an eyelash when Iran sent billions in cash released by the Obama administration to fund Hezbollah and pay for a rapid arms upgrade while on a buying spree in Moscow.

In the course of a defamation lawsuit he lost against journalist Hassan Dai, his deep connections to key figures in the Iranian regime and his role as an instrument of Iranian propaganda efforts came to light.

Believe us when we say Parsi doesn’t need much in the way of tar and feathers from detractors to smear his name; he’s provided plenty of it on his own.

All of which leads us to the predicament Parsi and the rest of his Iran lobby fellow travelers now find themselves: What to do now that the Iran deal has been knocked off by President Trump’s decision to pull out?

Initially, Pari and his colleagues got on the tallest soapboxes they could find to bray about the end of the world and inevitability of war with Iran.

It was a curiously discordant note to strike against the dramatic backdrop of North Korea releasing three imprisoned American hostages being brought back to the U.S. by newly-installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

It’s worth noting that their release was secured without a swap of North Korean operatives, nor were any pallets of cash rushed onto waiting for North Korean jets to take as payment, unlike what happened under the previous administration with the nuclear deal it struck with Iran under Parsi’s careful cheerleading.

It’s also silly for Parsi to be warning of war with Iran when North Korea has unilaterally called for denuclearization and invited world journalists to come see the destruction of its nuclear testing facility in advance of an epic summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, confirming that the president’s approach works.

To have this much egg on his face, Parsi must be trying out for clown school.

All of which has not stopped Parsi from now spooling out a fanciful tale of espionage and secret smear campaigns being aimed at him. In an editorial, Parsi recounts a daring tale of his being interviewed by a sinister shadowy organization in an effort to smear him. He even manages to work in Harvey Weinstein into his tale.

“Several weeks after the 2016 election, I had received a chilling message from a person in the US intelligence community (via an intermediary). The team around Donald Trump, my contact warned, was going to try to discredit me and my organization, the National Iranian American Council, and some of our allies,” he writes.

“We had been staunch supporters of the nuclear deal, and we were now considered obstructions that needed to be removed in order to kill it. As a first step, the intermediary advised me, I need to get a much more secure p

/hone, which I did.”

He goes on to claim that it was only through the efforts of NIAC that heroically stalled President Trump’s earlier efforts to kill the deal and only when he replaced his then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and then-national security advisor H.R. McMaster was the way cleared for him.

Parsi does seem to have an eternally high opinion of himself.

It’s interesting to note that Parsi claimed that he was warned by U.S. intelligence as early as the presidential transition in the fall of 2016 that the Trump camp was trying to discredit which raises a whole host of questions that he neglects to delve into, such as:

  • Why didn’t Parsi disclose this tidbit of information back in 2016? It would have been a blockbuster revelation, but strangely he never mentioned it;
  • Exactly why would a U.S. intelligence operative warn off Parsi, the leader of an organization tied to the Iranian regime? It raises the disturbing prospect of collusion between Obama intelligence officials taking care of an Iranian lobbyist; and
  • How did a U.S. intelligence agency actually know the Trump team was looking into members of the Iran lobby and why was it a priority to warn them?

We hate to break it to Parsi, but a whole lot of people have been working on hard on discrediting him and his colleagues for a long time. It isn’t much of a revelation that he was being targeted.

Parsi has been the subject of scrutiny from journalists and bloggers to human rights officials and Iranian dissident groups; all of whom have questioned his connections to the regime and obvious reluctance to criticize it even when it commits horrific offenses.

So for Parsi to claim he is the target of scrutiny is profoundly ironic given that he has been under a public microscope for a long time, but now he finds himself under scrutiny by a much more skeptical audience that has had the benefit of looking at his track record of public support for the Iranian regime.

The lack of balance from Parsi and the NIAC in offering even mild criticism in response to come of the more egregious actions by the Iranian regime is the most damning proof of the lack of any effort to be non-partisan.

The fact that Parsi has calculated President Trump is the enemy and has tried to join in the partisan bashing of the president’s policies only signals that the Iran lobby has run out of ideas to advance the regime’s cause.

It is reduced to throwing verbal assaults and concocting spy tales in lieu of real policy.

Michael Tomlinson

Trump Pull Out from Iran Nuke Deal is End of Line for Iran Lobby

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Trump signs the Presidential Order to pull out of JCPOA

Trump Pull Out from Iran Nuke Deal is End of Line for Iran Lobby

With a quick flourish of his pen, President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and signaled the end of the waning influence of the Iran lobby on U.S. foreign policy.

Administration officials said the Iran sanctions suspended under the agreement snapped immediately back into effect, meaning any new contracts and financial deals are banned. They said businesses and banks have either 90 or 180 days to wind down existing ties, depending on the particular type of transaction, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Because of the dominance of the U.S. economy on the global stage and the reach of its financial markets, as well as the status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s currency standard, the effect on the Iranian regime will be devastating no matter what European leaders attempt to keep Iran afloat.

Already the Iran lobby has howled like a pack of mad dogs at the president’s move.

Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council sounded the familiar war refrain as he claimed the move sets the U.S. on a path to war.

“Donald Trump has committed what will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage in America’s modern history. He has put the United States on a path towards war with Iran and may trigger a wider regional war and nuclear arms race,” Parsi said.

It’s a moronic statement since the U.S. is obviously not gearing up for war. There is no military build-up. No aircraft carrier battle groups are steaming for the Persian Gulf. The lack of any U.S. military activity is conspicuous.

The president has been forceful in speaking out against the Iraq invasion and against long-term U.S. foreign commitments, preferring to focus on domestic matters. In his mind, after granting several extensions to the deal giving European allies several months to work on a compromise addressing his concerns, he finally concluded that the only party not interested in changing anything were the mullahs in Tehran.

But that hasn’t stopped the Iran lobby from spreading its falsehoods like fertilizer in the hopes of resurrecting its fortunes, but not even recruiting for Obama officials in a last-ditch effort to save the nuclear deal made a difference because the Iran lobby could never address the real concerns the president had about Iranian regime’s support for terrorism, development of ballistic missiles and crushing human rights abuses.

It didn’t help that the mullahs cracked down by banning the instant messaging app Telegram and snatching yet another British-Iranian dual national citizen with no reason given adding to the large number of hostages the regime seems intent on stockpiling.

In his remarks in the Diplomatic Room of the White House, President Trump spoke directly to the Iranian people, recognizing their oppression and the lack of a government responsive to their needs. His words made plain that his actions were aimed at the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard Corps that backs them rather than the Iranian people who have been engaged in massive protests to this day against their government; most recently taking to the streets to protest the Telegram ban.

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of Iranian dissident and human rights groups, addressed a rally in Washington this past weekend opposing the regime in which she correctly pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal never addressed core issues making the regime dangerous to the stability of the Middle East, the action taken by the president was inevitable.

“Regarding the billions provided to the regime in the framework of this deal, I said that the money poured into the regime’s coffers must be placed under strict United Nations monitoring to ensure that it addresses the Iranian people’s urgent needs, especially the unpaid, meager salaries of workers, teachers, and nurses, and is used to provide food and medicine to citizens. Otherwise, Khamenei will use these funds to further the regime’s policy of export of terrorism and fundamentalism in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon,” she said.

The fact that the Iran nuclear was never submitted to the U.S. Senate for a vote as a treaty, but instead as an executive order and one of dubious legality, its erasure by President Trump was swift and simple.

The Iran lobby argued for this course because it knew it would never survive a Senate confirmation.

Bret Stephens, opinion columnist for the New York Times, argued this same point in an editorial and pointed out how supporters of the deal continued to get everything wrong about it.

“Apologists for the deal answer that the price is worth paying because Iran has put on hold much of its production of nuclear fuel for the next several years. Yet even now Iran is under looser nuclear strictures than South Korea, and would have been allowed to enrich as much material as it liked once the deal expired. That’s nuts,” he writes.

Stephens adds that “even with the sanctions relief, the Iranian economy hangs by a thread: The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported ‘hundreds of recent outbreaks of labor unrest in Iran, an indication of deepening discord over the nation’s economic troubles.’ This week, the rial hit a record low of 67,800 to the dollar; one member of the Iranian Parliament estimated $30 billion of capital outflows in recent months. That’s real money for a country whose gross domestic product barely matches that of Boston.”

All of which adds up to a simple truth: the Iran lobby has reached the end of its effectiveness in influencing American public opinion and that President Trump has recognized that the Iranian regime can’t be trusted and must be dealt with forcefully and with open eyes.

Michael Tomlinson

No Surprise the Iran Regime Lies

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Archived documents revealed proves Iran had a nuclear weaponry program

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu presented findings from a secret nuclear archive in Iran-April 30, 2018

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a televised address that was part news conference, part reality show and part TED talk, in which he revealed a trove of over 100,000 files and 180 CDs full of data allegedly from the Iranian regime’s “atomic archive” detailing its program to design and build nuclear weapons in a program code named “Amad,” which ended in 2003.

The revelations in and of themselves were not too surprising since the Iranian resistance movement originally revealed the existence of the nuclear program and has been regularly exposing regime’s nuclear activities including revealing secret military sites where the regime conducted tests for high explosive detonators.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading dissident organization, has held its own press conferences to unveil smuggled documents, videos and photos of the regime’s nuclear program so what Netanyahu unveiled demonstrated a flair for showmanship, but didn’t shake the earth with new information.

But what was underscored is the simple truth that seems to have eluded many news organizations who were taken in by the PR push by the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, which is that the regime has consistently lied about its nuclear program.

During the run up towards the Iran nuclear deal, the NIAC always maintained that Iran was not actively building towards a nuclear weaponization program but was instead building a civilian nuclear program. It tried to justify the weak inspections regimen by contending the Iranian regime wasn’t pursuing a bomb anyway, but the agreement would ensure that one could be postponed by a decade or longer.

Since the agreement didn’t include inspections of Iranian military sites, those assurances could never be fully realized and the Iranian resistance movement and Netanyahu’s disclosures only verified what was arguable one of the worst kept secrets that Iran was in fact trying to build a bomb, but somehow that past coverup never was called out as a reason not to trust verification by the regime under the deal.

The most explicit example of that conundrum was in the clean-up of Parchin facility before international inspectors could visit the site in 2015. Classified satellite images obtained by the U.S. government showed bulldozers and heavy machinery working at the site which was used by the regime as part of its nuclear program.

Of course, NIAC issued a statement by Trita Parsi that skirted the issue of Iranian lies and instead focused on the one thin shred of hope it has left before President Trump decides whether or not to decertify Iranian compliance with the deal by the May 12th deadline.

“Anyone familiar with the history of Iran’s nuclear program or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will not be surprised by allegations that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program fifteen years ago. Those well-known concerns were the reason why the international community negotiated an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program and subject it to intrusive international inspections,” Parsi said.

Unfortunately, Parsi was one of the key advocates for ignoring the Islamic state’s penchant for boldly lying about its nuclear program and urging the rest of the world to simply trust and believe in Iranian “moderation.”

Three years later we know now that Iran merely used the nuclear deal as a tool to gain access to billions in badly needed cash to save its military adventures in Syria, as well as launch its ballistic missile program.

While it didn’t come as a surprise that the mullahs lie, it was a useful reminder moving forward that Iran has to be held to a different standard, akin to North Korea which broke every international agreement it entered into until President Trump decided to play hardball.

Again, the NIAC tries to stoke war fears in order to dissuade public opinion from taking harsh action against the Iranian regime.

“Amid an already ruinous regional proxy war in the Middle East, a war against Iran could be even more disastrous for global security than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iran is nearly four times the size of Iraq, with influence in military conflicts from Syria to Yemen and with missiles capable of striking U.S. ships and bases in the region. Bombing cannot erase Iran’s nuclear know-how and would only empower those in Iran eager to obtain a nuclear deterrent. Moreover, it would set the region aflame and draw the U.S. into a prolonged quagmire that would cost American blood and treasure and set U.S. security back decades,” said NIAC’s Ryan Costello in a statement.

It’s remarkable how many misconceptions are in that one paragraph. First and foremost, he neglects to mention that the Iranian regime is the only one responsible for the “ruinous” proxy war engulfing the region through its support and control of the terrorist group Hezbollah and its use in Syria.

It is gratifying though for Costello to admit Iran has developed a ballistic missile capability aimed directly at U.S. military bases but falls flat on his face in supposing the U.S. aim is to fight a war with Iran.

If anything, President Trump has been an outspoken opponent to using U.S. troops in the Middle East, being a frequent and harsh critic of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.

President Trump has made it clear that his desire is to use the punitive power of economic sanctions which brought Iran to the bargaining table in the first place before the giveaways began under the Obama administration to appease the mullahs.

The threat of war doesn’t come from the U.S., it comes from Tehran and the mullahs there for are becoming increasingly desperate to hold onto their power.

What NIAC won’t tell you is that it isn’t worried about the threat of war, but the threat of renewed economic sanctions coming at a time when the regime is as weak and vulnerable as it has ever been. The prospect of regime change under those conditions is what terrifies Parsi and Costello and their comrades in arms.

Laura Carnahan

Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

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Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

Iran Lobby Ineffectiveness Reaches New Lows

For the past several weeks, the Iran lobby has mounted a massive effort to try and dissuade the Senate from confirming former CIA chief Mike Pompeo as the next secretary of state, as well as opposing the installation of former UN ambassador John Bolton as the new national security advisor.

This included the usual suspects such as National Iranian American Council staffers such as Trita Parsi and Reza Marashi, as well as NIAC Action head Jamal Abdi busy issuing press statements and drafting editorials and giving interviews to anyone who would bother listening to them.

Gone though are the heady days during the Obama administration when the Iran lobby was part of the vaunted “echo chamber” pushing for passage of the Iran nuclear deal and gaining appearances on mainstream programs such as CNN.

This latest effort to alter the trajectory of President Trump’s latest cabinet additions to his foreign policy team died a quiet death amidst a dearth of any appreciable news coverage of the Iran lobby’s messaging.

Long gone are the days when Parsi could command prime editorial space in major newspapers. Instead, the complaints and whining of the NIAC are relegated to progressive blogs and academic journals.

Their complaints were centered on the same old, refrain warning of the Trump administration’s misguided actions in getting tougher with the Iranian regime leading almost certainly to a path towards war.

It’s the same nonsense NIAC tried pedaling in warning about the president’s tough talk against North Korea and now we see the positive steps coming from that tough talk as the presidents of North and South Korea met in a historic meeting this week in South Korea; marking the first time a North Korean leader set foot across the Demilitarized Zone.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offered to discuss denuclearization for the first time without preconditions; an admission both startling in its suddenness and shocking in its existence.

Even President Trump’s most ardent critics have reluctantly given him credit for the breakthrough and for setting the stage for the first-ever summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

It is ironic too considering that North Korea provided Iran with its initial designs for its ballistic missile program, as well as assistance in jump starting its nuclear weapons program.

If North Korea and the U.S. can find an accommodation to abandon nuclear weapons as well as curtail ballistic missile development, then the claims made by NIAC and the rest of the Iran lobby that the Iran nuclear deal would be the best vehicle to achieve those goals will be proven false.

Pompeo’s confirmation by the Senate by a comfortable 57-42 margin also demonstrated how feeble the Iran lobby is now and how it lacks much influence anymore on domestic American politics.

Seven Democratic senators joined with Republicans in approving Pompeo in a strong sign of bipartisan support. It is no coincidence that his approval came after his secret diplomatic mission to North Korea in meeting Kim to discuss the summit with the president in the kind of diplomatic derring-do NIAC has claimed the administration was incapable of conducting.

Far from serving the interests of Iranian-Americans anymore, NIAC has been reduced to either serving as a cheap adjunct to the extreme “progressives” wing in order to keep money flowing or parrot whatever comes out of the mouths of the foreign ministry in Tehran.

Worse yet, NIAC seems to get more press from regime-controlled publications than any in the U.S. Even Parsi’s tweets have taken on an edge of near-panic.

“WAKE UP AMERICA! Trump’s about to start a war with #Iran and he’s openly telegraphing it. He’ll kill the #IranDeal (the deal that restricted Iran’s program) and then threatens war if Iran restarts the program – which it’ll only do if Trump kills the deal.” — Trita Parsi (@tparsi) April 24, 2018

One has to wonder why Parsi and the rest of NIAC are fixated on fighting battles to oppose the president at every turn, they remain strangely silent on more recent moves by the mullahs in Tehran to oppress its people and further try to destabilize the region.

The regime for example took the first steps to the popular Telegram instant messaging app used by over half of the Iranian population by banning the ability of Iranians to swap videos and pictures on it.

The act was taken by the regime to try and halt the near constant flow of videos and pictures being sent around and outside of Iran of protests and acts of oppression by the regime including arrests and beatings by regime police.

Also, the U.S. has stepped up surveillance to monitor the movement of suspected Iranian anti-air and ballistic missiles inside Syria as concern mounted the Iranian regime was moving its military forces into position for possible strikes against U.S.-backed coalition forces or even Israel.

Amidst these new actions, Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif arrived in New York for a weeklong visit and was met by large protests from Iranian dissident and human rights groups.

Several dozen supporters of the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC) joined a demonstration Monday across the street from New York’s Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as it hosted a discussion with Zarif on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and U.S.-Iran relations.

Shirin Nariman, the organizer of Monday’s protest, told VOA Persian that her group objected to Zarif’s invitation to speak at CFR. “The people of Iran have spoken [through anti-government street protests] in the last few months and showed that they don’t want this regime at all — not even a part of it,” Nariman said.

We can only hope that the ever-shrinking influence of the Iran lobby and NIAC continues to eventually disappear.

 

Iranian Regime Threats Ring Hollow

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Iranian Regime Threats Ring Hollow

Iranian Regime Threats Ring Hollow

What a difference a year makes. Last year the Iranian regime was riding high with its victories in Syria, its military partnership with Russia, the overthrow of the government in Yemen, billions of dollars to spend on upgrades to its military and successful ballistic missile launches showcased on state television almost weekly.

But in less than 12 months, the regime is under the most severe attack and pressure from all quarters than it has ever been since the nascent days of the Islamic revolution that the mullahs highjacked.

First the foremost, the Iranian economy is in freefall and a basket case. The rial has dropped faster than a lead anchor from a ship and furious attempts by the Iranian regime to artificially boost it and control the flow of foreign currency through local money changers has failed miserably.

The threat of a new cyber currency being offered by the ubiquitous messaging app Telegram didn’t help either which led to the mullahs trying to ban it even though over half of the Iranian population uses it.

On the military fronts, the gains made in Syria have been threatened with Bashar al-Assad’s continued indiscriminate use of chemical weapons to kill men, women, and children leading to the first multi-national military response on Syrian targets by French, British and U.S. forces.

It also forced Russia to sit on the sidelines and allow its ally to be hammered by over 300 missile strikes.

Also, Iran’s move into Yemen had the unintended effect of galvanizing long-time foe Saudi Arabia into action and form alliances that were unheard of only a short time ago such as Saudi and Israeli defense officials meeting to go over planning in defending against Iranian aggression and even permitting mutual flights over each other’s airspace for the first time ever.

The mullahs also probably did not count on the waves of mass protests and public discontent that have sprung up beginning late last year and have been propelled not by a single issue such as the disputed presidential election of 2009, but rather a whole raft of complaints ranging from pathetic job growth and record unemployment among youth, to the constant oppression of Iranians, especially women, over everything from riding bicycles and not wearing hijabs to degraded environmental conditions turning much of the Iranian countryside from fertile farmlands to barren deserts.

Not to mention the election of President Donald Trump and the 180-degree about face from trying to appease the regime under President Obama to the aggressive efforts to match Iranian aggression move for move.

You allow Assad to use chemical weapons? Okay, we’ll bomb sites and if Iranian military personnel happen to be there assisting, tough.

You threaten to walk away from the nuclear deal? Feel free to do it.

Every Iranian regime temper tantrum, taunt, and the threat is now met with a shrug of indifference and steely resolve instead of the constant handwringing that marked the previous administration.

Even the Iran lobby is left with little to nothing to say. In response to the president’s most recent comments to the possibility of Iran walking away from the nuclear deal, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council issued a curt two-paragraph statement that shows how much his verbosity has plunged in this new era.

“Macron and Europe seem willing to bend over backward to save the nuclear deal and prevent catastrophe. When our closest allies express alarm in unison, we should listen. Trump should quit while he is ahead and reaffirm the U.S. commitment to the JCPOA before it is too late. The alternative would be an isolated America, an unchecked Iranian nuclear program, and an escalation towards war,” Parsi writes.

It’s laudable for Parsi to even admit for the first time that President Trump is actually ahead of the ballgame with Iran. He recognizes, even if he is unwilling to say so publicly, that President Trump’s actions have turned the tables on who controls leverage in the Middle East.

The same approach has brought a startling and breathless turnaround with North Korea in which the Hermit Kingdom has agreed for the first time to put denuclearization on the negotiating table without any preconditions.

Parsi understands that the same mobilization of pressure and harsh rhetoric backed by tough actions are being applied to Iran now with most European allies, who had been staunch supporters of the Iran nuclear deal, now being contortionist moves to appease the Trump administration in an effort to save the deal.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Washington was designed to showcase French unity with the U.S. on issues such as Syria, while also acknowledging the need to address issues left untouched by the Obama administration such as ballistic missile development and unfettered access to now-blocked off Iranian military sites.

The fact that all of Europe is now intensely focused on appeasing President Trump instead of the mullahs is a remarkable feat of diplomatic brinkmanship and indicative of how the tide has utterly turned against the Iranian regime.

Meanwhile as Iran threatens to pull out of the treaty on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons if the Trump administration approves a non-certification of the deal by the May 12th deadline, President Trump now essentially has Iran dancing on a string since he could simply conditionally approve the extension one more time and squeeze Iran and Europe for even more concessions.

The president has taken a page from the mullahs’ playbook and is throwing it right back at them.

The threat to pull out of the NPT rings hollow since by doing so, Iran would be throwing its lot in with countries such as Israel which has not signed the agreement.

Now that would be ironic.

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Sees Echo Chamber Falling

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NIAC Sees Echo Chamber Falling

NIAC Sees Echo Chamber Falling

Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights activist, took dead aim at the National Iranian American Council in an interview with Bloomberg and linked its efforts in lockstep with the Iranian regime. Even more damning, she openly called for regime change and the ouster of top mullah Ali Khamenei and eradication of the position with the replacement of the Iranian constitution with one based on democracy and freedom.

Predictably, the NIAC and its allies went on the offensive but stopped short of the usual verbal tongue lashings reserved for others regime naysayers.

Maybe the stature of a Nobel prize winner had something to do it. Maybe it was because Ebadi was the first Iranian and Muslim woman to win the prize had something to do with it. Maybe it was because the NIAC ran out of lies.

Instead, the NIAC put out a plaintive statement that avoided directly criticizing Ebadi and instead went after traditional foes; President Donald Trump and newly installed national security advisor, John Bolton.

“As we speak, Donald Trump is installing John Bolton in the White House – a man who has openly called for over a decade for the U.S. to bomb Iran. Trump has fired his advisors who argued against killing the Iran deal and is replacing them with pro-war advocates like CIA Director Mike Pompeo – who wants to turn Iran into Syria. Meanwhile, our families continue to be banned from America because of Trump’s hateful policies,” the NIAC said.

Remarkably, the NIAC did not disagree with any of Ebadi’s statements, including her harsh denouncement of the NIAC. Sometimes, when you get caught red-handed, there’s little you can say to counter the charges.

In the case of the NIAC, it’s been increasingly isolated and under fire from all quarters as the Iranian regime disproves virtually every false claim made by the NIAC during the run-up to the Iran nuclear deal.

The litany of mistakes and broken promises stretches across the entire spectrum of Iranian society as the ruling theocracy has brutally suppressed human rights and gone on a spree of imprisonments, public executions and moves to cut off Iranians access to social media and open communications.

Couple that with an economy approaching Third World standards, an environment turning into a wasteland due to mismanagement and a mounting realization among ordinary Iranians that the divide between the wealthy and powerful elites and everyone else is wider than the Indian Ocean and the challenge facing the NIAC of maintaining its vaunted “echo chamber” seems greater than finding a cure for the common cold.

Which is why the NIAC is pushing all of its chips into trying to save the Iran nuclear deal at all costs since if the Trump administration walks away from it, the relevance of the NIAC plummets to that of Mr. Irrelevant in the NFL draft.

“I’m quite pessimistic,” said Trita Parsi, NIAC president, in an interview in The Hill.

Parsi argued President Trump’s threats to kill the deal have already scared businesses away from Iran, turning Iranian opinion against the agreement.

Again, Parsi is trying to find some other reasons for why the nuclear deal is failing and the Iranian people are turning against Khamenei, Rouhani and the other mullahs. His efforts to pin the blame for everything on the new administration ignores his own role in setting expectations for a new moderate era in Iran only to have all of his promised reforms drop dead.

He parlayed the echo chamber coalition of special interest groups, bloggers and academics invested in supporting the Iranian regime into a humming PR machine, but now has seen most of that infrastructure crumble and fall into ineffectiveness.

Most of the premium media interviews Parsi so relished at the height of the echo chamber have now vanished; reduced to a few poor blogs and obscure news outlets reaching audiences outside of the U.S.

Similarly, the cadre of fellow travelers he relied on has dried up as they have been outed by news outlets as being instruments of the Iranian regime and blasted on social media.

While the #MeToo movement took down powerful men accused of sexual harassment, the #FakeNews movement also targeted the imposters that have consistently tried to sell the idea of Iranian moderation against a backdrop of unremitting wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

The latest chemical attacks on Syrian families and the gruesome images of small children gassed by the Assad regime has put to a lie the idea of Iran backing Assad only to fight ISIS.

Now the Iranian regime finds itself getting pushed closer to the precipice of extreme reactionary moves to save itself as it announced a move to ban the popular Telegram messaging app used by almost half of all Iranians.

The official reason for the ban was economic nationalism: Iranian officials say they want to promote homegrown apps that could break Telegram’s virtual monopoly on social media in a country where authorities tightly monitor internet usage and many websites are inaccessible.

But the real reason lies in the regime’s desire to cut off Telegram in order to cripple the ability of Iranian dissidents to organize the mass protests that have plagued the mullahs since last December.

It also means the regime is almost paranoid over the apps recent cryptocurrency offering that reached a record and posed a significant threat to the beleaguered Iranian rial which hit an all-time low on Monday against the U.S. dollar.

The rial was trading at 62,000 to the dollar, an 18 percent drop since Saturday, which was the first working day after the Persian new year, when many people travel abroad and certainly heightened the regime’s desire to move forward in trying to squash Telegram and the threat it posed.

Laura Carnahan

Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Finally Endorses Regime Change

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Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Finally Endorses Regime Change

Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Finally Endorses Regime Change

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian lawyer, former judge in the Iranian regime and noted human rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, making her the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to win the award.

During her extensive and laudable career, Ebadi took care to never explicitly call for the kind of regime change many Iranian dissidents have long advocated. Instead, she retained hope that the Iranian government could be fixed from within by so-called reformers such as Hassan Rouhani, whom regime advocate groups like the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) have long sought to portray as a “moderate.”

However, her true positions came to light recently in an interview with Bloomberg in which she finally announced her belief that “reform is useless in Iran.”

Echoing the argument that Iranian dissidents have been making for more than two decades, Ebadi said that the means of ending Iranian tyranny should be a U.N.-monitored referendum on the constitution that proposes one basic change: eliminating the unelected office of supreme leader. The Iranian people, she said, “want to change our regime, by changing our constitution to a secular constitution based on the universal declaration of human rights,” according to Lake.

It’s a position similar to the one advocated by Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), in a ten-point plan for the future of  Iran.

Rajavi’s plan now seems remarkably prescient in light of the recent wave of massive grassroots demonstrations that began last December. Those protests and Ebadi’s belated condemnation are a strong rebuke not only to Rouhani but also to the Western progressives who foolishly believed he was an agent of change.

While Ebadi first made her views on the referendum known in February, she used the interview with Bloomberg to get more specific about what Western governments, and particularly the Trump administration, can do to assist the Iranian people in their struggle.

That included warning against any U.S. military intervention and urging only Iranian support for regime change. It’s a position that again echoed what the NCRI called for over a decade ago and represents a vindication of the vision laid out by the Iranian resistance movement in urging Western support for the Iranian dissident movement.

Ebadi went on to clarify what this type of Western support might look like, by advocating regime-targeting sanctions that would weaken the government without hurting the people themselves. For example, Ebadi says the U.S. and European governments should sanction the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting or IRIB. This conglomerate controls the media in Iran and also manages Iran’s foreign propaganda such as the English-language PressTV and the Arabic al-Alam. Ebadi stopped short, however, of endorsing the style of crippling sanctions that were disbanded by the Obama administration in mid-2015.

Ebadi also criticized NIAC, which played a key role in advocating for President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Ebadi told Bloomberg, she regrets participating in an event with NIAC in 2011, saying “when I analyzed what they say and do, I realize what they say is closer to what the government says that what the people want.”

Predictably, NIAC rallied its defenders among the American left including Noam Chomsky, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said in The “Iranian” (a site where lobbies and agents of Iranian regime write): “I don’t know on what basis Shirin Ebadi is confident that she knows better what Iranians want than NIAC, to take one of her examples,”

So what makes Chomsky, an American professor who speaks no Farsi and has never been to Iran, feel that he has more authority on the subject than an Iranian woman who has risked her life fighting for basic human rights in her country of birth?

It’s not clear, but coming from someone who has made a career echoing regime propaganda of America being a “terrorist state,” and has cast doubt on Assad’s well-documented use of chemical weapons, it is sadly unsurprising.

Trying to kill the messenger in order to kill the message seems to be a favored tactic of the Iranian regime and its lobbying arm.

Laura Carnahan

 

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

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Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

Iran Lobby Attacks on John Bolton Hide Fear of Regime Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

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Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

Iran Lobby Becomes Unhinged at Selection of John Bolton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Carnahan

NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

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NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

NIAC Tries to Defend Former Associate in State Department

Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a State Department official who was instrumental in directing policy for completing the much-criticized Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration, has been reassigned to other duties in the State Department by the Trump administration which has generated a flurry of lobbying activity by the Iran lobby.

The National Iranian American Council organized an effort to denounce the move in a letter sent to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and acting Secretary of State John Sullivan even though the reassignment was made last April 2017.

The genesis for this new round of false outrage though was a Politico story that discussed email conversations between administration officials calling into question her political loyalty. In essence, the NIAC and its brethren were objecting to that age-old political practice of “cleaning house” when a new party and administration comes to power.

Where was the NIAC’s outrage when the Obama administration led its own purge of Bush-era appointees and installed its own loyalists in key civil service positions at the end of its own term to ensure policies were continued in spite of the new Trump administration’s move in?

To say the NIAC’s outrage is silly is an understatement. Every president reserves the right to pick and choose whomever he likes to serve and carry out his policies. Every president is also entitled to move or reassign any federal employee that does not wish to carry out that administration’s policies.

It is no different for someone like President John F. Kennedy taking over for Dwight D. Eisenhower or Bill Clinton taking over for George H.W. Bush.

But in the twisted logic of the NIAC, it seems even that most basic of presidential prerogatives is off-limits when it comes to keeping a trusted ally in the heart of policy-making when it concerns the Iranian regime.

In the case of Nowrouzzadeh, her involvement in policy towards Iran under the Obama administration has been well-documented.

Born in the U.S. to Iranian parents, Nowrouzzadeh has worked in various government capacities including the Defense Department in 2005 as a foreign affairs analyst and later the State Department in a similar capacity. She later joined the Obama White House in the National Security Council as a director for Iran and part of the team responsible for the Iran nuclear deal.

What raises the suspicions of many though was her prior stint working for NIAC which seems to have been purged from her bios and NIAC’s public records. Why? Obviously, association with the Iran lobby group can be fatal to a career civil servant’s future job prospects and it has been in Nowrouzzadeh’s case.

Also, her key involvement in crafting an agreement that President Trump has openly derided also has proven disadvantageous.

While the reassignment is common in new administrations, the furor is not as the NIAC has chosen to use her as a stalking horse for attacking the Trump administration yet again as ardent Iran-haters and racists.

It is sad to see the NIAC elevate her case and drag her through the public mud in order to score political points over an action that every incoming president undertakes throughout history.

What this does reveal though is NIAC’s willingness to cast any stone in wild attempts to attack the Trump administration in some blind hope of slowing down the freight train of change barreling towards the Iranian regime.

The setbacks for NIAC are numerous and significant:

  • Its attacks on the Saudi government have failed to prevent a historic realignment in the Middle East of nations united against Iran’s regime and containing its expansion;
  • Its efforts to keep alive the Iran nuclear deal are on life support as President Trump has decided to install Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and former UN ambassador John Bolton as the new National Security Advisor. Both are ardent opponents of the nuclear deal;
  • Its struggle to deny democratic protests sweeping through Iran and bolster the fraudulent regime of Hassan Rouhani have only proven to news media how out of touch NIAC is with current events.

Oddly enough, Nowrouzzadeh could have settled this entire unhappy episode herself by simply advising President Trump’s incoming foreign policy team on the best methods for improving the nuclear agreement she had just worked to implement.

If you want to show your non-partisan, unbiased credentials, then all one has to do is provide the other point of view.

In her case, and because of the effort by NIAC to leverage her reassignment, the sad truth is that policy making in the State Department became highly politicized under the Obama administration, especially towards Iran.

Her reassignment is only the tip of the iceberg since if President Trump is going to finally hold the Iranian regime accountable for its support of terrorism and unbridled human rights failures, he will most likely need to reassign many more Nowrouzzadehs and that is the future that NIAC is terrified of.