Iran Lobby

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

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.

 

Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

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Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

Iran Lobby Faces United US-Saudi Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

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NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

NIAC Misses Mark on Apple Shutdown of Iran App Store Access

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NIAC highlights this in its statement saying:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

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IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

IranLobby Screams About War With Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

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The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

The Biggest Lie About Syria and Middle East Stability

On June 30, 2015, Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian American Council and a staunch cheerleader for the Iranian regime, published an editorial on CNN’s website that in retrospect now looks otherworldly stupid.

In it, Parsi was making the case for the Iran nuclear deal and the benefits it would bring, not the least of which was the argument that it would help empower moderates in Iran, rally Iranian youth and bring about stability throughout the Middle East.

His exact words were:

“The deal will help unleash Iran’s vibrant, young (the median age is 28!) and moderate society, which is continuously pushing Iran in a democratic direction. The deal enjoys solid support among the Iranian public as well as among Iranian civil society leaders, partly because they believe the deal ‘would enable political and cultural reforms.’

“America benefits if the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people are increasingly met, because a more democratic Iran is a more moderate Iran.

“This is particularly important at a time when the violent winds of religious radicalism are ravaging the Middle East and beyond. America is in desperate need of an injection of political moderation in the region. An Iran that moves towards democracy could provide that,” Parsi wrote.

In the three years since he penned that fairy tale, the reality has been brutally and violently different than the rosy picture he painted:

  • Iran poured billions of dollars it received in economic sanctions relief into propping up the Assad regime in Syria and committing thousands of troops and material into expanding a civil war that claimed 400,000 lives and pushed out four million refugees;
  • Iran shifted billions away from its domestic economy to crash produce a ballistic missile program exempt from restrictions in the nuclear deal, threatening the region under a missile umbrella stretching 2,000 km and plunging the Iranian people into poverty;
  • In two parliamentary elections and a presidential race, the regime cracked down by arresting hundreds of journalists, dissidents, artists, bloggers, students and ethnic and religious minorities, as well as wiping off thousands of candidates in favor of preserving power within the hands of hardline religious candidates;
  • Iran has expanded wars in Iraq and Yemen using terrorist proxies funded and armed by the regime’s Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force, destabilizing the.

Parsi is either the dumbest political analyst on the planet or one so far committed to covering for the Iranian regime it’s a wonder he’s not drawing a salary from the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

Parsi has been so colossally wrong in his predictions we have to ask if any news organization ever runs a check on the accuracy of his quotes.

But picking apart Parsi’s past stumbles is only picking at the corners of a much broader tapestry; one in which the NIAC has been proven wrong over and over again in its predictions.

One of the more recent claims was by Ryan Costello, a NIAC policy fellow, who wrote in analysis running on the NIAC’s website on February 16, 2018, that the Iranian regime’s missile program was not a threat and pointed out it was limiting the range of its weapons to 2,000 km, which only placed most of the Middle East under threat of attack and not the whole world.

Small comfort when news has come out of satellite photos revealing a flurry of activity as Iran’s military begins construction of permanent military bases outside of Syria’s capital of Damascus complete with hangers capable of storing missiles that can now strike Israel, Saudi Arabia and most of the Mediterranean within a matter of minutes.

You hear that sound? It’s crickets in the silence coming from the NIAC.

According to Fox News, satellite images from ImageSat International show what is believed to be the new Iranian base operated by the Quds Force.  The photos show two new white hangars, each roughly 30 yards by 20 yards, used to store short- and medium-range missiles.

On Capitol Hill this week, the top U.S. military commander for American forces in the Middle East said Iran was “increasing” the number and “quality” of its ballistic missiles it was deploying to the region — when asked during a House Armed Services Committee hearing by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., about reports Iran had moved more missiles into Syria.

Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, said Iran has “enhanced” its funding to proxy forces in the Middle East since the landmark nuclear agreement in July 2015, including sending missiles, fighters and other arms to Yemen and Syria.

The presence of permanent bases in Syria by Iran directly contradicts claims made by the NIAC that Iranian regime would only be a stabilizing force, but instead has turned into an occupation force.

All of which begets the question of what the U.S. needs to do to counter the regime, a question the NIAC has yet to answer other than to press the Trump administration not to ditch the nuclear agreement.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month laid out a U.S. strategy in Syria that includes an indefinite stay for troops.

“U.S. disengagement from Syria would provide Iran the opportunity to further strengthen its position in Syria,” Tillerson said in the January speech. “As we have seen from Iran’s proxy wars and public announcements, Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally.”

The tragedy of all this is that the NIAC has contributed to the biggest lie about Syria over the past three years and so far no one except us and the Iranian dissident movement seems to be holding it accountable for it.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Regime Tapping Into Smartphones with Apps

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Iran Regime Tapping Into Smartphones with Apps

Iran Regime Tapping Into Smartphones with Apps

One of the hallmarks of the Iran lobby, especially the National Iranian American Council, has been its consistent boasting of looking out of the interests of average, ordinary Iranian-Americans. That’s why it has spent considerable energy burnishing its credentials through attacking the Trump administration’s immigration proposals aimed at curbing terrorism and supporting the Iran nuclear agreement.

Of course, that’s exactly why the Iran lobby, especially the NIAC, cannot be trusted to advocate on behalf of ordinary Iranians; it is in the bag with the mullahs in Tehran.

This explains why the NIAC has been silent on blockbuster revelations by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the largest dissident group to the Iranian regime, that Iran was using false front smartphone apps to secretly collect data on smartphone users in Iran, as well as around the world and may have been using the data to target and arrest protestors sweeping across Iran recently.

NCRI researchers allege in this new investigation that there are not only hundreds of smartphone apps currently being used by the Iranian regime to spy on its own citizens, some of them are available to users around the world via online marketplaces like Apple’s App Store, Google Play and GitHub.com, according to a Fox News report.

“The Iranian regime is currently hard at work to test the success of these apps on the people of Iran first,” said Alireza Jafarzadeh, the deputy director of the NCRI’s Washington office. “If not confronted, its next victims will be the people of other nations,” Jafarzadeh added, noting that the Iranian intel unit responsible for this alleged surveillance is the same group tasked with cyberwarfare against the West.

The NCRI report lists a handful of supposedly problematic apps that are available outside of Iran, despite these alleged connections to Iranian intelligence. The list includes Mobogram, Telegram Farsi and Telegram Black. Fox was able to confirm that most, if not all, are indeed still available for download.

The regime apps leverage the ability to text and communicate in native Farsi as an attribute driving many Iranians to download and use them, not knowing they are secretly developed by special cyberwarfare units within the Revolutionary Guard Corps.

It is estimated that some 40 million people in Iran were using the official Telegram app as a series of deadly protests broke out at the end of 2017, and the beginning of 2018. The apps have become popular because people outside of Iran are able to communicate with their family and friends, and because domestic users are able to evade government crackdowns on the internet.

This raises the very real specter that the regime is spying on family communications between Iranians and their American relatives and using that information to arrest and imprison any who might be viewed as dissenters.

During the mass protests that broke out last year and into this year, the regime shut down the popular Telegram app that many protestors were using to communicate with the outside world, including Western news agencies. This prompted many Iranians to switch to the fake regime apps and unwittingly placed them square in the bullseye of regime intelligence agencies.

Fox News reported that based on the NCRI revelations, Google was one of the first internet giants to remove some of the suspect apps from its Google Play and Android stores. We can only hope that Apple follows suit.

All of which makes curious why the NIAC remains silent on an issue of tremendous import to Iranian-Americans, but it silence should be surprising given its complete reticence in attacking any aspect of the Iranian regime’s policies.

In fact, why Iranian-Americans are being spied upon, the NIAC’s Trita Parsi was traveling through Kentucky to speak at a local World Affairs Council gathering and appear on local radio to again shill for the flawed Iran nuclear deal and flog the same tired myth that ditching the deal would surely lead the U.S. to war with Iran.

Ironically, it might be the Iranian regime and not the U.S. that ditches the nuclear deal first based on comments by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi who said if Iran did not continue to gain any benefits from the deal, especially more foreign investment, it would walk away from it first.

“If the same policy of confusion and uncertainties about the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) continues, if companies and banks are not working with Iran, we cannot remain in a deal that has no benefit for us,” Araqchi said. “That’s a fact.”

For Iran, the deal only serves as a means to an end, which is to reopen the flood-gates so cash could flow back into a regime dangerously teetering on the brink of insolvency from the cash it spent in supporting the Assad regime in Syria and the Houthi rebellion in Yemen, as well as development of its ballistic missile program.

It also means that the Iran lobby really doesn’t care much what happens to Iranians unless it benefits its PR efforts on behalf of the regime.

Laura Carnahan