Iran Lobby

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

NIAC Tries to Diminish Iran Protests

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NIAC Tries to Diminish Iran Protests

NIAC Tries to Diminish Iran Protests

The National Iranian American Council has a problem; well it has several problems. It has lost its influential position in the “echo chamber” created by the Obama administration. It has lost its currency with many mainstream news organizations as the Iranian regime it defends has clearly shown itself to be a staunch supporter of sectarian wars and terrorism.

It finds itself having to retool on the fly and recast itself as a loyal and faithful partner to the progressive wing of American politics in the hopes of finding continued relevancy in an era of conservative politics dominating the White House, Congress, and electorate.

Much of that more conservative view among Americans has been driven by unrelenting terrorist attacks inspired by Islamic extremism; much of it flowing from the Iranian regime. It was also helped by extensive coverage of Iran’s own appalling human rights record over the past two years in the face of a so-called moderate administration by Hassan Rouhani.

Now the NIAC is faced with the specter of a widespread series of grassroots protests ranging throughout Iran and based largely within the working classes and poor of Iran’s population. It is the type of revolt that fueled the revolution against the Shah before it was hijacked by the mullahs that turned Iran into a theocracy.

The protests in Iran have been largely fueled by deep distrust of the regime, backbreaking poor economic conditions, the perception of rampant government corruption and a rigged game that rewards the scions of the Revolutionary Guards and mullahs, but punishes everyone else with strict morality codes, ever-vigilant policing and ruthless religious courts.

So, the leaders of the NIAC, including Trita Parsi, are faced with having to defend an Iranian regime in the face of broad and deep protests from the Iranian people – many of whom communicate with American-based relatives that find the NIAC virtually silent and absent in advocating for their Iranian brethren.

What does the NIAC do then? It does what it has always done: try to confuse the public and media about the true nature of resistance to the Iranian regime.

In this case, it involved putting on a panel discussion in Washington, DC in the hopes of communicating that Iran was changing in response to the protests.

Among the panelists were notable advocates for the Iran nuclear deal and noted apologists for the Iranian regime.

“Public dialogue with the (Iranian) state occurs through protest and those protests force changes to come about,” said Sanam Anderlini, Executive Director and co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network. “Each time there are protests, the regime gives some space and the public moves along, and there is an accommodation” that pushes the country in a more progressive direction.

It is one of the more inane comments said in relation to the political reality in Iran since the Iranian regime has never responded to public protest with a push towards a “more progressive direction.”

In fact, past history clearly demonstrates the regime’s willingness to use brutal force and murder to suppress protest. It happened in the wake of the 2009 mass demonstrates over a presidential election widely considered stolen in favor of re-electing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This most recent rounds of protests around the country have been suppressed by police and IRGC plain clothes and resulted in scores of deaths and arrests of nearly 8,000 men and women, 12 of which are known to have been slain under torture, which the government claims have been cases of suicide.

By the regime’s own admission, fewer than a thousand of those arrested have so far been released weeks later.

Another panelist, a research associate at the Watson Institute at Brown University, pushed the other favorite theory of the Iran lobby which was that these protests were in fact not products of discontent by ordinary Iranians, but were instead fomented by “hardliners” opposed to Rouhani’s “moderate” policies.

She again also emphasized the lack of sanctions relief by the U.S. as a major reason why the regime’s economy has sputtered and spurred protests. She, of course, neglected to mention the diversion of billions in new funds resulting from the lifting of sanctions from the nuclear that was instead used on building a ballistic missile program and funding wars in Syria and Yemen rather than boosting the economy.

In another Iran lobby message, she squarely lays blame on President Donald Trump as if the president was personally cooking the books in Tehran.

Predictably, the NIAC’s Reza Marashi weighed in by comparing the Trump administration to the Obama administration as if he was mourning a long-lost lover.

The panelist from Brown University’s biggest lie was describing the political response in Iran to the protests as being markedly different than previous major demonstrations.

“Unlike the 2009 protests, in which the political establishment eventually decided they should be suppressed, in this protest almost all factions have said publicly ‘we should let the people protest and let the people air their grievances’ because no one wanted to be seen as suppressing their base,” she claimed.

It is a bald-faced distortion given the ample video and photographic evidence of regime police and IRGC plainclothes wading into crowds throughout Iran in running street battles as chants of death to Rouhani and top mullah Ali Khamenei rang out.

It is amazing that the NIAC can continue to deny the evidence that every Iranian-American knows now which is that Iran is not on a course to moderation, but steering straight towards a reckoning with its own people.

Laura Carnahan

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

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Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

Seyed Hossein Mousavian Gets It Wrong Again

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former official with the Iranian regime who transplanted to Princeton University and remade himself into a scholar, has been busy advocating for his old bosses; the mullahs in Tehran.

Even though he presided over various aspects of the regime’s security apparatus and was responsible for essentially hiding its clandestine nuclear program, he has worked diligently from his university perch to push the same old narratives supporting the Iranian regime.

One of his most recent key messages has been to push the narrative surrounding the growing confrontations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In an essay he wrote for the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Mousavian dives deeply into the discussion and tries to frame Saudi Arabia’s opposition to growing Iranian influence as part of a larger U.S. security plan to maintain control in the region.

“The chief rivalry in the region—between Saudi Arabia and Iran—is in fact a proxy for the competition between states seeking multipolarity (Iran) and those seeking to bandwagon off continued U.S. regional and global hegemony (Saudi Arabia),” he writes.

“Given Iran’s expanding regional influence, the foremost concern of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and some other regional Arab states is that as the United States disengages from the Middle East and Persian Gulf, the subsequent vacuum is not filled by Iran and Iran’s allied powers. This worry is amplified by the fact that the Arab World is in decline and traditional Arab powers have either collapsed or are stricken with domestic crises,” Mousavian adds.

He tries to make the same stale argument similarly made by other Iran lobby supporters such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council that Iran is merely filling in the natural power vacuum resulting from waning American influence and that Iran is on the ascendancy, so it should naturally take a more preeminent position.

Couple this with a decaying and decadent Arab world, it makes sense for Iran to be a natural power in the Middle East according to Mousavian.

Unfortunately, the reality is much different than the picture he tries to paint. Far from being a rising power that used its economic clout, political influence of even cultural impact to influence the region, the Iranian regime has instead used its Revolutionary Guards and Quds Force to militarily intervene in neighbors such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen, while it has funded and directed proxies such as terror groups like Hezbollah and Houthi rebels to topple government and carry out attacks.

Far from using the financial windfall it gained from the nuclear deal to better and improve its own economy and lift the poorest Iranians, the mullahs instead opted to divert billions on a crash program to build and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile capability that has threatened its neighbors with the prospect of weapons of mass destruction raining down on them.

These are not the acts of a nation interested in being a friendly partner, but rather a brutal regime intent on subverting and controlling its neighbors in order to create an extremist Islamic version of the old Warsaw Pact to protect itself.

Mousavian also touts Iran’s willingness to fight terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but neglects to mention that through its own terrorist network through Hezbollah, Iran conducts terrorist operations far from the battlegrounds of the Middle East and specifically targets and kills U.S. personnel; most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Appallingly, Mousavian takes Saudi Arabia to task for the conflict in Yemen, blaming it for causing a humanitarian crisis there. He attempts to draw on historical claims of Houthi governance there and that the Saudis had engineered an overthrow.

What he again fails to point out is that the war in Yemen didn’t start until Iran armed Houthi rebels, supplying them with guns, mortars, rockets and communications equipment and regularly supplies them through clandestine Iranian fishing vessels; some of which have been intercepted by U.S. and Saudi navy ships.

Mousavian goes on to make similar claims that Saudi Arabia is responsible for instability in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and even Palestine and Israel. For Mousavian, Saudi Arabia seems to be the most powerfully destabilizing force in the Middle East. About the only thing he doesn’t seem to blame Saudi Arabia and its primary patron, the U.S., for is global warming.

Lastly, Mousavian takes aim at Iranian resistance groups, including the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which he claims conducts terrorist acts on Iranian soil, but also neglects to mention the long history of open warfare by the Iranian regime against its members and other Iranian dissidents; including assassinations carried out by its Quds Forces and attacks on unarmed refugees at camps in Iraq.

“These realities have compelled Iran to have an active, preemptive, and deterrent role in the region in order to secure it borders, centralized governance, and national cohesion. To achieve these aims, Iran’s foreign policy goals have been centered on confronting threats, stabilizing the region, and improving its self-sufficiency in the production of weapons of deterrence, including ballistic missiles,” Mousavian claims.

But ultimately Iranian regime has done little to stabilize the Middle East. In fact, since the nuclear deal, it has in fact been the chief antagonist and leading participant in the wars that have raged there. Even as of this month, the Iranian regime escalated conflicts in Syria when its forces approached a U.S. base along the Syria-Iraq border which resulted in attacks by U.S. aircraft.

If any nation is interested in establishing permanent military bases far from its borders, it is the Iranian regime and the rapid pace of confrontations with the U.S., Saudi Arabia and others only underscore the regime’s willingness to up the ante in terms of spreading conflict.

The real enemy isn’t Saudi Arabia as Mousavian claims, but rather the mullahs in Tehran and the Iran lobbyist that cover for them.

Michael Tomlinson

NIAC Tries to Rebuild Image Among Iranian-Americans

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NIAC Tries to Rebuild Image Among Iranian-Americans

NIAC Tries to Rebuild Image Among Iranian-Americans

One of the drawbacks for the Iran lobby’s leading organizer, the National Iranian American Council, has been that with investigative journalism and lawsuits the truth about its ties to the Iranian regime have come out and colored the perception of it as a true non-partisan, human rights group only interested in advocating for the welfare of Iranian-Americans.

In truth, the group’s links to the regime and its almost-cult-like obedience to supporting the regime and not criticizing it has left it open to legitimate charges of being an Iranian regime front group and nothing more.

This has been especially damaging towards the larger Iranian-American community which has shown a broader and deeper willingness to question the NIAC’s motives, especially as the Iranian resistance movement has made tremendous inroads in building ties to the broader Iranian diaspora scattered since the Islamic revolution that stole their homeland.

The damage to the NIAC has come especially in the wake of the nuclear agreement two years ago and the much-promised democratic reforms that the NIAC claimed would come as a result have become illusory.

In fact, Iranian-Americans have become alarmed at the level of brutality and violence shown by the regime and its blatant targeting of dual nationals; resulting in several notable Iranian-Americans being arrested and held without trial or charge and used only as potential chips in political bartering.

These same Iranian-Americans have also been horrified by social media postings from friends and relatives in Iran showing the brutal crackdowns on recent protests flooding throughout Iran from ordinary Iranians struggling to survive in an essentially a war-time economy.

But Trita Parsi and other leaders at the NIAC are not idiots. They recognize the futility of trying to cover for the regime when Iranian women are being rounded up and tossed into prison for simply taking off their headscarves as a sign of solidarity with protestors.

That is why the NIAC has launched an effort to participate in voter education campaigns in Northern California in San Mateo and Sacramento counties; both with sizable Iranian populations.

On the surface, the voter education efforts are pretty innocuous; designed to help educate voters, translating documents to Persian and conduct outreach. The efforts are funded by grants from the Hopewell Fund and the Future of California Elections. It would be interesting to know if either organization is aware of the NIAC’s ties to the Iranian regime’s leadership and its record of shilling for Iran in the face of mind-boggling human rights violations.

For the NIAC though the voter outreach is important in presenting a different face to the Iranian-American public beyond constantly braying for a nuclear agreement that has not worked in curbing the violent excesses of the mullahs.

Parsi and his colleagues also know that constantly defending the regime and the nuclear agreement from near-constant assault from President Donald Trump on down to columnists and bloggers is nothing more than a rear-guard action now and the NIAC is rapidly becoming impotent on the topic.

That leaves them working to rebuild their image and re-legitimize themselves in the eyes of the one community their mission statement claimed to represent all along. Unfortunately, because of the policy of appeasement adopted by the Obama administration, the NIAC found a home with progressive Democratic organizations and as such needs to work for their political advancement as its only means of survival.

That loyalty to Democratic aims is on display on Parsi’s social media feeds in which he regularly retweets political postings that often have nothing to do with the welfare of Iranian-Americans, but reinforces his progressive credentials.

All of which is odd since Parsi and the NIAC have done a rather piss-poor job of supporting for example the rights of women in Iran in regards to employment, misogyny laws, dress codes and imprisonment.

Oh, Parsi might send out the odd tweet about a woman prisoner or specific case, but will not condemn the theocratic system in Iran which dispenses so much misery on a mass scale.

This is also why the NIAC has taken up the cause of illegal immigration and trying to tie to Iranian-Americans claiming that Trump administration is anti-Iranian, not anti-terrorism. It is an ironic position to take since the U.S. is not the one throwing Iranian-Americans into prison, but rather the Iranian regime is doing that.

Inconsistency of thought has never been a problem for Parsi as he literally bends like a pretzel to accommodate the excesses of the Iranian regime. For Parsi, he go-to messages points are always to blame Saudi Arabia, etc.; claim that anyone opposing the regime is a war-monger and that there are lots of moderates fighting the good fight within Iran’s government.

Fortunately, due to the hard work of investigative journalists, blogs such as ours (if we can toot our own horn) and landmark disclosures through lawsuits, the broader truth about the NIAC’s true aims have come to light.

All of which may go a long way towards explaining why the Iranian-American community is not a broad supporter of the NIAC. The benefits and results directly affecting this community through the NIAC’s advocacy are few and far between.

So while the NIAC is busy trying to educate voters in Northern California, the broader Iranian-American community, especially in the greater Los Angeles area (which contains the largest Iranian diaspora community outside of Iran) has been largely silent in supporting the NIAC, but has been a vocal booster of the Iranian resistance movement both financially and politically, including support for the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

And that must concern Parsi very much.

Michael Tomlinson

Hassan Rouhani Mounts PR Offensive to Rebuild Moderate Image

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Hassan Rouhani Mounts PR Offensive to Rebuild Moderate Image

Hassan Rouhani Mounts PR Offensive to Rebuild Moderate Image

One of the inconvenient truths for Iranian regime president Hassan Rouhani has been the growing irrelevance of the Iran lobby and its inability to drive the narrative in the U.S., especially among leading media outlets.

Where once loyal allies such as Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council were common fixtures on CNN, NPR and the New York Times, they are now largely relegated to small, progressive blogs and websites.

Much of that has been due to the revelations over the years of the existence of the Iran lobby and its cooperation with the Obama administration to create an “echo chamber” in support of passing the Iran nuclear deal and its ties to the Iranian regime through the work of investigative journalists and lawsuits.

Iran itself didn’t help with its long support and intervention in the bloody Syrian civil war and sectarian fights in Iraq and Yemen that have claimed tens of thousands of lives. Neither did the election of Donald Trump as president; who took a much dimmer view of the regime’s claims towards moderation and has all but ignored anything the Iran lobby says.

All of which may explain why the regime has decided to put Rouhani out in front aggressively shilling a moderate/hard line on topics ranging from the economy to recent protests in effort to reinforce the illusion of moderation it once projected.

It’s important to remember that this is really what Rouhani was elected to do in the first place. His position lacks any real substantive power within regime since he does not control the Revolutionary Guards Corps, nor its Quds Force. Neither does he wield any power over the paramilitaries that brutally enforce morals codes on the people or the religious courts that are often used to sentence and imprison Iranians by the thousands.

Which is why the original messages put forth by regime supporters such as Parsi and the NIAC that Rouhani’s election was a sign of a seismic shift within the regime government weren’t worth much more than used toilet paper.

As a prophet, Parsi falls somewhere between David Koresh of the Branch Davidians and the Weekly World News.

What is true is that Rouhani put on a PR blitz this week to try and shore up support from the regime in a number of areas at a wide ranging press conference:

  • Rouhani conducts a televised news conference in which he states that Iranians have political, economic and social demands that must be met. “Our ears must be completely open to listen and know what the people want. The government is trying to solve the problems with all its power,” he said. Unfortunately, that didn’t help the over two dozen people that were killed and more than 8,000 arrested and tossed into prison as the protests were put down by Rouhani’s government;
  • At the same press conference, Rouhani reiterated that the regime would abide by the nuclear agreement’s terms even if President Trump opted out and withdrew from the agreement. “We will stay in the JCPOA [nuclear agreement] as long as our interests are observed. The US staying in or out of [the accord] will not be the main criteria for our decision,” Rouhani said. “We have principles and will continue [our commitment to the deal] based on our principles.” He neglected to mention that the regime got all of the benefits it already wanted from the agreement such as billions in cash, relief from sanctions and the ability to see oil back on the open market without giving up hardly anything;
  • Rouhani adds that the Revolutionary Guard Corps would divest itself from a range of companies it controls, including some in the energy sector, in order to “rescue the country’s economy.” Claiming that Iran needed outside investment to modernize its petroleum production facilities, Rouhani neglects to mention that under his corrupt government, billions were siphoned off to fund war and terrorist activities, allowing industry to falter and fall apart; and
  • In taking a harder stance, Rouhani said that Iran’s ballistic missile program would be off-limits to any restriction or sanctions. “We will negotiate with no one on our weapons,” Rouhani said. “Iranian-made missiles have never been offensive and never will be. They are defensive and are not designed to carry weapons of mass destruction, since we don’t have any.” He neglected to discuss why the regime’s missile program was the linchpin to a new regional military strategy to put its neighbors and most of Europe and Asia within missile striking distance as a means of political leverage or even blackmail;

So, while Rouhani was all sweet and moderate, behind his words were the real iron fist of a regime unwilling to bend or compromise or deny itself the ability to stifle dissent or control its own destiny.

Add to that statements made by two Iranian-backed Shiite militias in Iraq that demanded the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in order to allow Iran a dominant position as the only foreign military power within Iraq.

Kataib Hezbollah, a more militant, secretive and anti-American group, repeated threats to attack US forces.

“We are serious about getting the Americans out, using the force of arms because the Americans don’t understand any other language,” its spokesman, Jaafar Al-Husseini, told Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV on Monday evening.

Kataib Hezbollah has strong links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and has threatened to attack US forces several times in the past, describing their presence as an occupation.

But what has Rouhani most troubled, as well as the Iran lobby, is the persistent protests by ordinary Iranians that are not going away, no matter how many are imprisoned.

That is what concerns Rouhani and the mullahs the most; that this organic and natural protest movement will continue to spread and take deep root within Iran and pose the most significant threat to their rule.

Laura Carnahan

Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protesters

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Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protestors

Trita Parsi Tries to Diminish Iranian Protestors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hope that changes soon.

Laura Carnahan

Trita Parsi Bashes Trump State of the Union on Iran Threat

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Trita Parsi Bashes Trump State of the Union on Iran Threat

Trita Parsi Bashes Trump State of the Union on Iran Threat

President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union speech in which he went through a laundry list of domestic policy achievements as all presidents are wont to do. As expected, the speech will generate much debate and fierce support and opposition, but for our purposes, we are more interested in the reaction of the Iran lobby to his specific comments on the rogue regime in Iran.

In his speech, the president singled out recognition of the ongoing protests erupting in Iran:

“When the people of Iran rose up against the crimes of their corrupt dictatorship, I did not stay silent. America stands with the people of Iran in their courageous struggle for freedom.”

He also went on to criticize the Iran nuclear deal:

“I am asking the Congress to address the fundamental flaws in the terrible Iran nuclear deal.”

President Trump’s comments were a stark contrast to his predecessor’s efforts to tout diplomatic overtures to the mullahs in Tehran as a means to cajole them into submission; ultimately failing entirely.

Whereas President Obama took nearly a week to toughen his talk after the brutal suppression of protests over the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran, President Trump opted to embrace protests in Iran even as they broke out on the streets of cities throughout Iran.

President Trump’s actions also stand in opposition to the key messages and slogans endlessly uttered by the Iran lobby and some of its chief leaders such as the National Iranian American Council which always sought to deflect any potential criticisms of Iran or its theocratic leadership.

The NIAC’s Trita Parsi wasted no time in jumping up to attack President Trump over his support for Iranian protestors.

On his Twitter feed, which people should look at just for the Hollywood-like pats on the back he gives himself over his new book, Parsi tried to turn the president’s comments away from the legitimate protests in Iran towards his immigration ban to halt the flow of terrorists from countries that support terrorism.

“No Mr. Trump, you did not stand with the people of Iran when you banned them from visiting their American relatives in the US, nor when you tried to turn legitimate protests against the Iranian government into a tool for your Saudi-sponsored push for war…” Parsi tweeted.

It really is amazing how Parsi is able to cram so much misinformation in less than 140 characters.

He accuses the president of supporting the protestors in Iran as a pretense for some Saudi Arabian plan for war against the Iranian regime. Of course, Parsi neglects to mention that it was Iran’s intervention in the Syrian civil war and the Houthi rebellion in Yemen that brought it into direct conflict with the Saudis.

It has always been the mullahs in Tehran that have destabilized the Middle East through their intervention and use of the Revolutionary Guards and Quds Forces to subvert and attack their neighbors.

And Parsi and his colleagues at the NIAC have always stood by them and defended them against attacks; diplomatic or journalistic.

Ryan Costello of the NIAC, sent out a similar tweet attacking President Trump on the immigration ban. Fortunately, no one seemed to be listening with only two retweets five hours after the speech.

Therein lies the problem confronting the NIAC and its fellow travelers in the Iran lobby: fewer and fewer people seem to be caring what it has to say. With a hyperactive Twitterverse exploding with commentary about the president’s speech, Parsi’s tweets and those of his NIAC’s cohorts garnered little social media traction.

An odd situation considering how their profiles boast of thousands of followers. One might wonder if Parsi and his colleagues bought their followers from social media firms such as Devumi as recently reported widely of similar scams by several noted celebrities.

While Parsi claims to have over 71,600 followers, the guy can only get 12 retweets on his anti-Trump tirade?

While Parsi has always had a problem with generating fake news, he seems to be having trouble generating any interest out his Twitter followers except by click-baiting profiles that only retweet such as @sabengel4 which seems to have generated an amazing amount of retweets for Parsi, but not authored one original tweet.

This should lead to a broader and deeper discussion of just how much influence does Parsi and the NIAC really wield these days in the post-Obama world they now find themselves in. With events in Iran moving away from them with a mass rebellion by the Iranian people and a regime not living up to the nuclear deal and Trump administration outmaneuvering them on almost every front, the NIAC and Parsi seem to be contestants on the latest episode of “Survivor.”

This growing isolation can be seen in the decidedly less than ample access the NIAC seems to enjoy from mainstream media outlets which carry fewer and fewer editorials and opinion pieces authored by Parsi and his colleagues.

It seems the only places Parsi can get an audience is only when he bashes President Trump on issues such as immigration on progressive media outlets or blogs or his annual appearance on Russia Today.

In many ways, Parsi is becoming the very thing he seems to despise the most as evidenced by his ham-handed self-promotion over his latest non-bestseller: irrelevant.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

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Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

Iran Lobby Pushes Seyed Hossein Mousavian to Forefront

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

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

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

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

What have the mullahs done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mousavian clinches the irony trophy when he writes:

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

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

Michael Tomlinson

Trita Parsi’s Myths

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Five Myths About Trita Parsi

Five Myths About Trita Parsi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some moderation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Carnahan

The Irony of Trita Parsi Attacking an Echo Chamber

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The Irony of Trita Parsi Attacking an Echo Chamber

The Irony of Trita Parsi Attacking an Echo Chamber

Politico recently published a blockbuster expose of the Obama administration’s efforts to derail and stymie investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency into the narcotics and arms trafficking of the Lebanese-based terrorist group, Hezbollah, in order to preserve the prospects for a nuclear agreement with the Iranian regime.

Predictably, the National Iranian American Council, the flagbearer for the Iran lobby, finally chimed in with an editorial authored by the NIAC’s Trita Parsi in Huffington Post.

The parade of misstatements by Parsi is not surprising if anyone has followed his career. He has been a staunch and vocal supporter of the Iranian regime, even when it engages in brutal acts of human rights violations or supports various proxy wars resulting in the deaths of thousands of men, women and children.

In many aspects, his objectivity has never been an issue of debate since he clearly demonstrates he is incapable of demonstrating any objectivity when it comes to criticizing the mullahs in Tehran.

In his latest diatribe in Politico, there is a certain amount of irony in his naming the opposition to the Iranian regime as a “pro-war echo-chamber” since the NIAC led the “pro-Iran echo-chamber” charge during the run-up in nuclear talks. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes was the one who famously described the echo chamber built by the administration in collusion with pro-Iranian lobbying forces to suppress any dissent and spread the false narratives that any opposition to passage of the deal was merely war mongering by Iran “hawks.”

That echo chamber was a formidable coalition of Obama administration officials, Democratic and progressive support groups, K Street lobbying firms and sponsored front groups such as the NIAC and The Ploughshares Fund whose job it was to supply a steady stream of so-called “experts” and academics that could be paraded before news media as reliable sources of information and analysis.

Parsi’s hit piece in Huffington Post is a prime example of those same smear tactics in attempt to suppress any contrary opinion even in the face of overwhelming evidence over the past two years that all of the promises made by Parsi and his cohorts have fallen flat on their faces.

Parsi attempts to discredit the Politico investigation by describing it as lacking any “actual evidence,” but its noteworthy that Parsi never tackles the heart of the Politico story which are the statements made by DEA agents and Department of Justice prosecutors who go on record detailing the suppression of the narcotics trafficking investigations against Hezbollah.

Any reasonable person would doubt that career DEA agents are part of the right-wing, pro-war hawks Parsi tries to pin the story on. In fact, the lengthy series of articles is largely devoid of the bombast normally associated with political diatribes common to Beltway politics.

Instead, it’s a sober, methodical and meticulous examination of the hard work put forth by federal agents and prosecutors and the documented ties between Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.

At no time does Parsi ever actually deny that Hezbollah is a military and terrorist proxy for Iran and never does he deny Hezbollah’s acts in committing heinous crimes in Syria and Lebanon, nor its role in targeting and killing U.S. personnel over the past three decades.

Instead Parsi does the typical two-step dance move in sidestepping these inconvenient truths and instead tries to reach way out into fantasyland by trying to tie the Politico story with Israel in some convoluted way.

“If the pro-war echo-chamber genuinely believes their own spin that Obama betrayed other less pressing issues in order to secure a nuclear deal, then that reveals an even more dangerous problem: Their complete inability to see the bigger picture and differentiate between larger and smaller threats, prioritize between primary and secondary objectives,” Parsi writes.

This is Parsi’s favorite gambit, to try and frame the argument of choices between “big picture” objectives like the nuclear agreement and “little picture” ones such as human rights and terrorism or ballistic missiles.

It’s a terrible Hobson’s choice he tries to set up largely because history teaches us that you cannot act on the initiatives of a crazed regime and leave the regime’s power structure in place to create more mischief in other areas.

This was the exact same conundrum faced by European nations in the 1930s when Hitler’s Nazi Germany rose to power. By never addressing the sickness at the core of Nazi Germany and only dealing with the excesses such as the annexation of Austria, Hitler was only emboldened to reach farther afield when he realized the West was not going to stop him.

Similarly, the Obama administration’s well-documented efforts at trying to appease the Iranian regime at all costs has led to disastrous consequences for the regime with conflicts raging in Syria and Yemen and the threat of a broader war breaking out between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

“For the pro-war echo-chamber, Iran and the Iranian nuclear deal is at the center of the universe. All other challenges America faces are overshadowed by the desire to kill the Iran deal and strike Iran militarily. While that may be a fitting point of departure if you look at the region from the perspective of Iran-obsessed governments in Tel Aviv or Riyadh, it does not make sense from the perspective of any government in Washington that takes America’s global responsibilities and national interest seriously,” Parsi adds.

This is the heart of the insanity of his persistent falsehoods regarding the Iran nuclear deal and the overall approach to the Iranian regime in general.

Opponents to Iran have never wanted war. No one is calling for war and the Iranian dissident movement has not urged it. It is a canard created by Parsi and his colleagues in an effort to frighten the public and policymakers and drive American public opinion away from taking concrete action in containing Iran.

The Iran nuclear deal is not at the center of the Trump administration policy discussions because the mess left by the nuclear deal has spawned a host of headaches including the threat of long-range ballistic missiles, civil wars in neighboring countries, the rise and spread of radical Islamic terrorism and the daily oppression of the Iranian people.

These are all things Parsi neglects to talk about because for him, the truth is too hard to fight.

Michael Tomlinson

Iran Lobby Pushing More False Narratives Against Protests

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Iran Lobby Pushing More False Narratives Against Protests

Iran Lobby Pushing More False Narratives Against Protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Tomlinson