The recent acts by former prominent republicans to lend their support to Mujahedin Khalq terrorists motivated Eric Larch a writer for TPM to have an interview with Professor Ahmad Sadri from Lake Forest College in Illinois. He is a professor of Islamic Word Studies and Sociology. In his phone interview with TPM, professor Sadri described MKO claims as ” They are saying to the world we are whatever you want us to be.”
Eric Lach reports the phone interview with professor Sadri by presenting a background of MKO situation in the United States administration and among US neoconservatives:
As TPM has reported, the MEK has a history of support in Washington, and a number of prominent U.S. national security experts and former government officials have recently taken up the MEK cause, which includes getting the MEK removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. The MEK was put on the terror list in 1997, in a move that has been described as a nod to Iran’s then reformist president.
At a panel in Washington D.C. two weeks ago, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and ex-Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) joined former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in painting the MEK not only as unfairly shackled by the terrorist label, but also as a critical part of the Iranian opposition movement.
“The Mujahedin have absolutely no backing in Iran,” Sadri told TPM. He said he’d first become aware of the MEK 40 years ago, when he occasionally listened to the group’s clandestine radio shows, broadcast before the fall of the Shah. He described the MEK in its early days as a “vanguard organization.”
Sadri, who moved from Iran to the U.S. in the mid-1970s to attend a Ph.D program at The New School, said he visited Iran once every year or two until the 2009 election, and “never heard a positive word uttered” about the MEK. According to Sadri, many Iranians have never gotten over the group accepting safe haven and patronage from Saddam Hussein, and then fighting on his behalf in the Iran-Iraq war. MEK supporters maintain that they had nowhere else to turn in 1986, when Saddam took them in.
“If there is one thing everyone can agree on Iran, it’s that Saddam Hussein is a really bad guy,” Sadri said.
Professor Sadri describes the group propaganda campaign as “very very active”. “They wheel and deal and they’re willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder”, he told Eric Lach.