Just because the MEK is no longer listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., that doesn’t mean that the shameless shilling and lying on their behalf has stopped. Here is Hugh Shelton:
For years, freedom-loving people around the world worked together under the courageous leadership of Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, using every tool at their disposal, to get the wrongful designation of the Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) as a terrorist group removed.
Finally, the “good guys” won, empowering the most powerful group outside Iran in favor of disposing of the current Iranian leadership and providing the freedom-loving people of Iran a chance for democracy.
When the MEK was originally designated as a terrorist organization, that wasn’t wrongful. It was an acknowledgment that the group had employed and continued to employ terrorist tactics to pursue their political goals. The current pro-MEK line is that the group has renounced those tactics, which is debatable, but it’s the purest revisionism to say that the group never deserved to be labeled as a terrorist group. Given that the MEK is a totalitarian cult, it is crazy to think that their leaders have anything in common with “freedom-loving people.” In the extremely unlikely and horrifying event that the MEK obtained real power, they would not preside over anything resembling a democratic government, but would establish their own deranged brand of authoritarianism. If not because they are being paid to say it, why would otherwise sane and intelligent people repeat such obvious propaganda again and again?
I don’t accept it, but I understand the warped logic that says that Americans should support the MEK because it hates the current Iranian government. But even obsessive Iran hawks have to recognize that siding with a group reviled in Iran for its role in the Iran-Iraq war is doomed to fail, and every high-profile American that praises and lobbies on behalf of this group is another propaganda victory for the Iranian government. How better to confirm the Iranian government’s most self-serving claims about the U.S. than to have so many former U.S. officials and politicians romanticize the MEK into a group of democratic freedom fighters?
By Daniel Larison