Following the continuous floods in Iran that started in March claiming 70 lives, destroying infrastructures and displacing thousands of people across Iran, the opportunists such as the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO/ MEK/ PMOI/ Cult of Rajavi) have made efforts to fish in troubled waters.
The MKO’s propaganda media is flooded with the news of floods in Iran particularly claims of the authorities’ mismanagement to manage the disastrous rain showers and moreover the suppressive attitude of governmental forces against victims of the flood!
Actually the very question is that who cares for the MKO news websites? Definitely not the Iranian nation. The fact was once more repeated by the American prominent journalist a few weeks ago. Michael Rubin has always been a criticizer to the American support for the MKO although he is a significant critic of the Islamic Republic government. In his recent article he asserts that the decisions of the Trump administration “to defy long-held conventional wisdom on U.S. foreign policy” may not be so harmful but “when it comes to the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group, any cooperation and coordination—let alone support—from the United States would be disastrous.”
The main reason that he states for his argument is that there is “only one item that united Iranians inside Iran: absolute hatred of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK).”
Rubin truly suggests, “What really broke any remaining popular support for the MEK among ordinary Iranians, however, was their embrace of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq War”. As he accurately states, for most Iranians, the MEK-Saddam relationship is unforgivable.
He frankly puts: “The Mojahedin e-Khalq are a bad bet”
In his opinion, the MKO is a bad bet because the US should not trust a group that is hated among its own country fellowmen and eventually has turned into a political prostitute. “Unable to win any support from Iranians inside Iran, the MEK has turned to the gullible and greedy: they are political chameleons. When in Iran, they were a combination between Islamists and social justice warriors,” Rubin writes.
“In Iraq, they were secularists, basically Baathists without the Arab identity. And while in France, they are Ademocrats. In reality, their behavior resembles a cult, right down to dictating where members live, whom they should marry and divorce, and the rent-a-mobs who populate their rallies.”
Thus, the MKO’s propaganda on the recent flood in Iran has no Iranian audience but it surely has certain listeners among paid Western politicians like Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton. Stephanie Baker of Bloomberg website titles her recent article asking “where Rudy Giuliani’s money comes from”. She suggests that Giuliani has “made millions of dollars while acting as Trump’s unpaid consigliere” including the MKO as one of the main sources of Giuliani’s deep pockets.
“Giuliani told me he’s worked with the MEK since 2008,” Stephanie Baker writes.
“At the time, the U.S. Department of State designated the group a foreign terrorist organization, describing it as “cultlike” and saying members were forced to take a vow of “eternal divorce” and participate in weekly “ideological cleansings.” When the State Department revoked the designation in 2012, it nevertheless expressed serious concerns about the organization, “particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its members.”
However, as Rubin states, the biggest problem is treating the MEK as anything more than a pariah because Iranians hate the group for its history, previous actions, and past allegiances.
According to Dr. Emile Nakhleh former senior intelligence service officer and director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program in the Directorate of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency,
“The MEK, , is a terrorist cult that has received funding from all sorts of dubious sources and is often used as a tool by outside groups, states, and organizations, including intelligence services of regional and international state actors, to further an anti-Iran agenda.”
By Mazda Parsi