The designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration was cheered up and praised by formerly terrorist designated entity, the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (the MKO, MEK, PMOI, Cult of Rajavi) and the hawks and warmongers such as Benjamin Netanyahu and John Bolton.
Two of them publicly gave credit to Trump’s move to list the IRGC. Netanyahu appreciated President Trump and claimed that the designation was made at his request. “Thank you, my dear friend, President Donald Trump,” he tweeted in Hebrew, “for answering another one of my important requests.”
Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the MKO also took credit for the new sanctions against the official Iranian military force. “The terrorist designation of the repressive Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been the enduring and the righteous demand of the Iranian people and Resistance and an imperative for regional and global peace and security,” she claimed on her tweeter account.
In fact, Maryam Rajavi hesitates to thank President Trump directly the same way that Netanyahu did. Instead, she repeats her usual propaganda against the IRGC, although she has warm relations with US warmongers. American Iran hawks such as John Bolton, Tom Ridge and Rudy Giuliani frequently show up in the MKO gatherings where they are warmly welcome by Maryam Rajavi. She pays them hefty sums to support her group and to stop what she calls appeasement towards Islamic Republic and eventually to impose more sanctions on Iran. The MKO successfully lobbied to be removed from the proper official State Department list of FTOs with the help of these paid supporters, in 2012. Thus, with the listing of IRGC, Maryam Rajavi is normally expected to make her comment of appreciation to indicate that how grateful she is to the US administration.
However, she would not act the same as Netanyahu because she does not dare to openly contradict what her husband said at Camp Ashraf. Defectors of the MKO are ready to give testimonies that the group’s disappeared leader, Massoud Rajavi always claimed that being in the US list of terrorist organizations was an honor that the MKO members were supposed to be proud of. “We are proud of being in the US list otherwise we should doubt our cause,” he regularly said in the meetings, in Iraq.
Maryam Rajavi does not want to recall that her group’s objectives were originally anti-American and anti-Imperialism. Thus, she has to show her contentment of more pressure against Iranian nation, in some way.
By Mazda Parsi
