France is already preparing for its EU Presidency which is scheduled for July-December 2008. For sure, France has identified a number of key policy areas on which to focus when it assumes the presidency. The first issue that is of great importance for the country members of the EU is security and preventive measures against terrorism and its global threat, a responsibility all the countries have a share to fulfill.
Hillary knowingly supported the Iraq war to defend the “future of freedom”. In her drive for the Iraq war, she was supported by the Progressive Policy Institute, a self-described think-tank of the Democratic Leadership Council[i]. Perhaps no one describes the group better than former neoconservative Jacob Heilbrunn who wrote: “Don’t look now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback-and not among the Republicans who have made it famous, but in the Democratic Party ….
This stands in stark contrast with the perspectives of the MEK and its front organization. As part of its propaganda campaign, the MEK publish newspapers and websites like IranTerror.com and IranFocus.com. As an Iranian American, I am outraged that the MEK is attempting to hijack the perspectives of my community. The MEK do not represent Iranian-Americans in California – or anywhere else for that matter.
The cross-party parliamentarians backing the delisting of the PMOI – an organisation dedicated to overthrowing Iran’s fundamentalist regime by democratic means – include a former law lord, Lord Slynn, two former solicitors general and a former home secretary, Lord Waddington. The POAC, a body set up by the government to hear appeals from organisations on the UK blacklist,
But Home Office counsel Jonathan Swift told the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, today that the Government feared the PMOI’s professed cessation of terrorist activities was temporary and”for pragmatic reasons”. Lord Phillips, sitting with Lord Justice Laws and Lady Justice Arden, heard that the pro-democracy PMOI was formed 40 years ago with the aim of replacing the then-government of the Shah of Iran
According to the report, three senior judges headed by the lord chief justice, Lord Phillips, will hear the home secretary’s appeal. The government argues that the proscribed group has only temporarily ceased terrorism for”pragmatic reasons”. A Home Office spokesman said:”The PMOI was engaged in terrorism until 2001, and until 2003 kept an extensive arsenal at its base in Ashraf
Far beyond being an internal threat, terrorism stages a global threat that has to be fought by all the means. A globally proscribed terrorist organization, MKO may appeal to a variety of lawful judiciary bodies and take advantage of proficient lawyers and proponent parliamentarians to divert governments and international bodies from the potential terrorist threat of the organization.
We have to be consistent in our views of terrorists,”he told supporters of protracted attempts to have the MKO removed from Britain’s domestic list of proscribed organizations, suggesting they had been falsely influenced.”When we like the people whom terrorists attack, we call them ‘terrorists,’ when it is the civilians of Iran who are attacked, we have a bad habit of thinking of them as liberation fighters,”Malloch-Brown
British Foreign Office announced on Tuesday that the British government still considers the banned MKO a terrorist organization. Mark Mallon Brown, British deputy foreign secretary for Asia and the United Nations, protested a recent verdict by the Commission for Reviewing the Status of Banned Organization.
“…Lord Malloch-Brown: My Lords, I certainly concede the point that the organization is led by a woman [Iran-Interlink editor – the PMOI is led by a man, Massoud Rajavi, who is the sole decision maker in the organisation, Maryam Rajavi is only his lieutenant.], but I will risk the wrath of a portion of this House when I say that despite that, and despite what it says about the rights of women, the PMOI was involved in numerous terrorist attacks for a very extended period. At the time of the second Gulf War, it was considered by coalition forces to be completely assimilated into the security apparatus of the Saddam Hussein regime. Indeed, we had to disarm the organization to the extent of 2,100 tanks, vehicles and artillery pieces. Since then it has made no renunciation of terrorism and disarmed only in the face of pressure from coalition forces; so, despite what it has to say on women’s rights, we are not convinced that in other regards this organization has permanently renounced terrorism….”