Filner said his $9,839 in travel costs to Paris were covered by the Organization of Iranian-American Communities, a group Filner initially claimed was a charity organized under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3).“I have become aware that the OIAC’s representations regarding its non-profit status were inaccurate,” Filner said in a news release late Wednesday.
The MeK’s aka MKO/PMOI political agenda has undergone multiple transformations—at various points since its founding in 1965 it has been Marxist, Islamist, secular—but its opposition to Iran’s post-Shah Shi’a regime has remained a constant. The organization, which moved its main headquarters to Iraq in the 1980s, was first listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997 for its killings of American civilians in Iran in the 1970s and an attempted bombing of the Iranian UN Mission…
When the MEK/MKO/PMOI 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….
Bob Filner, a former congressman and San Diego Mayor, is seeking to survive the sex scandal that is the talk of America’s Finest City. …Such double standards may insult those who truly care about their words and behaviors. But that is the type of freedom, human rights and women’s right that the advocates of MKO have learned to respect.
..”involvement in terrorism that killed not only regime officials but ordinary Iranian citizens, as well as their willingness to accept aid and shelter from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the years after Iraq’s invasion of Iran, delegitimized the group in the face of the public they claim to represent.”..
It seems that the MKO/MEK/PMOI leaders must now not only pay speakers to sing their praises at their rallies, but also the audience members. The MKO is not only a creepy cult, and willing to say anything to buy support regardless of the group’s record, but an empty shell as well. Let us hope that one day their remaining congressional supporters will recognize that if they truly want to bring change to Iran’s odious regime, they would best reach out to the Iranian people….
Right. One of the reasons relations between the U.S. and Iran have been contentious is because the U.S. took it upon itself to change the Iranian regime once before. There are certainly many people in Iran who would like to see the current system fall or be systemically reformed — but the people rejoicing in the streets after the election of Rouhani are unlikely to cheer efforts to install an MEK cultist as a temporary president of Iran.
Definitely the MKO show in Paris was not an Iranian demonstration at all. The major authorities speaking at the hall were mostly American; the attendees were deceived to take a trip in Paris almost for free. Not a single Iranian except the she-guru of the cult, Maryam Rajavi addressed the crowd because none of the Iranian intellectuals –even those who oppose Islamic Republic – care about the MKO if they do not hate it.
Filner has previously accepted travel from groups that are part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. He went to Paris in June 2011, as a member of Congress. He also took a similar trip in June of 2007, federal records show. His 2011 trip cost $6,589 and was paid for by Colorado’s Iranian American Community, a group tied to the Mujahideen-e Khalq …
U.S. officials have tentatively identified a handful of Camp Liberty residents who may be allowed to move to the United States. But they would be expected to renounce their membership in MEK, the officials told Reuters.Forty-four residents of the camp have left over the last month for Albania, which has offered to take up to 210 of them.