Although the list of foreign terrorist organizations unfortunately has come to be regarded as a kind of general-purpose way of bestowing condemnation or acceptance on a group, we should remember that delisting changes nothing about the character of the MEK/MKO/PMOI. It is still a cult. It still has near-zero popular support in Iran. It still has a despicably violent history. As for more recent chapters of that history…
there is undoubtedly more to the decision to delist the group than the fact that it showered money on former U.S. officials — funds that were probably extracted from American taxpayers at some point. .. numerous reports indicate that the cult has been as busy as ever. As recently as 2009, for example, the U.S. State Department warned that “MEK leadership and members across the world maintain the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts
In 2005, Donald Rumsfeld used MEK to carry out various reconaissance and sabotage operations in Iran after they had been equipped and trained at a base in Nevada. More recently, they have been directly linked to the assasination of Iranian military scientists, now supposedly by being trained and armed by the Israeli Mossad…
This is a bloody-minded, bloody-handed organization with a past history of assassination and involvement in ethnic cleansing, murder, and human rights abuses on a large scale.Does the United States really think it can adopt its own extremist organization, domesticated and house-trained like a well-mannered pet to be used against Iran, without consequence?
And now, with the MEK aka MKO/PMOI, we have a group that, at least according to some reports, appears to have intensified its terrorism, and yet they are removed from the list. Why? Because now they are aligned against the prime enemy of the US and Israel – and working closely with those two nations – and are therefore, magically, no longer “terrorists.”
..As tensions with Iran over its nuclear program remain high, the Obama administration is wiping away the stigma from a cultish group[MKO/MEK/PMOI] that wants to overthrow the Iranian regime so badly it has attacked Iranian and other civilians to advance its agenda. And it comes after a long and deep-pocketed lobbying effort attracted a host of Washington politicos to advocate for the group
The campaign to bury the MEK’s aka MKO/PMOI bloody history of bombings and assassinations that killed American businessmen, Iranian politicians and thousands of civilians, and to portray it as a loyal US ally against the Islamic government in Tehran has seen large sums of money directed at three principal targets: members of Congress, Washington lobby groups and influential former officials.
no single act by the administration so crystalizes the hypocrisy and recklessness of US postures towards Iran.The MEK has a long history of terrorist activity going back to the 1970s and has the goal of overthrowing the Iranian government. Because of this goal, there has been a big money push by many influential people in Washington to get the group de-listed..
A separate justice system for American Muslims, the US embrace of terrorism, and other key political facts are highlighted..MEK achieved its goal by doing more than merely changing the beneficiaries of its actions from Saddam to the US and Israel. It also found a way – how it did so remains a mystery – to funnel millions of dollars into the bank accounts of key ex-officials from both parties..
This is a line up that is hard to rent, much less buy, but M.E.K and its well connected lobbyists have shown how money makes things happen in Washington.It shows how porous is the terrorism issue too. It is subject to changes in political fashions, and how little the media knows or remembers and how open it is to being influenced by insiders, especially when there’s money to be paid for a few hours work.