Rudi Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani, MEK’s paid supporter charged with 13 crimes.

As the Western support for the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is in decline, the group’s paid supporter Rudy Giuliani surrendered on charges in the Georgia election subversion case. As Donald Trump’s key election lawyer, Rudy Giuliani together with two other lawyers, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis are under trial.

On August 23, 2023, CNN reported, “The scene of Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and a notable former federal prosecutor, walking into the Fulton County jail represented another remarkable moment in the ongoing investigation into Trump and his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.”

According to the report, as one of Trump’s most outspoken attorneys in 2020, Giuliani was charged with 13 crimes, including breaking the state’s racketeering act, engaging in various criminal conspiracies, and soliciting a public officer in the state to violate their oath.

For more than a decade, Giuliani has pushed the agenda of the MEK, giving paid speeches and writing newspaper op-eds expressing support for a group linked to the deaths of six Americans in the 1970s.

In October 2019, NBC News warned about Giuliani’s material support for the Cult of Rajavi. The article was titled “Giuliani’s work for Iranian group with bloody past could lead to more legal woes”.
NBC News quoted Daniel Benjamin, a State Department counterterrorism coordinator from 2009 to 2012. He has focused extensively on the network of American politicians who have been paid by MEK, including Giuliani.

“I found it pretty distasteful that they were shilling for this group even if it was delisted,” Benjamin told NBC. “This is a group that has American blood on its hands, and it’s never owned up to that.”

“Look at those who have gone on their gravy train and then go to their events and say MEK is going to bring democracy and peace to Iran,” Benjamin said. “Basically, these guys bring aboard their pals. Especially among the hardest line anti-Iran folks, this is the place to go. Though plenty of people become much more hard line once their pockets are filled with MEK money.”
The authors of NBC New also quote from Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Sadjadpour describes the organization as a fringe group with mysterious sponsors that garners slight support in its home country. “Their population in Iran hovers between negligible and nil,” Sadjadpour said.

Today, in August 2023, after the MEK’s headquarters was raided by the Albanian Police, the group’s base among its paid supporters is much more devastated than before. Regarding that Albania is a loyal ally of the United States, the move by the Albanian authorities to confiscate the MEK’s computers and other digital tools of its cyber army must have been granted approval of the American authorities.

The group’s paid supporters among the US warmongers like Giuliani seem to have to leave the group alone to help their notorious background.

August 26, 2023 0 comments

Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

The Mujahedin-e-Khalq has become a barometer of Washington corruption

Like flies to honey, each year, a bipartisan array of senior American politicians and former officials flock to France, Albania, or, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom in order to speak to the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s annual conference and rally. It is a lucrative gig, even by the standards of Washington A-listers: Five and six-figure honoraria and speakers’ fees are common for retired officials — not a bad deal for a three- or four-minute speech. Sitting officials expect to receive lucrative campaign contributions.

Former New York City mayor and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani is a repeat speaker, as is former senator and United Against Nuclear Iran Chairman Joe Lieberman. Former national security adviser John Bolton is also a frequent speaker. Earlier this week, Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense and perennial hopeful for the Pentagon’s top spot, made her debut, as did Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The retired four-star U.S. Army general and Fox News contributor Jack Keane also spoke.

But this isn’t just any summit. The group is the political front for the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, an organization whose roots rest in 1960s-era opposition to the Shah. A short history of the group’s evolution through different from Marxist-infused Islamism to its current rhetorical embrace of democracy is here.

In reality, its leaders Masoud and Maryam Rajavi rule with an iron fist. It runs as a cult with its rank-and-file cut off from their families and the broader society. Its literature reads like a Lyndon LaRouche diatribe. Footnotes may look legitimate but pull readers down a rabbit hole of nonexistent sourcing, irrelevancies that do not substantiate their points, and dead links.

Claims about high support inside Iran are fiction.

Ordinary Iranians despise their regime but see the MKO as worse. Many resent the MKO’s terrorism that as often killed innocent Iranians as the regime officials they targeted. More despise the group for siding with Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. In effect, ordinary Iranians see the MKO as people in the United States see John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. While this does not excuse the regime’s torture and its execution of MKO members, it is not clear that those who died in 1988 would recognize the group today.[..]

I have spoken with some Washington luminaries who attend the MKO events. Their approach is cynical. To paraphrase one: If the regime falls, ordinary Iranians will sort it out, so who cares if we get an honorarium for a conference? Certainly, the Rajavis know this, so then, the question is: Why do they persist in arranging such a high honorarium? What is in it for them?

Perhaps, as with many cult leaders, they live in an alternate reality, or perhaps they believe the price of legitimacy that comes from rubbing elbows with top officials is worth it. The tragedy, however, is that the appearance of supporting a group so despised by Iranians actually benefits the existing regime. [..]

As important, it serves as a barometer of corruption in Washington. Iranians put their lives on the line every day. They do not want direct interference, but they want to know they have allies in pursuit of liberty. To cash out their aspirations and side with those opposing liberty and democracy for a $40,000 check represents the worst aspects of Washington culture.

It may not be illegal to participate in a Rajavi rally or to attach one’s name to a ghostwritten Mujahedin-e-Khalq piece in the same way that Gen. Mike Flynn did with Erdoganists, but it does signal an embrace of greed above principle and a willingness to sell out the freedom agenda.

Giuliani’s transformation of himself from America’s mayor to a figure of ridicule is an extreme example, but his embrace of a wacky cult was an early warning sign of his true character. People of both parties should view attendance at future Mujahedin-e-Khalq rallies in the same way — as a barometer of corruption that neither Republicans nor Democrats should accept in their leadership.

By Michael Rubin, Washington Examiner,

July 17, 2021 0 comments

The cult of Rajavi

The Rajavi Curse

Rudi Giuliani is the latest in a long list of people who have advocated for Rajavi and the MEK, and who have fallen from grace. Giuliani is, of course, the architect of his own downfall. His support for the MEK played only a small part in his long, often unsavoury career. (Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2020 Borat film played successfully on Giuliani’s dodgy reputation.) But Giuliani is in good company when we examine the roll call of individuals who have advocated for the MEK and subsequently lost their careers and their reputations – again often in only small part due to their association with the MEK.

The common theme behind this phenomenon – which should be called the ‘Rajavi Curse’ – is corruption. Recently, the US Secretary of State sanctioned the former Albanian leader Sali Berisha over corruption. Berisha presided over the transfer of MEK from Iraq to Albania after 2013. Once they arrived in Albania, Berisha found a lucrative role in advocating for Maryam Rajavi and the MEK. His downfall reminds us of this ‘Rajavi Curse’.

The Rajavi Curse

Let’s be clear, all political persons and groups make alliances; some work out well, some work out badly. It should be well known by now that linking themselves to the Rajavis will always work out badly for everyone. From Robin Corbett (UK MP) who had to write denying he took money from the MEK shortly before his death. To Struan Stevenson, Paulo Casaca and Alejo Vidal-Quadras who abandoned their roles as MEPs after the taint of Maryam Rajavi touched them. Of course, John Bolton, Rudi Giuliani, John McCain and others in the US will be forever known as shills for the terrorist MEK. In Albania, former deputy anti-trafficking coordinator Elona Gjebrea, who fawned upon supreme slave owner Maryam Rajavi, was later linked to a mafia family. Now Sali Berisha is added to the long list of unfortunates touched by the Rajavi Curse. In June, Edi Rama’s government which is notoriously corrupt itself, impeached President Ilir Meta, citing corruption.

The roll call of the MEK’s backers is a who’s who of people in power who have tried over the years to inflict fatal damage on the Islamic Republic. They found, in the MEK, a group which offered a package of military, ideological and propaganda thrust which matched with their own anti-Iranian agendas. It mattered not a bit that the MEK members themselves are subjected to calamitous human rights abuses and extreme exploitation as modern slaves.

Several have been embroiled in scandals which are linked to their poor judgement like Sir David Amess, who as an MP advocated for Maryam Rajavi in parliament. Or Bob Torricelli and Bob Menendez who have peddled misinformation for, but not exclusively, the MEK. Others, like Dennis Hastert, are just bad characters and their willingness to shill for the MEK (Hastert appeared in MEK rallies in Paris), can be seen in that context.

Whatever their motivation for supporting and advocating for the MEK, these individuals have backed the losing side. A side which has lost because it is itself corrupt to the core. Maryam Rajavi is currently languishing in Albania, as far from Iran and its politics as could be imagined. Expelled from Europe in 2018, Rajavi has suffered nothing but diminishing forces and power. What we are witnessing as we see her advocates fail and fall along the way is not Rajavi’s power to corrupt people. Rather it is simply that it takes a level of corruption, greed and/or confidence trickery to allow a person to support such an unsavoury group. Whether that support is rooted in money, ideology, stupidity or brainwashing, the result is the same: the Rajavi Curse is toxic to all who come close.

June 26, 2021 0 comments