“No one except the regime in Iran opposes the de-listing of the MEK,” Louis Freeh, former director of the FBI under two Presidents, said Friday at a rally in front of the Department of State supporting de-listing the MEK.
Excuse me? I am no fan of the current regime—nor are my parents, my Iranian friends, or the millions of Iranians who took to the streets after the June 2009 elections. But for just about all of us, it’s beyond comprehension as to why delisting the MEK is even being discussed.
Yet Freeh writes us all off as regime supporters.
Freeh then promised to personally give a tour of FBI headquarters to MEK leader Maryam Rajavi if the MEK gets delisted. It makes me wonder: if Hamas or Hizbollah started paying former officials $25K per speaking engagement, would they be able to tour the Hoover Building too?
It’s a shame that former public servants–Patrick Kennedy, Ed Rendell, and John Sano all spoke at the rally– have taken to promoting a cult-like organization with little to no support among Iranians, both inside and outside Iran. If these officials were to ask other Iranians, they’d find a deep seeded disgust for the MEK and the current regime. They’d find that the Green Movement views de-listing of MEK as a gift to the regime.
There’s no correlation between dislike of the MEK and support for the regime. They’re mutually exclusive positions; one doesn’t mean the other.
I dislike the regime because their paranoia keeps me from experiencing the land of my father’s birth—I’ve written too many unfavorable things about them to even remotely consider visiting now. More than that, they’ve turned the country and its people, into hostages of their own sordid political game.
But the MEK isn’t any better. They use the people at Camp Ashraf—and their members outside of Ashraf for that matter–as pawns to serve their own dreams for power. Any attempts at trying to close Ashraf, by allowing the people there to apply for refugee status, have been rebuffed by the MEK leadership.
One would think officials like Freeh would at least get all sides of the story before opening their mouths, but I guess $25,000 per pro-MEK appearance is enough to ignore the rest of us. Or perhaps these guys are getting tripped upon their own twisted logic—if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then I guess the enemy of my enemy’s enemy is my…enemy?
August 30, 2011