The following statement was published by the Committee of Anglo- Iranian Lawyers amid The Guardian ‘s recent suspicious campaign of demonization against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK) to satisfy the terrorist regime ruling Iran:
Iran’s religious terrorist dictatorship has launched an unprecedented campaign against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK) in recent months in a bid to contain the nationwide uprising in Iran. Ali Khamenei, Hassan Rouhani and other leading officials have repeatedly spoken about the PMOI’s role in protests.
That campaign entails arrests inside Iran, recurring terrorist plots in Europe and the US, deployment of some “friendly journalists” to demonize the PMOI and preparations for further terrorism. The latest example is an article by Reza Merat, published in The Guardian on 9 November 2018 and titled, “Terrorists, cultists – or champions of Iranian democracy?”
The assigned article relays the slanders of the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) against the PMOI which has been repeated on and on in the past four decades. The persistence of these lies cannot be attributed to lack of knowledge of the facts, especially given that the press spokesman of the PMOI addressed most of the despicable allegations on the 2nd of October and 1st of November in letters addressed to senior editors of The Guardian.
The people of Iran are quite familiar with the nature of the clerical regime and its slander machinery. It is also reminiscent of the old colonialist policies of the early 1950s, when the corrupt Pahlavi dynasty disseminated similar slander against Dr. Mohammad Mosadeq and the oil nationalization movement, in collaboration with some British media. The fall of the clerical regime is within reach. Civil society is exploding and the regime is exhausted and helpless. Meanwhile, the PMOI demonstrates a growing presence in protests and uprisings, while Western policies of appeasement are falling apart.
Missile and mortar attacks failed to impede the downfall process. The regime’s foreign outreach has failed to bear fruit, including Rouhani’s disgraceful call to the French President urging him to prevent the activities of the PMOI on 2 January 2018. Thus, the demonization campaign has returned to full force. Toward that end, Reza Aron Merat conveyed an unwritten conclusion to The Guardian that clearly seeks to legitimize a crackdown and massacre of the PMOI.
We have seen efforts by the regime’s agents in the UK to infiltrate British media. AliFallahian, the regime’s terrifying Minister of Intelligence said in a TV interview on 9 July 2017: “The Intelligence Ministry needs cover for its efforts to gather intelligence inside and outside the country. We would not dispatch an intelligence agent to Germany or the United States who would say I am from the Intelligence Ministry. A trader or journalist cover is required.”
The task of the “friendly journalist” and the Guardian article is to give the impression that the PMOI has no popular support in Iran, that it is undemocratic, and that there is no viable alternative in Iran, so it would be only wise for the international community to hold onto the current barbaric regime. But the people of Iran have supported the PMOI for the past 53 years and their children, brothers and sisters have joined its ranks, their loved ones martyred for the cause. The Iranian people have also generously shared their wealth with the PMOI, while the article claims, without evidence, that Saudi Arabia funds it.
Reza Merat is a known advocate of the regime in general and Hassan Rouhani in particular, and he appeases the regime by expressing hysterical opposition to the PMOI. His previous articles and tweets make this clear, but of course, confessing to this reality is tantamount to political suicide. Thus, he has no choice but to distort the most basic facts and to repeat the lies that the PMOI had repeatedly revealed with documents.
Every school pupil can do a one minute search on the internet to find out that Merat’s narrative of the terrorist plot against the grand gathering of the Iranians in Paris with the presence of hundreds of political dignitaries from North America, Europe and the Middle East, in which we were also participating, is an attempt to cover up the role the mullahs’ regime in this terrorist plot.
Merat wrote, “One day after the conference, the MEK accused Tehran of plotting a bomb attack againstthe event, following the arrest of four suspects – including an unnamed Iranian diplomat – in Belgium, Germany and France. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, rejected claims of Iran’s involvement and described the accusations as a “sinister false flag ploy.”
The reality is that it was not the PMOI/MEK who initially disclosed the terror plot. The Belgium General prosecutor and the Federal Police did so in an official statement on Monday, July 2, two days after the gathering. The statement announced the arrest of the two would-be bombers and an Iranian diplomat. Subsequently, the German Federal Prosecutor announced in a statement on July 11 that the diplomat had personally handed the bomb to the terrorists. Merat had worked on his article for months, so excluding this information could only have been a deliberate attempt to whitewash a crime as big as bombing a meeting attended by 100,000 people and preparing the stage for further attacks. This is criminal.
Another case in point is the story of Ms. Somayeh Mohammadi (38 years-old). The article begins and ends with her tale. She has explained her ordeal in her book, “An end to a conspiracy”,
She went to Iraq from Canada to join the PMOI. A copy of the written consent of her father and mother is published in her book. Subsequently her father, Mostafa Mohammadi, came to the service of the mullahs’ Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS), and traveled to Iran
from Canada on several occasions, after he had obtained asylum and citizenship as a supporter of the PMOI. Mostafa Mohamamdi had obtained a visa from the embassy of Iraq in Tehran on several occasions and had travelled to Iraq. Accompanied with a number of the MOIS agents, he went to the border of Camp Ashraf on several occasions in 2010 and 2011, where they used 320 loud speakers to engage in psychological warfare and threaten a massacre of the Ashraf residents. The clips of him shouting and threatening the residents with murder and burning has been repeatedly broadcast by INTV and is available on the internet. The Justice departments of Canada, Iraq, and Albania, have repeatedly rejected the claims of Mostafa Mohamamdi, who is a torturer, against the PMOI. The rulings are available.
Ms. Mohamamdi took part in a press conference in Rogner Hotel, which is adjacent to the Prime Minister’s office, in Tirana on 3rd of September. Prior to that, in an interview with the Washington Times on 25th of August, Ms. Mohamamdi underscored that she has no interest in seeing an individual who was implicated in seven massacres in Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty, even if it is her father. During the seven massacres, between 2009 and 2015, one hundred forty-one compatriots of Ms. Mohammadi were murdered. During the same period, 27 residents died due to a medical siege and six women were taken hostage whose fates are still unknown. Some 1,500 residents were wounded. No one can force a girl to visit a man who is engaged in a holocaust, even if that man is her father, unless one is intent on degrading that women and trampling her under the feet of the murderers.
Reza Merat has charged the PMOI with complicity in murdering Iraqi Kurds. This is a big lie uttered by the mullahs. Hoshyar Zebari, was the Foreign Minister of Iraq for 12 years after the overthrow of the former government in 1999, and prior to that he was the head of foreign affairs for the Iraqi Kurdish Democratic Party, the main party in Iraqi Kurdistan. In an official affidavit to a court in the Netherlands, he explicitly stated that the PMOI was never involved in Iraqi domestic affairs and never played a role in suppression of the Kurds. Col. Wesley Martin, the coordinator for counter-terrorism of the coalition forces in Iraq, testified under oath before the US Congress on 7th of July 7th, 2011 and said that he had made an extensive investigation confirming the PMOI played no role in suppression of the Kurds. The documents of Hoshyar Zebari’s affidavit and Col. Martin’s testimony have been available on the internet for years.
Killing of the Kurds in Iraq, assassinating nuclear scientists in Iran, murder and torture of its members for bogus reasons, forced divorces, forcible separation of children from their parents in Iraq and sending them to Europe in the middle of the Kuwaiti war without permission of their parents, forcing women to receive surgery and threatening them to be handed over to the Iraqi generals if they refuse, and other similar disgraceful lies, are nothing but kissing the bloody hands of the mullahs and then drying them with the pages of The Guardian newspaper.
False claims made by female mercenaries are only a disgraceful stain on the history of The Guardian, and they demonstrate its ethical and professional fall. One of such woman is Batoul Sultani, who left Camp Ashraf in 2006 and went to the adjacent camp run by the Americans (TIPF). She went to the mullahs in Iran in January 2008, and returned to Iraq three weeks later to implement her mission. Lt. Col. Leo McCloskey, then commander of the American Forces protecting Camp Ashraf, provided damning testimony in a speech in Paris on 24 March 2012. He said, “Within a month or two after she left, I got a frantic call in the middle of the night from one of our police stations outside of Ashraf saying that Ms. Sultani is back in Iraq with an Iranian Passport.”
Her mission to spread maximum lies to undermine the Iranian Resistance and its leader was not hidden to anyone. Disgraceful lies that have been relayed by Merat are the very false allegations the mullahs’ regime has made against the PMOI and its leader, which started early in the aftermath of the anti-monarchist revolution and reached their peak in the presidential election of 1980. This is reminiscent of the royal court using disgraced women such as Malakeh Etezadi to tarnish Dr. Mossadegh’s image.
Reza Merat’s sources and his debunked chain lies are all known to us. Using an old tactic of the mullahs’ regime, he introduces his sources as “former members” of the MEK, when in fact they are current members of the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and the terrorist Quds Force.
Merat’s sources are of the same brand as the Gestapo and are similarly detested. We are ready to prove this in any court of law. Their lies have already been published over a thousand times in media and websites controlled by the MOIS and the Islamic Republic Guard Corps (IRGC). Not even a single one of these lies is new to us Iranians.
Committee of Anglo-Iranian Lawyers
13 November 2018
