By Christopher Booker
Source: The Sunday Telegraph
While our media have been preoccupied with faked pictures of rockets put out by Iran's sabre-rattling Revolutionary Guards, Tehran's equivalent of the Gestapo, there have been extraordinary developments behind the scenes, in the ongoing drama over the West's outlawing of Iran's main opposition movement, the only real hope of a democratic, secular alternative to that fundamentalist tyranny.
By Christopher Booker
Source: The Sunday Telegraph
While our media have been preoccupied with faked pictures of rockets put out by Iran's sabre-rattling Revolutionary Guards, Tehran's equivalent of the Gestapo, there have been extraordinary developments behind the scenes, in the ongoing drama over the West's outlawing of Iran's main opposition movement, the only real hope of a democratic, secular alternative to that fundamentalist tyranny.
Last month the British Government was forced by the Lord Chief Justice and the Court of Appeal to remove the People's Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI[MEK]) from its list of banned terrorist organisations.
Britain had only outlawed the PMOI, part of the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), in a bid to appease Tehran – even though the Revolutionary Guards themselves help to spread terror through the Middle East, from Lebanon and Gaza to Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the mullahs, the lifting of the ban was a serious defeat, since they used this proscription (which Britain persuaded the EU to copy) as evidence to the Iranian people that the West regarded their chief popular opposition as terrorists.
The PMOI is still banned by the EU, however, and Tehran has therefore gone into overdrive to ensure that ban remains.
Having lost Britain's support, Tehran has been focusing its efforts on the French government, which now holds the EU presidency.
Two weeks ago the NCRI staged a huge rally in Paris, attended by 70,000 Iranian exiles, supported by hundreds of MPs and Euro-MPs from across the EU, calling for the EU to follow Britain's lead.
But at a series of secret meetings involving the French foreign ministry and both countries' intelligence services, Tehran has prevailed on the French government to maintain the EU's ban.
With the EU's "foreign minister", Javier Solana, due to meet senior Iranian officials in Geneva next Saturday, to plead with Tehran yet again not to proceed with its nuclear weapons programme, it seems the EU is as bent on appeasement as ever.
This leaves our Government in an extraordinary position. Unless it can persuade the EU to change its mind, thanks to Britain's courts having explicitly ruled that the PMOI is not involved in terrorism, it is now in serious breach of EU law.
And this mess has all come about through a vain bid to appease a regime that, as our Foreign Office admits, has been responsible for killing British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Isn't it time that this scandalous and humiliating farce was noticed in other parts of the media, and not just this column?
Photo by Reuters: Supporters of the People's Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK) demonstrate in front of the European Parliament asking the EU to remove the PMOI from its list of terrorists movements, in Strasbourg July 10,
