American companies who do business with the theocratic regime in Iran would inevitably contribute funds to the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force which is responsible for spreading terrorism globally, Iranian exiles in the U.S. have told Newsmax.
“Americans who develop a business in Iran will find that not a penny they pay in fees to the government will go to help the poor, the 70 percent-plus of Iranians in their teens and 20s who are unemployed, or the teachers who haven’t been paid in six months,” said Allen Tasslimi, New Jersey venture capitalist and president of the Association of Iranian-Americans of New Jersey, whose younger brother was executed by the clerical regime in the 1980s.
Tasslimi predicted that money paid to the Tehran regime by U.S. businesses for opportunities in Iran “would go to [Iran’s] Quds Force,” its brutal branch blamed for spreading terror throughout the region, Newsmax wrote on Wednesday.
The Quds Force is headed by the notorious Gen. Ghasem Soleimani, branded “a cold-blooded killer” by Sen. John McCain for overseeing the manufacture of armor-piercing bullets that have killed more than 500 U.S. Marines, the report said.
Tasslimi, along with other exiles, strongly believes that an enhanced Quds Force “will provide even greater assistance to the terrorist clients that Khamenei and the regime already service: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis who have toppled the government of Yemen, and [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s murderous regime, which has forced tens of thousands to flee to Europe.”
The shot at American companies was loudly voiced on Saturday by Iranians among the more than 200 guests attending the 50th anniversary celebration Saturday of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) — or MEK and the largest Iranian opposition group — in Washington, D.C, Newsmax said.
A voice from the past is driving their pleas. A book written before the U.S. was at war with Germany admonishing American entrepreneurs might be read as a cautionary tale.
“You Can’t Do Business With Hitler” became a mantra by a gathering of Iranian exiles this weekend. In it, author Douglas Fuller documented how American businesses who sought opportunity in Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s found themselves short-changed by officially-sanctioned corruption and contributing to what would become an industrial war-making machine against Germany’s neighbors.
“[Their] mentality, which profoundly affects dealing with the outside world, is an open and cynical disregard of truth and justice in carrying out negotiations either in war or peace,” wrote Fuller, onetime commercial attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin in the 1930s.
Much like Tasslimi’s warning, Fuller in 1941 predicted “one purpose will pervade all German economic policy: Germany’s military advantage.”
Tasslimi’s words were strongly seconded by Northern Virginia restaurateur Hossein Panah, who, like Tasslimi, fled Iran for the U.S. as a teenager in the 1970s.
“Americans shouldn’t do business with Iran’s present government,” he told Newsmax, “because for the past 30 years, its goal has been to spread its influence throughout the Middle East—Iraq, Syria, and even Algeria.”
Panah likened the American desire to invest in Iran to “seeing someone who makes trouble in the neighborhood by firing a rifle and saying ‘let’s give him a machine gun and he’ll behave.’”
He said he would urge American businesses “don’t rush to Iran. You have to somehow put some pressure on the regime not to pursue nuclear ambitions or support terrorists in neighboring countries. And American businesses should give some help to opposition groups.”
Newsmax wrote: “Founded in 1965 to oppose the rule of the Shah of Iran and now opposing the regime of the Mullahs in Tehran, the MEK espouses a platform that advocates universal suffrage, gender equality, separation of religion and state, and a non-nuclear Iran. On this anniversary, the group announced the election of a new leadership, comprised of a 1000-member all-female Central Council.”