Hanging with the People's Mujahadeen of Iran, MEK - by Michael J. Totten

London, 22 Jul - Michael J. Totten writes in World Affairs: In 1997, US President Bill Clinton added Iran’s People’s Mujahadeen (Mujahideen Khalq in Persian, or MEK) to the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, and in 2012 his wife Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took them off. One of them erred and erred badly.

He points out that the MEK fought hard against the Shah Reza Pahlavi before and during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Afterward, when the Islamist faction led by Ayatollah Khomeini emerged the strong horse in the ensuing struggle for power, they fought the new government alongside Iran’s leftist movements and lost.

Iran’s government insists on calling the MEK terrorists and convinced Bill Clinton to do so as well.

They’re based in France now. The MEK have to base themselves somewhere outside Iran because they’ll be tortured and executed if they go home. And they’ve formed a larger umbrella organization that includes other opposition movements called the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Every year they hold a huge rally in Paris that’s broadcast live on television (via satellite, of course) into Iran.

They invited me this year, so I went, says Totten.

I was a little bit skeptical at the outset. Hillary Clinton only took them off the terrorist list a couple of years ago. Their roots are quasi-Marxist and Islamist. Their most strident critics insist that the MEK is some kind of a cult and that nobody inside Iran likes them. But I went anyway because…why not? I don’t work for them or answer to them. I can write whatever I want. I could denounce them as a gaggle of hysterical charlatans and propagandists and nothing bad would happen to me.....................http://iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30660:hanging-with-the-people-s-mujahadeen-of-iran-mek-by-michael-j-totten&catid=4:iran-general&Itemid=109