Robert Wright at The Atlantic has a good piece on the campaign to remove the name of Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. terrorist list. As Wright states, legitimizing this terrorist group whose main goal is to overthrow the current Iranian regime is not a big confidence builder for the upcoming second round of nuclear negotiations with Tehran. This is especially true since MEK has been responsible for recent Israeli-sponsored acts of sabotage including assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists.
But Wright is strangely upbeat, concluding that the final decision on MEK’s fate may rest with Hillary Clinton, who is less subject to the political pressures to embrace MEK than President Obama, who will be involved in placating special interests and bagging contributions in a bid for a second term. It is odd to think Hillary would choose doing the correct thing over a pro-Israel, pro-war option.
When talking about the huge amounts of money that are behind the MEK campaign, Wright skittishly does not mention the pro-Israel lobby, although their fingerprints are all over this. But the post adopts the Iranian point of view to describe the involvement of Israel, so the reader gets the picture.
Here is part of the narrative the [Iranian] hardliners are pushing:
Iran needs nuclear weapons to defend itself. It is beset by enemies. The Sunni states would love to overthrow our government. Just recall that Iraq, when it was a Sunni-run state, attacked us, starting a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians. And note that Sunni states are currently trying to abet the overthrow of our ally in Syria–just one domino away from the fall of our own government. And don’t forget about the American-Zionist axis: prominent Americans and Israelis openly call for regime change in Tehran, and we suspect that this is the secret goal of the Obama administration.
OK, so that’s the narrative that we don’t want to strengthen–particularly the America-Zionist-axis-is-bent-on-regime-change part. Here, then, is an example of something we probably shouldn’t go out of our way to do: Take an Iranian-exile group that is devoted to overthrowing the Iranian government, and that has long been on America’s list of terrorist organizations, and give it our seal of approval by taking it off that list.
That would be stupid, right? Yet that’s what, according to today’s report in the Journal, the State Department is leaning toward.
The group in question is the Mujahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, which got onto our list of terrorist organizations decades ago by, among other things, killing Americans.
Ha! Hillary will approve taking MeK off the terrorist list in a heartbeat. She has already been reported as looking favorably on that outcome.
What makes her any less prone to zio pressure than any other politician in the US? She has her sights on a presidency in 2016, and even a rumored vice presidency in 2012 were Biden to step down.
All these moves are designed to make next week’s talks fail.
Until BIG-MONEY is taken out of USA’s politics, money will distort the computation of EVERY part of the USA’s “national interest” or “policy” (that is, what our government plans and what it does). Just think of our refusal to deal with global warming or with banking shenanigans or to really reduce military spending. And then confirm by thinking about our kowtowing to the Israeli “fifth column” (AIPAC and friends).
True. More to the point, though, by making moves toward delsiting the MEK right before the next round of talks, the US is signalling very clearly that it has no intention of actually allowing the talks to succeed.
They’re really pulling out all the stops – Obama is something else. I wonder if there will be retroactive immunity for the groups american shills. Obama shielding Fran Townsend and co. from prosecution for material support for terrorism would be oh so perfect, that would really say it all.
I dont know that this increases the likelihood for war between the US and Iran directly, but it definitely greenlights an overt fight among the big powers for a iranian host, the west has decided it wants to destroy iranian society and remove the current government, if that can be done with iranians killing iranians, i suppose thats what the west prefers.
There are now two types of terrorist, those aimed at states the US does not like, and would like to regime change, those terrorists can be materially supported it seems by US citizens [since it appears the US government are helping such groups or turning a blind eye to them] here I mean Al qaeda and associated groups supporting the free Syrian army against Assad and also the MEK, a state dept listed terrorist group killing scientists in Iran and materially supported with lucrative speaking engagement fees from the MEK to the likes of John Bolton R Giuliani Howard Dean, Tom Ridge et al, and then there are the other terrorist groups or as I prefer to call them National Liberation movements like Hezbollah and Hamas, were should you donate a penny to, will see you in jail for life, the hypocrisy is stunning, do the US think the rest of the world stupid?