On June 30, the first day of the four-day Free Iran 2023 World Summit, a panel of politicians and distinguished personalities discussed the Iranian regime’s continuous disinformation campaign against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
The regime has gone to great lengths to demonize the MEK, and anyone who has had interactions with the Iranian opposition has had experience with the regime’s extensive disinformation campaign.
Struan Stevenson, former MEP from Scotland, who has recently written a book on the modern history of Iran, shed light on the regime’s incessant efforts against the MEK.
“This kind of demonization has been going on for years,” he said and pointed that when MEK members were relocated from Iraq to Albania, the Iranian regime immediately started increasing its staff in its embassy in Tirana. “Suddenly there were 25 new diplomats, most of them agents from the ministry of intelligence,” he said.
“We should be aware that this demonization campaign is based on [nonsense],” he said. “This is not worth the paper it’s written on. It is typical of the propaganda that emanates from this regime.”
He also said that the futility of the regime’s efforts was made clear in a recent statement, now signed by 120 former world leaders, expressing support for the Ten-Point Plan of Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).
Candice Bergen, former Leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, recounted an experience in which she was attacked online for attending an NCRI meeting on women’s rights.
“The agenda here is to discredit the opponents of the regime, to divide, to stigmatize, to cause disunity, to cause fear in me as an elected representative,” she said. “Thankfully I know I’m supporting an incredible organization that is working with so many others for freedom and democracy in the beautiful country of Iran.”
Bergen stressed the need to defend the truth and reject lies in free countries. “As we do that in our own countries and in our own institutions, we will then send the message to regimes like the one in Iran that is trying to discredit, demonize, and cause division,” she said.
Louis Freeh, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), recounted that during his efforts to delist the MEK and NCRI, he ran into the regime’s propaganda deeply embedded into the files of the U.S. State Department, falsifications that had long been debunked. “So even though the information was transmitted several times, the State Department kept getting played back to us in a number of different ways,” he said.
Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield Jr., former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, who has carried out extensive research on the regime’s disinformation against the MEK, said that he looked into numerous allegations against the Iranian opposition.
“I would find differences and say, wait a minute, this isn’t what really happened, and these few early moments turned into one chapter after another of a different story, an untold story, and to the point where I would say two things: one, there’s an entirely wrong narrative about the resistance and about the regime, and two, it’s still believed by many people in Washington, and it’s still repeated by most of the major media,” he said. “When it comes to Iran, we don’t have a narrative, we don’t have a unified story of what happened. We missed a whole lot of formative things that happened.”
Ambassador Bloomfield concluded by calling on the media to “stop repeating things that you now know are untrue. You must stop. And we will keep telling you to stop.”
Steve McCabe, member of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, said, “I think we have to start by acknowledging that it’s almost in the DNA of this regime that exists through falsehood and propaganda. That’s the starting point where it subverted the Iranian revolution and that’s the practice it’s continued ever since.”
McCabe said that the regime essentially oscillates between brutality and violence and misinformation and covert activities, sometimes extending to blatant terrorism, as in the terrorist attempt by an Iranian diplomat against the Free Iran 2018 rally in France.
McCabe himself has experienced the regime’s disinformation campaign, he said, sometimes being called a “terrorist sympathizer” by western media for his support of the NCRI. In all cases, the sources of information the media had used were “so-called ordinary Iranians” that were in fact regime agents.
“These are not normal politicians or diplomats; these are gangsters, and we should respect the cross-party views of the British Parliament and ban the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),” he said.
Of course, the regime’s obsession with demonizing the MEK inside Iran and across the globe stems from its fear of the main opposition movement that poses the real threat to its illegitimate rule. But the Free Iran 2023 rally in France, the growing global support for Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan, and the expanding activities of MEK Resistance Units inside Iran are testament to the futility of the regime’s efforts.
