By Phil Wilayto*
John McCain stood alone, facing more than 1,000 members and supporters of a violent, terrorist organization - and praised them.
“I thank you for being an example, an example to the whole world, that those people who are willing to fight and sacrifice for freedom will achieve it,” the Republican senator from the state of Arizona said admiringly.
It was April 14, 2017, and McCain was addressing a mass meeting of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) in the Albanian capital of Tirana, where the group relocated after being driven out of its former base in Iraq. MKO leaders made a point of thanking McCain for his assistance in helping the group make the move.
Sen. McCain is not the average U.S. politician. Besides twice running for president, he heads up the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, responsible for Congressional oversight of the country’s military.
Given his own reactionary politics, it’s not hard to see why he would be sympathetic to a group like the MKO. In 1983 he voted against creating a federal holiday to honor the great civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He later opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1990. In 2000, while running for the Republican presidential nomination, he called the racist Confederate flag a “symbol of heritage.”
But McCain is not the only highly placed U.S. figure to praise the organization that in 2009 was described as a “cult” and "skilled manipulators of public opinion" in a report by the Washington, D.C. Rand think-tank. Other outspoken MKO supporters have included former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Financial compensation for MKO-speaking engagements reportedly starts at $20,000.
Many of these “supporters” urged the U.S. State Department to remove the organization from its list of banned foreign terrorist groups, which it had been on since 1997. The United Kingdom removed it from its terrorist list in 2008, followed by the European Union in 2009, and then Canada and the United States in 2012.
Going even further, in January of this year a bipartisan group of 23 former senior U.S. officials wrote to President Donald Trump urging him to cooperate with the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), whose military arm is the MKO.
Following McCain’s remarks at the MKO meeting, the group’s longtime leader, Maryam Rajavi, reminded her followers that “Iranian Resistance - the Mujahedin - are determined to overthrow the regime and establish democracy in Iran.”
That would be a strange form of democracy. In 2005, the organization Human Rights Watch reported that 70 percent of residents of the MKO’s Camp Ashraf in Iraq were being held there against their will. It also accused the organization of torturing its own members. Adding to its reputation for being a “cult,” MKO leaders admitted “encouraging” their members in the camp to end their own marriages and stay celibate, in order to better focus on their mission.
As most Iranians know, the MKO began as an opponent to the Shah, but after 1979 turned its guns on the new revolutionary government. Driven out of Iran, the group sided with Saddam Hussein during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq, going so far as to carry out military raids inside Iran.
The organization was originally placed on the U.S. list of terrorist groups because of the deaths of U.S. citizens during one of the MKO’s military operations against the Shah. But now that the group’s target is the Iranian government, Washington no longer views it as reactionary or dangerous to U.S. interests.
In the United States, Iran is regularly portrayed as a dangerous enemy responsible for most of the violence in the Middle East. Few Americans know that Iran hasn’t attacked another country in more than 200 years, or that the first foreign operation of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, in 1953, was to overthrow Iran’s popular and democratically elected Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, ushering in the brutal 26-year reign of Mohammad Reza Shah.
Meanwhile, it is the U.S. taxpayers who must carry the financial burden of sustaining a military greater than those of the next eight countries combined, with a military presence in three-quarters of the world’s countries. Active U.S. wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan are draining U.S. resources while taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Rather than supporting a foreign policy designed to maximize the profits of super-wealthy U.S. corporations, the American people would be wise to remember that it is these same corporations that are responsible for many of the problems facing poor and working people in the United States.
Our enemies are not the people of Iran or any other country. Our enemies are poverty, racism and oppression here at home - and U.S. wars around the world.
*Phil Wilayto is editor of the U.S. newspaper The Virginia Defender and author of the book “In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation’s Journey through the Islamic Republic. He can be reached at: DefendersFJE@hotmail.com.
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