The Maple, an avowedly left-wing Canadian online publication whose ideological outlook on Iran and Western foreign policy often dovetails conveniently with narratives promoted by Tehran, is the latest fringe outlet to join the familiar MEK-bashing chorus. In its September 2 article, “These MPs Took Trips From Groups Linked To Former Iranian Terror Org,” The Maple takes what is ostensibly a story about Canadian lawmakers’ sponsored travel and turns it into yet another broadside against the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). The timing is also telling.
That such a piece should appear at a moment when Iran’s ruling mullahs are engulfed in crises on virtually every front and facing mounting challenges to their rule inevitably raises questions about the ulterior motives behind resurrecting these familiar attacks against their most organized opponents.
The entities that invited and sponsored the travel of these lawmakers are separate and distinct organizations; yet The Maple deliberately makes the MEK, the Iranian regime’s best-organized and most potent opposition movement, the centerpiece of its headline and narrative. That editorial choice suggests a not-so-hidden agenda: the article rehashes decades-old allegations and guilt by association to disparage the MEK. The pattern is hardly new. Similar attacks have repeatedly found an eager second life in Tehran’s state-controlled and affiliated media.
These allegations are hardly new and have been recycled in one form or another for nearly four decades and addressed and debunked repeatedly over the years. Repetition does not turn an allegation into fact, however many times it is repackaged for a new audience.
It is common knowledge that the blacklisting of the MEK was a pillar of the misguided search for moderates within Iran’s ruling theocracy. Indeed, one day after the United States designated the MEK in 1997, a senior Clinton administration official told the Los Angeles Times that the decision was intended as “a goodwill gesture” to Iran’s newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami. Five years later, Martin Indyk, then Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, confirmed that the administration viewed action against the MEK as a means of opening a dialogue with Tehran.
The designation eventually collapsed under sustained legal scrutiny. In June 2012, the U.S. Count of Appeals for the Columbia Circuit, America’s second highest court, condemned the egregious delay by the department to decide on the MEK designation, giving it four months to do so. The Secretary complied with the ruling and revoked the designation in September of that year.
Britain’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission examined both classified and public evidence, calling continued proscription of the MEK “perverse.” The Court of Appeal for England and Wales upheld the decision. The United Kingdom removed the organization from its list on June 24, 2008. European courts likewise annulled the designation, and the European Union removed the MEK from its list on January 26, 2009.
The murders of American military personnel and Pentagon contractors half a century ago were carried out by a Marxist splinter group.
The U.S. State Department’s own 2005 terrorism report attributed the killings to a self-described Marxist splinter faction. Members of that faction also murdered Muslims who remained loyal to the original MEK. The individuals implicated in the killings of Americans were arrested and executed by the Shah’s authorities or killed in clashes with the police.
The origins of the “cult” label against the MEK goes back to the early 1990s, when the regime’s intelligence apparatus coined the phrase to disparage and delegitimized its fiercest opposition.
The claim that the MEK simply sided with Saddam Hussein against Iran similarly erases the chronology. When Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, the MEK opposed the invasion and fought Iraqi forces in Iran. The organization did not relocate its leadership to Iraq until 1986, four years after Iraqi troops had withdrawn from Iranian territory and after the MEK had campaigned for a ceasefire that Khomeini opposed.
The central point is straightforward: the ultimate source of these allegations can be traced back, directly or through intermediaries, to the Iranian regime’s intelligence and propaganda apparatus, whose longstanding objective has been to delegitimizing its most organized opponent.
European security agencies have explicitly documented Tehran’s methods. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV, reported that Iranian intelligence focused on the MEK and NCRI and recruited agents from among people formerly associated with organization. The Netherlands’ General Intelligence and Security Service, AIVD, reported in 2012 that Iranian intelligence managed a European network of former MEK members whose assigned tasks included negatively influencing public opinion through lobbying, publications, and anti-MEK meetings.
For its part, the MEK, as a member organization within the National Council of Resistance of Iran coalition, advocates free elections, separation of religion and state, gender equality, minority rights, abolition of the death penalty, and a non-nuclear Iran.