Burnt Orange Report

Why do Senator Hutchison's staffers love Marxist terrorism?

By Jim Dallas

The Mujahedin-el Khalq (MEK) are, to put it bluntly, not nice people. The State Department describes them as a foreign terrorist organization:

The MEK philosophy mixes Marxism and Islam. Formed in the 1960s, the organization was expelled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and its primary support came from the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein since the late 1980s. The MEK’s history is filled with anti-Western attacks as well as terrorist attacks on the interests of the clerical regime in Iran and abroad...

Nonetheless, that didn't stop some of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's aides from attending a MEK get-together in Washington yesterday, according to Nick Hoover at The Agonist.

(more below)

To be sure, the group invited dozens of senators and representatives, but only a few decided to show. Why? Consider:

Former members and friends of members of the group describe the organization, which insists its members be celibate, as a cult. "They take your individuality and beliefs and tell you that all the love you have must go to the leadership," Sametipour says. "That's how they make terrorists."

Ronak Dashti, 20, who was also introduced to a reporter by the Iranian government, said she was abducted in Turkey by MEK members who took her to Iraq. There, she says, she had to sign documents saying she had no right to contact her family and should not think about marriage. She and three other defectors described communal living, hours of menial work and nightly self-criticism sessions.

(USA Today, Thursday)

In 1991, MEK fighters were on the front lines of Saddam's brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in the Shiite south and Kurdish north. "Up until the fall of the regime, they were part and parcel of the Iraqi military. And they were heavily involved in suppressing the Kurdish uprising of 1991," the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan representative in Washington, Qubad Talabani, said yesterday.

...

Some congressmen shared Ms. Rajavi's position on the terrorist designation. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican of Colorado, compared those gathered yesterday to America's Founding Fathers. Not all members of the Iranian opposition, however, have such fond words for the MEK. The organization has been left out of the nascent movement inside the country to press for a constitutional referendum.

An Iranian activist in Los Angeles, Roxanne Ganji, told The New York Sun yesterday, "They are definitely a cult, and that is a dangerous thing. If anyone goes to Iran and takes the pulse of the people, though, 90% would never allow them to go back. That does not mean the information they gave America was not good. But they are a terrorist organization. If the United States wants information, then they can get it from viable groups and not terrorists."

(New York Sun, "Iranian Group Asks State To Lift Terror Designation", pg. 8, this morning)

Contrary to what some may say, there are many opposition groups in Iran which refuse to work with the MEK on principle. So why would any thinking person support them?

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend," said terrorism expert Neil Livingstone at a news conference in Washington in February where he and several retired U.S. diplomats and military men unveiled a new organization, the Iran Policy Committee, whose goal is to overthrow the Iranian government by supporting Iranian opposition groups.

(USA Today, Thursday)

In 2003, the Washington Post reported that some senior administration figures would like to use the MEK as a proxy force in Iran, in the same manner that the Northern Alliance was employed against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

("Oil and The Coming War with Iran", Wednesday)

I am inclined to remind Senator Hutchison that this lovely theory worked out real well the last time we employed terrorists for geo-strategic purposes. And the time before that.