Author: AIAINY

By Raymond Tanter To facilitate regime change from within Iran, it is critical to remove the terrorist designation from the MEK, and to protect and resettle its members. To facilitate regime change from within Iran requires a dissident organization with the same sort of leadership skills that helped create a coalition to overthrow the shah of Iran. Read More

A federal appeals court has ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make a prompt decision on whether to remove an Iranian dissident group from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia gave Clinton four months from Friday to deny or grant Mujahedeen-e-Khalq’s request for removal from the list, or the court would issue a so-called writ of mandamus and remove the group itself. “We have been given no sufficient reason why the secretary, in the last 600 days, has not been able to make a decision which…

The European Union criticised Iran on Wednesday for an “alarming” increase in the use of the death penalty this year, calling on Tehran to introduce a moratorium on executions. “According to the latest data, compiled from a number of sources, the rate of executions in Iran during the first 5 months of 2012 confirmed the country as one of the world’s leading users of the death penalty,” a spokesman for the EU’s foreign policy chief said. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is “deeply concerned by the alarming increase”, the spokesman said. Ashton is leading negotiations between six global powers…

WASHINGTON (AFP)— The US Senate is urging Iran to free jailed leaders of the Bahai faith and recommending sanctions against officials in the Islamic Republic over treatment of the religion’s followers. In a resolution approved by voice vote late Thursday, the Senate said it “condemns the government of Iran for its state-sponsored persecution of its Bahai minority and its continued violation of the International Covenants on Human Rights.” The Bahais, whose faith was founded in Iran two centuries ago, have faced persecution both before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The clerical regime bars Bahais from higher education and government…

By Lisa Daftari Twelve Christians stood trial Easter Sunday in Iran, where they were called “apostates” in a courtroom and tried on multiple charges, according to sources close to Iran’s Christian community. The Christians had been acquitted on the same charges, including “crimes against the order,” a year ago in Bandar Anzali, a city on the Caspian Sea. The group was first arrested when authorities found them drinking wine while taking communion, according to sources. “It ultimately illustrates that being a Christian is illegal in Iran. No matter how clear or how open a pastor and a church may be,…

Although Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to a disputed island in the Persian Gulf, claimed by both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, created an international incident last week, video posted online later appears to show that Iran’s president was also forced to engage in what Americans call retail politics during his visit to the region. Watch the Video

By Tom Ridge To believe that the resumption of negotiations in Istanbul could — or ever will –avert Iranian nuclear breakout and a possible Middle East conflagration, is to believe in the triumph of hope over experience. When it comes to the Mullahs’ intentions, however, we believe that the past is best viewed as prologue. Consider that on the eve of these new negotiations, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad brazenly mocked President Obama’s “last chance” proffer to the Mullahs, declaring that sanctions were a failure because Iran has stockpiled enough hard currency to survive for years without selling any oil. True or not,…

NEW YORK, A bipartisan group of former U.S. political and military leaders is calling for the U.S. State Department to remove a prominent Iranian dissident group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran/Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (PMOI/MeK), from its list of terrorist organizations, saying the classification is unjustified and 3,400 Iranian dissidents housed at Camp Ashraf in Iraq cannot be safely resettled until the change is made. “What troubles me is the politicization of the national terrorist list,” former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-RI, said at a conference attended by more than 1,000 Iranian-Americans and community leaders Saturday in New York.”I call on the State…

The infamous Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s has a well-known saying: “If you tell a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, and the whole world will believe it.” Trita Parsi’s preposterous and naive attempt to besmirch the reputation of the main Iranian opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) as a “terrorist” group smacks of pure desperation to lay lie upon lie in order to build a metaphorical dam against a growing tide ofsupport for the MEK in Washington and around the world. That is, of course, not unexpected. Parsi is the head of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a group…

By Ali Safavi, Member of Iran’s Parliament in Exile; President of the Near East Policy Research On a chilly October day in 1981, after returning home from the University of Michigan campus, I answered a phone call. On the other side of the line was my step mother from Iran. She rarely called those days because of the reign of terror imposed by the regime some five months earlier. In tears, she gave me the distressing news. My older brother, Hossein, had been executed a week earlier… Read More