On Monday, my friend and occasional co-author Sohrab Ahmari published an incisive review of A Single Roll of the Dice, a new book by the National Iranian American Council’s Trita Parsi, in The Wall Street Journal. Ahmari’s critique was entirely substantive in nature, taking Parsi to task for blaming everyone but the Iranian regime for the failure of President Obama’s “engagement” policy. Ahmari’s bottom line: “Mr. Obama’s engagement policy failed not because of Israeli connivance or because the administration did not try hard enough. The policy failed because the Iranian regime, when confronted by its own people or by outsiders, has only one way of responding: with a truncheon.”
Rather than respond to these substantive claims in a civil manner, however, Parsi’s NIAC colleague and research director Reza Marashi immediately took to Twitter to denounce Ahmari as an “MEK terror cult supporter.” “MEK” refers to Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, a violent Marxist cult that helped bring about the downfall of the Shah—only to have its members executed en masse by the Khomeinist regime after the revolution.
This was a shameful smear on Marashi’s part. In fact, Ahmari had twice attacked the MEK in previously published articles. In an August 2011 piece published on the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website, Ahmari had written that the MEK is “a bizarre, Islamo-Marxist cult with a long record of gruesome terrorist attacks against civilian targets and little support among Iran’s young democrats.” And in a December 2011 article in Tablet magazine, Ahmari described the organization as an “Islamo-Marxist cult that helped the regime come to power.” Not exactly what one would expect from an MEK shill.
Regrettably, Marashi has thus far refused to retract his libelous statement or apologize to Ahmari. But this comes as no surprise, for Marashi’s intemperate rhetoric is merely a symptom of a nasty political culture inside NIAC. For years, NIAC has vilified those who dare challenge their false narrative of US-Iran relations as part of an unholy alliance of Zionists, Persian monarchists, and MEK cultists—a myth more suitable for an audience attending Friday prayers at Tehran University than for savvy Iranian-Americans who seek creative and practicable ways of effecting democratic change inside Iran.
Such attacks insult the entire Iranian American community. Instead of inspiring and leading its purported constituents toward the common goal of ending theocratic tyranny, NIAC attempts to stifle debate within the community and smear critics.
Peter Kohanloo is a Boston-based Iranian American activist. His writing has previously appeared in The Weekly Standard, the National Post, and Foreign Policy Digest, among other publications.
