VIEW

what a poorly written

what a poorly written article.

"That Parsi is a free man more than six months after the piece was published is all the evidence you need Lake’s reporting was and is garbage."

good thing the author is not a detective.  maybe some iranian americans find it effective for an organization like niac directly deal with iri officials and serve as a go-between between iri and the u.s. so that the two governments can work each other.  and maybe some iranian americans welcome such action (especially those who are also iri supporters).  but are niac and parsi transparent and inform their members on their private dealings with the iri officials?  i'd like to know.

proves the urban myth...

This piece provides proof that the internal debate among Jewish libs and cons is paramount. In all of this the only word that comes remotely close to the only issue that ought to be important in any discussion involving Israel namely Palestinian and this great shame of humanity, was the word apartheid. Once again we must sit through the most obviously transparent vitriol between Jews as they prove the myth that Israel only keeps Palestine around because if they didn't have a common enemy they would fight amongst themselves. Also the author has in fact used the same tactic himself namely attacking a bigger name writer hoping for some trickle of fame. Dragging Parsi into the ploy and posting it here as well as his own site merely yet more obvious self promotion via Google. You know the one. That's where having multiple sites linking you increases your search engine ranking. That's why you frequently see non Iranian authors re posting their pieces on this site and rarely will you see an original post that is not accompanied by a duplicate one elsewhere. Parsi and the use of the name in a piece gets clicks. While the issue of Israel bombing Iran is hugely important, the all too commonplace backbiting among Jewish Americans as subterfuge to avoid addressing the plight of Israel and her human cattle management problems is very largely irrelevant. The writer would do well to go to Gaza and merely write a report on how polluted and unsanitary the water supply is and that truth alone would do more than any he said she said popularity fluff to get him the attention he is so desperate to have.

Iranians Against IRI, Not Neocons Against Trita Parsi

It is not neocons’ smear campaign against Dr. Trita Parsi but objections by many Iranian expatriates to his lobbying efforts that have helped sustain and legitimize the Islamic Republic of Iran’s stranglehold over Iranian people.  His advocated policy of negotiations and compromise has bought time for the mullahs to advance towards developing nuclear arms and decimate the youths that oppose their inhumane sharia laws and religious dictatorship.

The facts, Mr. Charles Davis, are that IRI has killed thousands of Iranians, supports terrorist groups, pursues nuclear arms, assassinates its opponents, conducts a foreign policy of lies and deceits, rules over Iranians by terror, aspires to export its ideology, and is constitutionally not reformable.  Dr. Trita Parsi has campaigned to negotiate with this regime while the overwhelming majority of Iranians want to overthrow it. The issue is not neocon smear tactic and bombing Iran but IRI regime change.

Lobbying for the IRI, DOES require active presence

MM

Your question(s) are  based on the (flawed) assumption that the current American administration is opposed to engagement with the Iranian regime. This is simply untrue. Therefore, it makes every sense to see the IRI's number 1 lobbyist organization in the US receive invitation to all the events and functions you have listed.

It would have been surprising if NIAC were absent not the other way around!!

FR

PARSI THE AYATOLLAHS MESSENGER PIDGEON

  Trita Parsi
//www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/sep/03/obama-sent-second-letter-to-irans-khamenei/

"Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian-American Council, a group that represents Iranians in the U.S., said Ayatollah Khamenei had responded to Mr. Obama's first letter and that Mr. Obama then sent another letter to the Iranian leader.

Mr. Parsi, who did not disclose the contents of the letters, said that the entire exchange took place prior to the June 12 presidential elections, which handed a disputed victory to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "

JUST WHAT WAS MR PARSI'S INVOLVEMENT IN THE AYATOLLAH'S LETTER?
Use your brain for God's sake.Iranians don't need the Ayatollahs MESSENGER PIDGEON leading the NIAC..

The Guy is GONE forget him and move on with the NIAC.

Well said MM jan, well said.

Mehrdad

It is very interesting

to see that while being "accused to be" an IRI agent, NIAC gets invited to congressional hearings, council with the White House, and one senior member was even invited to attend the signing of the newest round of sanctions by President Obama in the White House. 

I would like to know who is more credible, in the eyes of the US government, when it comes to Iranian-American affairs?  Please ask your representatives to engage your Iranian-American representative instead.  Furthermore, if NIAC is an IRI agent, please produce your evidence to the US government and ask them NOT to engage NIAC, and deport them back to IRI. 

NIAC is discredited

you guys want to have a fight between democracts and neocons who have both been wrong.

 The arguement is against NIAC is by the iranina people.  NIAC is agaisnts Iranians changing the system and has never cared for human rights until their position to engage rapists became embarassing.

 They are against the green movement and are disliked by iranians, that is why they only have 3000 members out of millions.

Trita Parsi is a dislike by most Iranians who want their country to be free.  Parsi just wants rafsanjani to be runnin g the show.

Dear Via Chris Davis

Thank you for this insightful article. Very interesting.

Neocon this,Neocon that

Neocon this,Neocon that,do you have any Halloween candy? Stupid political game,it's Orwellian.Does it matter what a Neocon is? Does it matter what a person says if they are a 'Neocon' to you? Does it matter what's right and what's wrong or do you have to figure out if a person is a Neocon first? I think the latter to your types most definately.This is the problem the 'Neocons had with Trita Parsi,speaking for the Ayatollah doesn't fly well with Neocons or plain out ANY CON..So,If you think speaking directly for the Ayatollah under the name of AMERICAN IRANIANS can be whitewashed with your 'Neocon' name calling forget it.Keep wasting your time.Keep sitting there with NO INFLUENCE and remain a useless misrepresentation of a organization.

Yes,You may as well consider ALL Americans to be Neocons,American's are smarter than that,we don't go for your name calling jibberish that fly's in Iran like over Zionism.Exactly why the NIAC is ineffective not only with Iranian Americans but totally as a whole.The NIAC did not earn their credibility in D.C. but was given it out of respect to Iranian Americans and their lack of Organization which the NIAC lives up to.

George Bush traditionally the Biggest Neocon by these jibberish standards DID NOT Bomb Iran,DID NOT invade Iran,DID NOT levy brutal sanctions against IRAN,DID NOT expose Iran's Nukegate,DID NOT attack the NIAC and TOLD AIPAC Iran was OFF THE TABLE.

Failure...Whatever 'Hai Dasoleum' and the NIAC'S problems were,they did not INVOLVE what is considered to be the 'Neocon' establishment but the NIAC went out to take them on full on and turned the NIAC's directive and main goal exactly that.Are the Neocons hurting? Is AIPAC hurting from the NIAC? Is the Tea Party hurting? Do you think attacking Conservative American's is good expense for the NIAC? Do you like going to meet the President while he sanction's the country you supposedly lobby for with a cork in your mouth?Do you think that was the blame of 'Neocons and Aipac' also?

YOU Bavafa and your words

You were the one who mentioned this thing about them trying making it easier on indiv. students. and removing the language that would affect them.

Nice speech aziz. But i ain't buying it::)))

Via Chris

I do not care one bit on  who is going after whom and who is agenda is more tainted and vicious than the other's. Unlike you, i am not consumed by the glory of parsi and co. and how they have stood up to the neo-cons (or other neo f... whatever) or how many character assasination attempts they have been able to withstand.

There was not even a serious talk of sanctions, let alone a war against iran back then until very recently as in after 2008.

If the history of political affairs in this country or anywhere else in the world is any indication, parsi and one of the card-carrying neocon top dogs will be seen having a beer at a nude bar, and will start writing up joint policies together sooner that you and i can say... bastards!

Doctor X:

May I ask what has given you the impression that NIAC does not care about ordinary people or cares only about students? They put all their effort and word very hard to prevent this sanction which I completely agree with you that it will affect ordinary people perhaps in a profound way. They simply were not successful in preventing it but that was not due to lack of effort on NIAC's part. Mehrdad P.S. I wish other groups that think they are influential and represent Iranian people like Reza Pahlavi had worked either along side or on their own to prevent this immoral sanction. But this shows that we need much more unity and vigilance to have a more powerful voice in Washington.

Doctor X....

If you study the Neo-con machine, you will see that they dont target their victims randomly. Parsi and Greenwald, and the many others that are being character assasinated by the neo-cons, are targeted precisely because they have been effective in defeating the neo-cons. Of course, you are naive if you expect them to win all the time.

But there is a reason why Parsi is targeted - going back to his book and the effectiveness of NIAC in pushing back againts war back in 2006-2008.

The neo-cons wouldn'tspend so much time and resources going after Parsi had NIAC and he not been a threat to the neo-con agenda.

Bavafa

BUT it does. IT does affect the ordinary people. Think about it. we can't just worry about what affects our students and forget about the whole entire majority who will have to risk their livelihood over this, in the coming months and years.

Why should we direct our focus on our Students and be proud about what NIAC is doing to exempt them fromthe ill impacts of sanctions, when the majority suffers over time? You call that, or a "symbolic change" an accomplishment?? baba ey vallah.

VCD - thanks for the links - NIAC, early on was concerned....

mainly with Iranian-American issues, and NIAC (with very few people working) had plenty to deal with, especiially after 9/11 and bunching Iranians with the 7th century cave dwellers. 

Iranian-Americans have come a long way since since 9/11, thanks to the efforts of Iranian-American organizations such as NIAC and PAAIA.

Doctor X: I don't believe any one is claiming that NIAC

 I don't believe any one is claiming that NIAC can do it ALL, specially given the AIPAC hard push for this and surely NIAC is no match for AIPAC at this point of time.  But they have been trying and actually able to get some changes, even if it is symbolic, in the Sanction bill that it should not be targeting the ordinary people.  In fact they are currently working to remove the portion of the sanction that affects individual Iranian students that have been affected by this moronic sanction.

Mehrdad

Great!

Oh so he wrote plenty about this. I bet that did a lot of good. We could almost see the immediate impact of all the writings!!!

So we have an organizations who objectively tries to do the best it can regarding iran and iranians, Yet we see the sanctions bill gets an Ass kicking approval majority of votes by both houses in congress and the president.

Trita Parsi has long track record of Human Rights commentary

It is an often repeated lie by the neo-con smear machine that Parsi didnt comment on human rights until June 2009. Anyone that can read can see that this is a lie.

On July 26, 2007, NIAC and Amnesty International held a joint conference
on Capitol Hill titled "Human Rights in Iran and U.S. Policy Options."
The panel attracted a diverse crowd consisting of Republican and
Democratic lawmakers, congressional staffers, journalists and scholars
of international affairs. Panelists included representatives from the
New York Times, Human Rights Watch, MIT's Center for International
Studies and Amnesty International. Copies of the transcript and video
can be found here.

Actually, you can go all the way to 2005 to see that Parsi wrote about human rights in the Finnacial Times: //www.ft.com/cms/s/8a048db2-5ce5-11d9-bb9c-00...

But hey - why care about facts? after all, this is the neo-con smear campaign. Facts are unimportant when you are trying to smear someone. 

OnlyIran:

While I don't agree with every issue/position that NIAC has taken, from an objective point of view, I can only appreciate what this organization has done so far. It has been arguably the most affective voice for Iranian-Americans and have fought for many issues that affect Iranian-Americans. All of this, while it has been confronted by a smear campaign that were not able to show any proof for all the allegations against them.

Mehrdad

I'm sorry, but Trita Parsi is a tool!

Until last year's uprising in Iran, he never mentioned a word about human rights violations in Iran.  There can only be two explanations for that: 1) that he knew about them and ignored them because he was trying to remain friendly with regime elements in the U.S.--who he was trying to pimp to lawmakers in Washington; or 2) he did not knew about human rights violations in Iran (which would make him an even bigger tool and totally unqualified to head an organization called the "National Iranian American Council").

Either way, he is a tool.  Now that's not saying that the neocons and Israel lovers / fanatics aren't tools.  They belong in the same category.  Needless to say, none of those groups have the best interest of the Iranian people at heart.  They all have their own sick agendas.   

good article

and it should teach us to judge folks by the merits of their cases and not hype.

some Iranian.com members also practise the neocon method

I wont name names but we all know them very well. Every single criticism of neocon policy towards Iran/Israel is faced with smears of "pro regime Islamist this or islamist that".

The recent blogosphere discussion over Lee Smith is also worth mentioning.

Daniel Luban (more or less) is spot on:

---
//www.lobelog.com/lee-smith/

Many readers will already have seen that this blog was mentioned, along with Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Phil Weiss, and Steve Walt, as one of the sites “using the Internet to make anti-Semitism respectable,” in a Tablet article by their neoconservative politics columnist Lee Smith. The article is silly and substanceless enough that I won’t bother responding — Walt, Weiss, and Jerry Haber have already written fine rebuttals, and even journalists who are far from sympathetic to our politics, like JTA’s Ron Kampeas and the New Jersey Jewish News’s Andrew Silow-Carroll, have picked apart Smith’s article for the idiocy that it is. (Although Kampeas feels compelled to take a gratuitous and frankly bizarre shot at Phil Weiss–he “gets up in the morning and plans a day that includes harming Jews”? Really, Ron? This is the kind of hysteria that one expects from Jeffrey Goldberg–who, no surprise, is the only source for Smith’s article.) I’ll just note how revealing it is that Smith is unable to produce a single instance of anti-Semitism from any of his targets, and is forced to rely on random and anonymous blog comments to make his case. His gloss on Jim’s political views also indicates that he has probably never read anything Jim’s written.

The real question is why the piece was published in the first place. I’ve written for Tablet before, and found the editors to be smart, thorough, and open-minded (as evidenced by their willingness to publish my piece in the first place). Reading Smith’s screed, I have to wonder how it made it through the publication process without anyone forcing him to provide some evidence for his claims.

More generally, it’s an interesting question why Smith has his gig at Tablet in the first place. I have no objection to the magazine airing neoconservative voices–they are a small minority in the American Jewish community, but an important one–but it is strange that the magazine would give its only weekly politics column to a neoconservative political operative who uses it exclusively as an echo chamber for talking points from Commentary and the Weekly Standard (where Smith also writes). I’ve gone through just about all of Smith’s Tablet columns, and virtually without fail they fall into one of two genres: there are hit pieces against whoever the neocons’ enemy of the week is (e.g. Trita Parsi, the Leveretts, and this latest article), and there are sycophantic puff pieces touting the wisdom of various Likudnik policymakers (e.g. Elliott Abrams, Michael Oren). Last week, he attempted a deeper think piece on Israel, Intellectuals, And The Fate Of Western Civilization, and it didn’t go too well–the kind of turgid pop philosophy that would be more at home in a college newspaper.

So why are we treated to Smith’s insights every week? Is it his good looks? His winning personality? A condition imposed by a funder? Regardless, his columns are jarringly out of place with the tenor of the rest of the magazine–and if his last couple are any indication, they’re only getting worse.

Great article, good work and lets expose them ever more so.

Mehrdad