Former Governor of Pennsylvania, Edward Rendell addressed a crowd of more than 100,000 people in a Grand Gathering of the Iranian Resistance supporters on June 13, 2015 in Paris, France. He opened his speech by saying: “Before I pick up on the reading of the letter,” referring to a letter addressed to the US President and singed by 38 current and former officials and dignitaries regarding the plight of the Camp Liberty residents.
“I wanted to say that I know many of you are frustrated that 2,500 of your comrades are still imprisoned in Camp Liberty. We have been here many times and talked about the need to get out and get them to safety, and nothing seems to change. But I want you to know that we are frustrated, too. Myself and many of the people behind me, many of my colleagues, were a great part of persuading the people of Camp Ashraf to go to Liberty because we were told by the UN and the United States that it would be a temporary transit camp, and everyone would be immigrated as fast as humanely possible. That was over two years ago and only 200 have been immigrated out of the camp. When I was coming over on the plane last night I saw a news program which reminded me that a 120,000 Vietnamese were taken out of Vietnam with the American troops and sent to Guam where they were safe. Their personal safety was assured while they were going through the immigration process. It took four months to get a 125,000 people out of Vietnam to safety in Guam. It should take four weeks to get 2,500 members of the MEK out of Iraq to personal safety, and the United States gave a promise to each and every one of those citizens that we would protect them, and it is clear we cannot protect them in Iraq. So we need to get them out. We have a moral and legal obligation to get them out to Guam, or to the great country of Albania, which has opened its arms to the first 200, but we have got to get them out of Iran and got to get them out of Iraq quickly.
And now returning to the letter:
In all of these actions, while the US administration has exercised restraint in the apparent hope of moderating Iran’s behavior, Iran’s leaders have shown nothing but contempt to any American, European and Arab interest through the Middle East. They have also clearly demonstrated that money is no object in their efforts to quell popular movement for more open and democratic governance, both domestically and in neighboring Arab countries.
Inside Iran, while many Americans have for years detected some sign of moderation, the regime has become, if anything, more repressive. Since Hassan Rouhani became president in 2013, imprisonment and executions have increased, information including access to the Internet, radio, television and social media are now substantially controlled by the Revolutionary Guards. The 2013 elections were carefully managed by the regime to avoid a repeat of the open rebellion in the streets in 2009 as to which many have been executed and many more have been imprisoned. The editors of The Washington Post writing about its reporter, whom they say is entirely innocent of the charges which he has been imprisoned in Iran since the July of 2014, write that this and I am quoting The Washington Post, “Blatant abuse of the human rights of an American journalist raises disturbing questions about a regime that Mr. Obama is counting on to implement a complex and multi-faceted accord limiting its nuclear activities. The Post editors ask the question if Foreign Minister Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani either countenance or cannot stop blatantly provocative behavior by the Iranian intelligence services and judiciary, how can they be expected to overcome the entrenched resistance to limiting Iran’s uranium enrichment? Good question. We share these concerns.
We also recognize that the fundamentalist regime in Tehran, in violating so many norms of political governance and international behavior since the 1979 revolution, survives not through the ballot box but only by absolute suppression and its false claim to religious authority. A formula which has now been repeated by Sunni extremists attempting to create an Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. No one should misunderstand why the National Council of Resistance of Iran is the single most feared entity by the rulers in Tehran. It is because the MEK and the NCRI directly challenged the religious claim of authority that mullahs have used to exercise and maintain political power. The ayatollahs’ 35 year war against the MEK and NCRI, the repeated deadly results against Camp Liberty, their intelligence services and covert influence and propaganda campaign against the resistance in western countries, their constant diplomat request over the past two decades for the US, France and other governments to place the MEK on the list of terrorist organizations, their confiscation of satellite dishes and jamming of Iran national TV signals reaching the population inside Iran, their arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution, if there is anyone supporting the resistance, all these aspects of the regime’s obsessive focus on the resistance are due to one fact. This is not about terrorism, not about culture, not about the Iran-Iraq War or the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. All the propaganda generated by the regime to defame and criminalize the resistance has now been exposed and the NCRI has challenged every terrorist listing and won every single time. No, this obsession of the mullahs with the resistance is about Islam and the desire of millions of Iranians to exercise their faith while at the same time living in a modern society, with higher education, economic and political empowerment for women and men alike. The concept of velayat-e faqih in the new regime’s constitution forcefully imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini after the fall of the Shah to place total religious and political power in the hands of one man has been a disaster for the Iranian people, for Iran and for the world. You will not hear any debate in Washington that ISIS must be stopped. It is high time then for Americans to also recognize that if ISIS succeeds what the world will get is a Sunni version of Khomeini’s Iran.