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The leader Iran’s regime fears the most is Maryam Rajavi
Oct. 28, 2018 - In an article published on Sunday,
October 28, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now lawyer to U.S. President
Donald Trump, calls for the recognition of Iranian opposition People's
Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) as the alternative to the Iranian
regime.
As protests inside Iran escalate and the mullahs’ regime
faces an ever-growing international isolation, analysts and observers are
discussing the issue of the alternative for this regime that can guarantee the
correct transition to freedom and democracy based on the Iranian people’s will.
Originally published in the Townhall website:
The American Iranian diaspora that stands against the regime
in Iran last month came to New York, my city, as the international community
does during the annual United Nations General Assembly meetings. For the ninth
time, I had the honor of addressing them.
We have an obligation to listen to what the Iranian people
have been saying over the past nine months in their continuous nationwide
protests. I am one of a large bipartisan group of former governors, mayors,
military leaders, senior administration officials and members of Congress, who
agree on one critical foreign policy, as the Iranian people do: Iran is
entitled to freedom and democracy, and should be led by those who have fought
for it and with whom America can find its best allies.
We strongly support the largest and most organized Iranian
opposition, known as the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK). It is very important to
realize that fundamental change in Iran requires organization, leadership, a
platform, endurance, competence, and sacrifice, and the one group that the regime
feels has all those characteristics is the MEK. The one leader that Tehran
fears the most is Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of the broader
coalition of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) which includes
the MEK as a member.
This explains why the Iranian regime has been trying to bomb
events supportive of MEK and kill their leaders, and why the regime has
murdered tens of thousands of their members over the years and seeks to
eliminate them even using terrorism in Europe and the United States.
Iranian terrorists and spies were caught recently in Belgium,
France, Germany, Albania, and most recently right here in America with bombs
and photos of senior members of the organized opposition.
The two Iranian spies arrested in the U.S. attended the opposition’s
rally in New York last year with a “target package” that included “capture/kill
operations,” according to the seized documents. New York has seen enough
terrorism for several lifetimes; this must not stand. Moreover, we can
only conclude from an operation so brash that the regime in Iran feels
threatened by all that is going wrong. They consider the MEK to be an
existential threat.
In Europe, where Tehran is striving to shore up its relations
with the EU, its diplomats are orchestrating bomb plots. Iranian agents planned
to bomb a Nowruz celebration earlier this year in Albania, which both
Maryam Rajavi and I attended. Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence station
chief for all Europe, based at its embassy in Vienna, and three others armed
with bombs and explosives, targeted the annual conference of the NCRI in Paris,
attended by some 100,000 Iranians from the diaspora and international
dignitaries including several retired U.S. generals.
Tehran is willing to risk the political backlash of irrational
terrorist activity abroad; the desperation of such acts is clear to the
international community.
Of course, the regime’s terrorism starts at home, where it
has killed tens of thousands of its own people. For those in Iran who are
the tip of the spear, standing up to the regime in protest, we must say:
We have your back. Now is the time to follow Ronald Reagan’s path a
generation ago, when he led America to embrace Solidarity in Poland. Then, the
U.S. government embraced Polish liberators and patriots and did not turn its
back on them. We must embrace Iran’s patriots so that their protest
movement prevails as well.
The backing and tenacity of the organized Iranian opposition
in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere for their brothers and sisters inside Iran
are driving the latter’s will and courage. Those in Iran are putting their
lives on the line in the name of freedom, and it seems that the more the regime
attacks, imprisons and tries to kill them, the stronger the resistance becomes.
Iran apologists and detractors have questioned the MEK’s
influence inside Iran. I have never doubted it. Why would the regime be so
methodical in imprisoning, torturing and killing MEK supporters in Iran, as
well as targeting its senior officials in Paris and New York if it didn’t feel
threatened by it? The regime does not doubt the MEK’s strength in Iran and is
on record identifying it as the only opposition movement capable of
overthrow.
And that regime will be overthrown. It is a question of when
not if. Clearly, the people of Iran have had enough. The currency has
plummeted. In the streets, men and women are demanding a better life, and
an end to the corruption and costly regional meddling that has robbed them of
their futures. Sanctions are working to cut off the ruling apparatus’
access to funds. These are the conditions that create change, and revolutions.
Nor should we fear what comes the day after the revolution.
Iranians are demanding a democratic republic. Under the leadership of Maryam
Rajavi and the movement of dedicated dissidents that she has established inside
Iran and across the Western world, there is a strong and viable alternative
that can make that happen.
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