By Robert Novak
His remarks came days after some members of the European Parliament in Brussels hosted the leader of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), a terrorist cult that has murdered over 17,000 Iranians.
“Despite human rights slogans of the European Parliament, it’s regrettable some of its members turn a blind eye to the dark record of those who killed over 17000 Iranian kids, women, men, statesmen and members of parliament and hosted the ringleader of terror outfit MKO," Kan’ani tweeted.
“What do human rights have to do with supporting terrorists,” he hastened to add.
Kan’ani was referring to an open-door meeting dubbed "Perspective of Change and European Union Policy," held last Wednesday on the premises of the EU Parliament in Brussels.
The meeting was attended by several dozen people, including a small circle of EU parliamentarians known as the "Friends of Free Iran" (FOFI), an anti-Iran lobbyist group already blacklisted by Iran.
The infamous group was sanctioned by Iran’s foreign ministry in October 2022 during the deadly foreign-backed riots in the country for stoking violence.
We are not talking about experts in Iranian studies or connoisseurs of Iranian socio-political conditions but about lobbyists from peripheral European countries and parties who read pre-ordered texts full of lies, accusations, slander, uncivilized insults and pompous promises.
These people include Stanislav Polčák and Jan Zahradil from the Czech Republic, Alessandro Panza from Italy, Rasa Juknevičienė from Lithuania, Ryszard Czarnecki from Poland, Cristian Silviu Bușoi from Romania, Ivan Štefanec from Slovakia, Milan Zver from Slovenia, and Javier Zarzalejos from Spain.
The MKO’s infamous ringleader Maryam Rajavi addressed the gathering in a speech with three goals: including the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in its list of terrorist organizations, triggering snapback mechanism i.e. restoring the UN Security Council sanctions against Iran, engaging the European Union in attempts to overthrow the Iranian political system.
Evidently, all these goals are congruent with long-term nefarious plots and ongoing efforts of the US neocon and Zionist lobby groups in the West, who are also sponsors and backers of the MKO.
It is not the first time that pro-MKO gatherings of this type have been held, with the same group of people, the same speeches and the same goals.
The latest event, like all the previous ones, failed to achieve any desired political or media response.
Not only did the EU Parliament not respect their demands, but their performance on social networks and video hosting websites was more than miserable.
Weak lobbying results, however, cannot be a justification for the EU Parliament's policy which allows such organizations to operate unhindered, provides them with official premises and allows EU parliamentarians to lobby for terror cults without any inhibitions.
The MKO is a terrorist group that has killed tens of thousands of Iranians over the years, including prominent political leaders, activists and academics, a fact with which all independent observers.
On August 30, 1981, former Iranian President Mohammad Ali Rajaie and former Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar were both martyred at the Iranian presidential office in a terrorist attack carried out by the MKO.
It was only one of the dastardly terrorist attacks by the terror cult.
In a surprise move, the group was removed from the list of terrorist organizations by the EU in January 2009, which allowed it to expand its activities in Europe without any checks and balances.
It was not the result of any independent legal decision, but due to intensive multimillion-dollar lobbying by anti-Iran lobbyists such as those who met Rajavi in Brussels last week.
In February last year, Iran’s top human rights official Kazem Gharibabadi said that it was shameful for EU members to turn a blind eye to the crimes committed by the MKO terrorist group and refer to it as “political opponents”.
“The Europeans should know that as their support for the ISIL has backfired on them in a way that more than 4,000 ISIL members were European citizens and created insecurity for them, their support for the MKO will equally be costly,” he said at the time.
The recent pro-MKO gathering is not the first time that EU parliamentarians have showered lavish praise on notorious terrorist groups. We saw in the last ten years how terrorists in Syria were called "moderate opposition" or "democratic alternative."
As Gharibabadi said, Europeans should know the way their support for Daesh and its affiliates in Syria backfired, their support for the MKO terror cult will be “equally costly”.
We have seen similar distortion of reality in a number of other examples, including the Israeli regime.
It is not uncommon for EU politicians to call Israeli aggression in the occupied territories "self-defense," attacks on sovereign states "freedom operations," participation in the Western Asian occupations "promoting peace and stability," etc.
If today we see a dozen of EU parliamentarians hailing terrorists as "democrats" for a paltry sum, tomorrow hundreds of them with millions in their pockets will lobby for World War III.
Again, it wouldn't be the first time for Westerners. The last time they marched for a "pure race," before that for "enlightenment", and even before that, in the Crusader times, for the "true religion."
Today, it's "human rights." And it actually exposes their hypocrisy on human rights.
Robert Novak is an independent political observer and writer from Slovakia.
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