Iran Focus
Washington, 5 Jul – Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Ken Blackwell, said that the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) had already united “officials from several presidential administrations” of both parties in “common cause” against fundamentalist terrorism. In pursuit of “the universal imperative to confront the threat of Islamic extremism,” the new administration, whether Republican and Democratic, needed to join the coalition developing around the NCRI, he argued.
Describing NCRI President Maryam Rajavi as “a devout and profoundly anti-fundamentalist Muslim woman leader,” Ambassador Blackwell said, “moderate democratic Islam is the antidote to the violent conduct of extremists.”
The Free Iran rally in Paris on July 9, Ambassador Blackwell said, will see Iranians joined by “a bipartisan American delegation, along with delegations from the EU and various nations of the world,” together with “the moderate Syrian opposition and other anti-Islamist movements.” He looked forward to US participants in the rally bringing home Mrs Rajavi’s perspective on “the destructive role of Iran, Assad and Iraqi Shiite militias in the spread of extremism throughout the region; and the means by which that spread can be halted.”
At 100,000 strong – “ironically bigger in size” than both US party conventions – the NCRI’s rally in Paris will include an explanation of its ten-point plan for “standing up to the egregious conduct of the Iranian regime, fighting the Islamic State, facilitating the removal of embattled regional dictators like Bashar al-Assad, and making sure that the peoples of that region have strong, recognizable alternatives to the extremist groups currently vying for dominance,” Ambassador Blackwell said.
That plan “includes the establishment of truly democratic governance in the Middle East, the separation of religion and state, an end to institutional misogyny, and the promotion of other principles that hold equally obvious appeal for all Americans, and indeed for all civilized peoples of the world,” he explained.
The NCRI’s qualifications in the confrontation with extremism were exemplary: Ambassador Blackwell reported that, “Some 120,000 of the activists of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI or MEK), the main constituent of the NCRI, have been executed in Iran in the past three decades.” This was, he continued, “an Iranian voice Republicans and Democrats should heed.”
