An unprecedented demonization campaign began last week in Iran against the opposition MEK and its leaders Maryam Rajavi and Massoud Rajavi.
It is some time Tehran has changed its old policy of not mentioning MEK in official media, a rule strictly respected under Khomeini and afterward under Khamenei until a few years ago, when the media began talking of the MEK.
The peak had yet to come when following nationwide unrest at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself went to lengths explaining that the MEK was, apart the Americans and the Saudis –responsible according to him for the chaos covering the country at the time – the internal factor fomenting general unrest against the regime.
But last week the Tehran Times, the semi-official mouthpiece of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, quoted the Iranian Ambassador in the UK on cyber activities of the MEK, directed according to the paper from Albania, where the movement is settled since 2016. The ambassador claimed that MEK was using super modern computers to spread fake news on the Islamic Republic, publishing as proof a photograph it claimed had been smuggled out of the Ashraf3 compound belonging to the MEK in Albania showing a number of people working behind ordinary computers. However, the paper does not mention what fake news was diffused by those people from Albania, and still worst, the photograph it mentions is one borrowed from public websites belonging to the MEK.
But official websites are but one of the means used by the Tehran regime to attack its opponents. Public speeches, like the one-two days ago in the presence of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, by a certain religious preacher named Saadi come to amplify the message.
“What is happening today is that a regime that boasts 17000 terror victims including the supreme leader himself is nowadays presented as a sponsor of terrorism,” he claimed in his speech, with those present chanting “death to the MEK” in response, as the regime claims that those victims were virtually all lost to the resistance led by the MEK.
Even foreign sources considered friendly to the Tehran regime are not omitted from the campaign. NBC’s recent report on US internal politics turned into a demonization effort against the MEK since the regime is considered a victim of the current US administration’s foreign policy.
The reason for the propaganda up-flare is not a secret. A nationwide campaign by the Resistance’s unites and sympathizers the country over, concentrated on hanging huge posters of the Resistance’s leaders in public spaces is beginning to have its effects on the population, and worst for the regime, on the morale of security forces who are not able to prevent such activities.
Two weeks ago, the regime’s websites were obliged to even publish a photograph showing a huge poster of Massoud Rajavi hanging from a highway bridge in Tehran. Clearly, Iranian authorities are at a point to understand silence would be counter-productive, so the go-ahead seems to have been given to all official outlets.
The current campaign by resistance units and sympathizers consists mainly of putting on fire huge posters of the regime’s figures, mostly Khamenei and Rohani. At the same time, portraits of the resistance leader Massoud Rajavi and the NCRI’s president-elect, Maryam Rajavi, are increasingly hanged in public places where they remain visible at times for hours before being taken down by security forces.
A huge poster of a smiling Maryam Rajavi attached to three red, green and white big balloons reminding the national colors strode over Tehran two days ago for everyone to see.
