Iran's mullah regime has stepped up its propaganda campaign of smears against Iran's democratic opposition.

Tehran's media propagated the unfounded claim that Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Iranian opposition and former Secretary-General of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), had fallen ill and was hospitalized.

This rumor surfaced a day after Le Monde criticized the PMOI, a principal opponent of Tehran’s regime, employing the regime's long-standing derogatory terms. The timing and details of these publications were notably promoted by "NGOs" tied to the regime's intelligence networks.

But what's the reason behind this?

We'll start with something going back to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, remember him?

In the 1980s, Khomeini, the Islamic Republic's founder, dishonestly accused the Mojahedin of arson on buses and farms, aiming to undermine the group that was gaining traction among the youth, especially among young women, for its robust resistance to the regime.

Around that time, he also started a war with Iraq.

In 1988, under pressure from the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), with the Mojahedin as a central member, Khomeini had to concede to a ceasefire with Iraq, metaphorically "drinking poison" as he put it, to halt his aggressive policies.

The ceasefire was embarassing to Iran and obviously fueled more discontent within his regime.

In the end, it came at a high cost to the opposition: the execution of around thirty thousand PMOI inmates. This conflict, which brought untold suffering to Iran in terms of deaths, injuries, and financial costs — with at least a million students sent to the front and two trillion dollars spent — was used by Khomeini to justify the purge of PMOI members. Notably, the plans to eliminate PMOI prisoners were in motion well before the summer 1988 attack, confirmed by various reports including those from Amnesty International.

Later on in 2021, Khomeini's successor as supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, orchestrated efforts to elect Ebrahim Raisi during Hassan Rouhani’s second presidential term. This is important to remember.

The Mojahedin, under the campaign "Neither Charlatan nor Executioner," were pivotal in exposing Raisi’s role in these 1988 massacres. Rouhani leveraged this campaign to thwart Khamenei’s initial plans for Raisi. Anticipating a major uprising similar to that of 2009 if he pushed Raisi’s election, Khamenei later sought retribution by targeting Mojahedin camps in Iraq.

Numerous instances highlight the religious dictatorship’s relentless attempts to assassinate Mojahedin leaders or orchestrate mass killings abroad. When physical elimination was unfeasible, the regime resorted to demonizing its adversaries to marginalize them from the political arena.

The trial of 104 members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) resumed in Tehran after a hiatus, where the presiding judge opened the proceedings to the public before delivering the final judgment. He warned countries hosting the defendants that their presence is deemed criminal under international counterterrorism laws. He particularly called on France and Albania, urging them to reconsider their asylum policies toward those accused of terrorist activities and crimes against humanity and to collaborate with international bodies for their extradition to Iran.

The article in Le Monde appears to support this judicial spectacle in Iran, part of which aims to create a pretext for executing opposition figures abroad. This mirrors the scenario in Spain where an assassination attempt was made on a former vice president of the European Parliament by an individual wanted by French authorities and linked to Tehran, with his support for the Iranian resistance being his supposed offense.

Amid accusations from the Mojahedin condemning the Tehran regime's role in Middle Eastern conflicts and their call for peace devoid of the current leadership, the global community has begun to look for alternatives to this regime. Concurrently, after the NCRI declared significant resistance activities both within and outside Iran, resistance units have undertaken twenty thousand actions against the regime’s oppressive measures, each action risking severe penalties including death.

As a result, the regime resorts to demonization tactics. A lengthy critique in Le Monde serves this purpose well.

In her book, supported by friends and family, Danielle Mitterrand, the late First Lady of France, stated that no resistance movement achieves its objectives without being maligned and slandered. Mrs. Mitterrand herself faced terrorism charges for her role in the French Resistance against Nazi occupation.

This pattern of vilification is familiar to the Iranian populace. Iranian newspapers are compelled to publish distorted narratives about the Mojahedin daily. Despite decades of such propaganda, especially post the mass executions of 1988, the Mojahedin have successfully orchestrated thousands of resistance cells within Iran, under a harsh dictatorship.

The question then arises: should we trust the Iranian regime’s portrayal of this resistance or the judgment of the Iranian people who have firsthand experience with these activists?

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