Beware of Experts Collaborating With Tehran
Towhall, October 9, 2023 by Ivan Sascha Sheehan
In 2014, Ariane Tabatabai – then a predoctoral fellow at Harvard University – published an article which pointedly advised policymakers to “Beware of the MEK.” It repeated serious accusations against the Iranian regime’s principal domestic adversary, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The obvious goal was to discourage American and European legislators from flocking to the organization and its democratic agenda.
Tabatabai’s article described the MEK as a “cult-like dissident group, based outside of Iran.” While noting that the group had been removed from European terrorist lists in 2009 and the U.S. State Department list in 2012, she repeated spurious and long denied claims that the MEK had attacked American personnel in the 1970s and supported the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran at the end of that decade.
The article went on to accuse the MEK of torture and beatings and of controlling “every aspect of its members’ lives.” While indirectly acknowledging the organization’s democratic platform, Tabatabai accused the group of deceiving and manipulating its Western supporters by secretly advancing an ideology that posed a threat to Western security interests.
Without a shred of evidence to support her claims, Tabatabai leveraged her reputed expertise in Iranian affairs to repeat the allegations in widely circulated foreign policy outlets in 2018 and 2020, clearly directing her ire at the ayatollahs’ most formidable opposition.
It now appears that Tabatabai may have been serving as an Iranian mouthpiece in the United States.
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