Michael Rubin’s fixation on dehumanizing Iran’s largest opposition, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), serves only one master: theocracy in Tehran. For decades, every major U.S. misstep on Iran—from Washington’s failed attempts to court Tehran, to the Iran-Contra scandal in 1985, to the disgraceful 1997 blacklisting of the MEK as a “goodwill gesture,” and the 2003 U.S. bombing of MEK camps in Iraq at Tehran’s behest—has only served to embolden the regime. By perpetuating this cycle, Rubin sustains the very regime he claims to criticize.
When confronted with fact-based arguments, Rubin deflects with self-pity, portraying himself as a ‘victim’ of the MEK. This is not the stance of a serious scholar. It is the deflection of a man unwilling or unable to defend his baseless claims or his checkered past.
True, Rubin’s visits to Iran don’t make him a regime agent. But they do raise questions like: Why did a regime notorious for its anti-Semitism grant Rubin access to the archives of a notorious IRGC foundation directly supervised by Khamenei?
A foreign ‘academic’ reviewed documents in Tehran’s security apparatus while independent scholars are arrested, tortured, and murdered in the infamous Evin Prison for much less. That is like Neville Chamberlain getting a guided tour of Hitler’s war room while the Gestapo rounded up resistance fighters. How many Americans have ever received such extraordinary access from the IRGC? In the annals of contemporary Iranian history, the clerical regime has never bestowed such an exceptional privilege upon any group, not even the Communist Tudeh Party, which, in the early 1980s, brazenly clamored for the execution of MEK members with unabashed zeal.
Exposing Michael Rubin: A Propagandist Echoing #Tehran's Narrativeshttps://t.co/oBD52xSU97
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 18, 2025
History teaches us that when totalitarian regimes roll out the red carpet for an ‘academic’ – not once but twice – it’s never because they fear his pen; it’s because they find it useful.
Rubin frantically tries to minimize his oeuvre in Iran, dismissing it as mere “spinoff articles about Persian cryptology… and the like.” Yet, in June 1997, fresh from his first of two pilgrimages to Iran, he confidently voted in the mullahs’ favor, writing in The Middle East Quarterly: “Nor is there a viable opposition to the current government. Iranians hate the People’s Mujahedin [MEK].” This evidence-free proclamation, a gift to Tehran’s propaganda machine, earned him a second invitation.
But true experience and expertise are not cultivated through opinion columns. Rubin parachuted into the Iran debate only after visiting the mullahs. The MEK, however, did not simply parachute into history; it has bled for it over six decades and counting.
In 1988, some 30,000 MEK activists were brutally massacred in what the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran condemned as a crime against humanity and genocide. Since then, they have endured unspeakable persecution. Yet Rubin, while offering token criticism of Tehran, reserves his sharpest vitriol for the MEK, which has been the mullahs’ primary victim.
Michael Rubin’s MEK-Bashing Serves Iran’s Ruling Tyrantshttps://t.co/7qMISaPraA
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) January 25, 2023
Then there is Rubin’s newfound expertise on Iranian women’s rights. His foolish remarks regarding Mrs. Maryam Rajavi and the MEK women’s choice to wear the hijab reveal a deeply misogynistic stance.
Never mind that two of Mrs. Rajavi’s sisters, one brother-in-law, and one sister-in-law were murdered by the Shah’s regime and later by Khomeini’s forces, and that she herself narrowly escaped a similar fate when IRGC thugs attacked the home she was staying at in Tehran in 1981. Maryam Rajavi has remained unwavering in her commitment to women’s rights—not just today but since the earliest days of the revolution, when, while wearing the hijab, she marched in lockstep with throngs of unveiled women protesting compulsory hijab. Mrs. Rajavi’s famous declaration, “No to compulsory religion, no to compulsory veiling, no to compulsory governance,” is heard from the front lines of a brutal struggle. MEK women are not victims; they are the vanguard of a historic resistance.
Does Rubin extend his patronizing misogyny and faux outrage to hundreds of millions of women who wear a hijab, or is it reserved solely for those leading the charge against the mullahs?
Next, Rubin trots out the canard that “most Iranians” despise the MEK. This sweeping generalization is presented with precisely zero evidence. Has he conducted an independent survey inside Iran, where even a whisper of support for the MEK can lead to a death sentence? No fewer than 10 political prisoners currently await execution on the charge of being MEK members. Or does Rubin perhaps derive his “evidence” from the same IRGC archives where his “research” finds such warm acceptance? Or perhaps his “evidence” comes from the IRGC archives?
Check out my latest column: Michael Rubin's Anti-MEK Rhapsody from Tehran’s Archives to Washington’s Websites—a look at a smear campaign stretching from #Iran’s vaults to America’s digital realm.https://t.co/IO4NWhT8qV @MarioNawfal @CyTheNoble @SebGorka @iran_policy @NCRIUS pic.twitter.com/G6AE3bq5n5
— Ali Safavi (@amsafavi) April 6, 2025
He claims the MEK “disrupts grassroots opposition,” yet his own career seems singularly devoted to eradicating them from the conversation altogether. The real irony, however, is that he clings to the defunct monarchy, despite being keenly aware, more than most, that the Shah’s son, ensnared by his reliance on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has morphed into an unwitting pawn of the very regime he claims to oppose, sowing discord among opposition factions, even those who once pledged fealty to him or his father’s faded crown.
In contrast, the MEK has built a formidable, organized resistance both inside Iran and on the global stage. Even the turbaned tyrant Ali Khamenei has been forced to acknowledge the MEK’s central role in the 2017-2018 and 2019 uprisings. In the past year alone, the MEK-affiliated Resistance Units have carried out 3,077 operations against Rubin’s hosts in Tehran—the IRGC and the Basij—and have participated in over 39,000 acts of protest across all 31 Iranian provinces, spanning 135 cities. These brave individuals, many of whom are young men and women confronting the IRGC directly, are the true patriots.
On the political front, the MEK and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) stand as unwavering beacons, tirelessly advocating for national solidarity, resolute in their pursuit of the regime’s overthrow, and devoted to erecting a democratic republic on its ashes.
Rubin, however, tries to label them traitors simply because the MEK called for peace in the devastating Iran-Iraq war and relocated to the Iran-Iraq border strip in 1986—six years after the onset of the Iran-Iraq war, a conflict senselessly prolonged by Khomeini after Iraq’s withdrawal behind internationally recognized borders in 1982. Khomeini’s mantra, “liberating Quds (Jerusalem) via Karbala,” was a criminal undertaking that resulted in one million children being sent to the front lines as human minesweepers.
The Michael Rubin Rubik’s Cube: Parroting #Iran Mullahs https://t.co/tKycYPH6Gq pic.twitter.com/m4Jw0qWCeX
— Ali Safavi (@amsafavi) March 31, 2024
Rubin’s history with individuals like Ahmed Chalabi—an Iraqi exile who was later revealed to have been secretly liaising with Iranian intelligence—further undermines his credibility. The same man who mocks the MEK for relocating to the Iraq-Iran frontier has been part of a much greater embarrassment: the fiasco that was the Iraq War.
Let’s, for a moment, grant Rubin the courtesy of scholarly pretense. His latest grievance that he is a “victim” of the MEK for being held accountable for his own words exposes a scholar’s most fatal flaw: an aversion to scrutiny. Rather than defending his assertions with evidence, he retreats behind the façade of intellectual martyrdom, mistaking criticism for persecution.
History is littered with those who sought not only to annihilate a population but to erase their culture, history, and future. Is Rubin’s ‘scholarship’ not pursuing a similar erasure of the MEK’s enduring presence and legacy?
Rubin’s baseless and tired half-century-old allegations have been debunked previously. I will suffice to recall what John Adams once famously said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Rubin’s refusal to engage with the facts speaks volumes about his commitment to disinformation, which has found a welcome home on the front pages of Khamenei’s mouthpiece.
A true academic welcomes scrutiny; a propagandist recoils from it. If Michael Rubin seeks credibility, he must present evidence, not grievance; he must support his assertions on the MEK with sources beyond his own articles. In the realm of ideas, merit is earned, not entitled.