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U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western leaders have been duped into believing that the Iranian regime’s President Hassan Rouhani is a “moderate” when reality shows he is no different from the mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to Iranian dissidents in an interview published on Monday by The Washington Times.<\/p>\n
The Washington Times wrote:<\/p>\n
When the doorbell rang, it was longer and harder than normal, like someone was ramming an angry finger on the button. Then the window suddenly was smashed and the police were inside the house.<\/p>\n
It was eight years ago in Tehran, but Parisa Kohandel, who was just nine at the time, remembers the authorities coming to take her father as if it happened yesterday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was crying, and I hugged him, and they were just searching the home,\u201d she says. \u201cI hugged him so they wouldn\u2019t take him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, they put a gun on my head and separated him from me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The case of her father Saleh Kohandel, who supports the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, PMOI (or Mujahidin-e-Khalq, MEK), resembles that of dozens of other political prisoners in Iran, the paper wrote.<\/p>\n
It added: The Islamic republic\u2019s oppressive regime is something the Obama administration chose mainly to ignore as it pursued this year\u2019s historic nuclear accord with Tehran, which formally took effect Sunday, even as some high-profile human rights cases prompted outrage in Washington and beyond.<\/p>\n
The fate of Iran’s political prisoners is a matter of uncertainty. “Some end up hanged from construction cranes in public squares. Others get lucky and are released after years of sordid incarceration,” The Washington Times said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe worst torture happens when you are in solitary confinement, both physical and psychological,\u201d says Farzad Madadzadeh, an MEK (PMOI) activist who was set free last February after five years of imprisonment.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the years, scores of my best friends were hanged \u2014 scores of them,\u201d Mr. Madadzadeh, 30, told The Washington Times in an interview. \u201cTheir only crime was they were seeking freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Washington Times added:<\/p>\n
What\u2019s worse, according to both Mr. Madadzadeh and Parisa Kohandel, 17, is that the crackdown on political opposition has grown more intense just as Iran\u2019s leaders have sought to appear moderate on reaching the nuclear deal and getting the U.S. and its allies to lift sanctions.<\/p>\n
The Obama administration has so far insisted that sanctions for human rights violations and support of terrorism remain in place. But the Iranian regime appears undeterred.<\/p>\n
The two dissidents, who recently fled Iran in pursuit of asylum in Europe, warned that the West\u2019s wider policy of appeasement toward Tehran is emboldening Iranian leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe nuclear deal has already made the regime more brazen because they feel the West is going to be silent no matter what they do,\u201d said Mr. Madadzadeh, who claimed the regime lives in \u201cconstant fear\u201d of an uprising by opposition forces.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe number of arrests I know of university students and teachers, simply people who partake in any protest, has increased dramatically over the last three years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Human rights and prison conditions, he added, have particularly worsened since President Hassan Rouhani came to power in mid-2013.<\/p>\n
President Obama and other Western leaders, Mr. Madadzadeh argued, have been duped into believing Mr. Rouhani is moderate when reality shows the Iranian president is \u201cno different\u201d from supreme religious leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei and other mullahs who wield the real power in Iran.<\/p>\n
The \u2018Purple Fox\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n Mr. Madadzadeh said frustration runs deep among many Iranians that \u201cthe West is not standing with us, but standing with a dictatorship like this \u2014 one that\u2019s creating chaos in the whole region and killing prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n The biggest outrage, he said, is that the regime has achieved a kind of complicity from the West in promoting Mr. Rouhani as a man of the people fighting for reforms.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are some people who are playing this political game trying to depict Rouhani as a moderate. Some in the regime play this game to buy time from the West, and some in the West have an interest in playing this game,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is all a gambit to deceive the international community. I call it the massive deception of moderate show in Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cReality is totally different,\u201d he said, adding that, in private, many Iranians \u201ccall Rouhani the \u2018Purple Fox\u2019\u201d because of the deceptive nature of his image on the world stage.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s also called the \u2018deceiving Mullah,\u2019\u201d Mr. Madadzadeh said, although the \u2018Purple Fox\u2019 nickname has stuck because it stems from Mr. Rouhani\u2019s use of purple as the official color of his campaign while running for president three years ago.<\/p>\n Mr. Madadzadeh pointed to the soaring number of executions that have occurred in Iran since then, claiming the rate under Mr. Rouhani far outstrips that of past periods, including during the 2005-to-2013 presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.<\/p>\n Amnesty International has pointed to \u201can unprecedented spike in executions,\u201d describing the situation as \u201cshocking,\u201d with some 694 people having been executed in the first six months of 2015.<\/p>\n A vast network<\/strong><\/p>\n Mr. Madadzadeh was arrested in 2009 for promoting anti-regime political activities through the Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose members claim to have a growing and deep opposition network both inside and outside Iran.<\/p>\n The network facilitated Mr. Madadzadeh\u2019s flight to Europe in recent months. He spoke with The Times via videoconference from an undisclosed location.<\/p>\n While his story could not be independently verified, his name and the severity of his detention have been referenced in State Department human rights documents.<\/p>\n Both Paria Kohandel and Mr. Madadzadeh met Iranian opposition leader Mrs. Maryam Rajavi for the first time in Paris on October 10 in an event to mark the World Day Against the Death Penalty.<\/p>\n The Washington Times wrote the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the PMOI (MEK) \u201care said to have deep sources inside Iran\u2019s nuclear community, and members have made some game-changing revelations about Tehran\u2019s nuclear activities over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n The paper added:<\/p>\n During the early 2000s the NCRI revealed the existence of Iran\u2019s Natanz uranium-enrichment facility and the Arak heavy water plutonium facility \u2014 two operations that have been at the center of international scrutiny and distrust of Tehran during the years since.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a factor that seems only to have hardened the regime\u2019s resolve for cracking down.<\/p>\n \u201cThe regime is only fearful of one domestic phenomenon, and that\u2019s Mujahedin-e-Khalq,\u201d claimed Mr. Madadzadeh, who asserts that \u201csupport for the MEK is growing in Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to expanding government propaganda aimed at smearing the group.<\/p>\n A sad prison hallway<\/strong><\/p>\n One tactic involves programming on Iranian state-controlled media that features interviews with known MEK members who\u2019ve been coerced by the regime into publicly condemning the organization. If a dissident refuses to play along, the consequences can be grave.<\/p>\n Parisa Kohandel told The Times that when she was a young child, government officials apprehended her father and pressured him to speak out against the MEK on state television.<\/p>\n \u201cHe didn\u2019t accept it, and because of that, now he\u2019s in prison,\u201d the 17-year-old said, adding that the true terms of his incarceration are unclear.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s been told that it is a 10-year sentence, but he has also been told that he is awaiting execution,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n His predicament has inspired her own activism and membership in the MEK. \u201cI have made up my mind,\u201d she said. \u201cI am not afraid of anything.\u201d<\/p>\n But Parisa also was remorseful about the horrific experience of having grown up with a father behind bars in a country where thousands have been executed on murky terms.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of political prisoners are executed under the guise of being drug dealers,\u201d she said, adding that they are not drug dealers but ordinary Iranians \u2014 many jailed purely for their Kurdish ethnicity or being Sunni Muslims in the Shiite-dominated Islamic republic.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I used to walk in the hallway of the prison to the visiting place to see my father, I could see many young kids, six, seven, eight years old, who had to walk the same path,\u201d Ms. Kohandel said. \u201cA lot of them were carrying small pictures, a child\u2019s hand-drawn picture of them and their dads, and many of them, when they came the next week, their dad was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western leaders have been duped into believing that the Iranian regime’s President Hassan Rouhani is a “moderate” when reality shows he is no different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":44411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[175],"class_list":{"0":"post-19306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-stop-executions-in-iran","8":"tag-updated"},"yoast_head":"\n