Wise Men From The East?

Right when we need him most, Asad Haider is dead. By installing the Rodríguezes, with whom he had clearly done the deal for this startlingly unbloody coup, Donald Trump is not even pretending that María Corina Machado had any popular support in Venezuela, or that he cared whether or not Edmundo González had won the last Presidential Election. González presented no evidence to the Supreme Court, and thus to the world. But to Trump, so what if he had?

Like her brother who swore her in, Delcy Rodríguez is no slouch when it comes to the old repression. Trump makes no bones about the fact that she is his puppet President, and that the whole intervention was for the oil. If you are still banging on about freedom and democracy, or about drugs, then you are probably beyond help.

There will no more freedom or democracy in Venezuela than there was last week, there will be no reduction in America’s drugs-related problems that were no more about Venezuela than there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Trump will quite fairly say that neither of those points was pertinent. Having been actively or passively allowed to leave Venezuela, Machado may never again set foot there. Ponder that in view of more recent but obviously long-planned developments.

The Iranian Machado is Maryam Rajavi, who heads the weirdest political cult in the world, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq). That has been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population was under 30, yet the longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim was to install it in Tehran, so the Americans relocated it to Albania between 2013 and 2016. It remains there, not without local resistance, while also maintaining a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.

Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden’s, Bush’s and Blair’s Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn. Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But these people really did and do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet they were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.

Now, though, affections have been transferred to the extremely pro-Israeli, and overtly Israeli-backed, partisans of Reza Pahlavi, hitherto a ridiculous fantasist supported by almost no one else in the world apart from a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. Rajavi is most put out.

Using her stage name, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Rajavi alleges that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has been infiltrating demonstrations and shouting for the Shah, or else overdubbing recordings of demonstrations in those terms and circulating them on social media. In every case of the former, says Rajavi, the real demonstrators have responded with her own slogans of opposition both to the Supreme Leader and to the Shah. Like the Eskandari founders of the Tudeh Party, she is a member of the Qajar dynasty that reigned until the Pahlavis overthrew it in 1925. As was the great Mohammad Mosaddegh, but that does provide some context.

In calling for Pahlavi himself to run Iran, all the old munchers of freedom fries are now advocating an absolute monarchy. Many of them want to overthrow our own constitutionally constrained King out of liberal republicanism. The people who wanted to do so because he was one or more of a Green, a closet Muslim, and a participant in Popish idolatry, are calling for a Muslim to be made the unchecked ruler of the world’s seventeenth largest country both in area and in population.

 

Meanwhile, the talking points of Islamo-Marxist Rajavi and of her Islamo-Marxist PMOI/MEK are being amplified by none other than The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Sun, and the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Bob Blackman. Those newspapers would normally have a field day with a Red Princess, but here we are. As Leader of the Opposition on Brent Council, Blackman blocked the two thirds majority that would have given Nelson Mandela the Freedom of the Borough when he came to Wembley Stadium, before going to court to stop any recognition of the fact that there had been a simple majority for that award.

Blackman has since been elected to Parliament with the support of Operation Dharmic Vote, the only too successful campaign to repeal the Labour ban on caste discrimination, which the present Government has still not reinstated. He has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita. At the House of Commons, he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims, mirroring Blackman’s advocacy of Azerbaijan against Armenia and Artsakh while retweeting Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

In 2024, when the Conservatives’ only gain was Leicester East, Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. He has visited the headquarters of the PMOI/MEK at least three times, including twice in the last three years. And he chairs the 1922 Committee, as well as the Backbench Business Committee. Think on.