FISN: Professor Sheehan submitted the following letter on February 4, 2026 to the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs in response to an article by Tirza Shorr. As of today, February 15, 2026, neither the author nor anyone else at the Center has responded. The letter has therefore been submitted to FISN for publication.
By Ivan Sascha Sheehan, Ph.D., Interim Dean and Professor, College of Public Affairs, University of Baltimore
The January 22, 2026 essay, “Ideology and the Politics of Convenience: Why Has an Exiled Iranian Islamic Socialist Cult Become Popular Among Western Elites?”, by Tirza Shorr of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs is not a serious analytical contribution to the debate on Iran’s future. It is a familiar compilation of discredited accusations, recycled talking points, and demonstrably false claims that have circulated for more than a quarter century as part of the Iranian regime’s expensive intelligence-driven disinformation campaign against its most organized and effective opposition, which it views as an existential threat, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK).
Its timing is telling. The piece appears as Iran is in the grip of a powerful, ongoing nationwide uprising—one that regime officials themselves have acknowledged. The secretary of the regime’s National Security Council Ali Akbar Jamshidian told the state television on January 21 that the current uprising has spread to more than 400 cities and over 1,000 locations nationwide, including at least 100 protest sites in Tehran alone. This is occurring amid economic collapse, mass arrests, executions, internet shutdowns, and lethal repression.
At precisely this moment, when the clerical dictatorship is visibly weakened and the question of a democratic alternative has become unavoidable, the author rushes to advance a single political objective: to undermine the credibility of the most serious and capable alternative to the regime, thereby throwing a lifeline to Tehran.
That objective explains both the timing and the substance of the article.
1. A Regime Playbook, Not Independent Analysis
The allegations recycled in this piece—claims of a “cult,” “Islamic socialism,” “lack of popular support,” “foreign manipulation,” and “paid Western politicians”—are not independent findings or fresh analysis. They are verbatim reproductions of narratives manufactured and relentlessly disseminated by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and the IRGC since the late 1990s, at enormous financial and operational cost. These tropes have been laundered for decades through front organizations, incentivized “defectors,” compliant armchair academics, sympathetic journalists, and ideologically aligned outlets.
What is most striking is not merely the repetition of these talking points, but the author’s wholesale disregard for the substantial body of countervailing evidence: peer-reviewed scholarship, well-documented investigative reporting, and authoritative books that have methodically dismantled these claims. Many of the allegations advanced here collapse under even minimal scrutiny; others cross the line from distortion into outright defamation.
2. Western Support: Illegitimacy Claim, Terrorism Label
Western support for the Iranian Resistance comes from elected lawmakers and former senior government officials across party lines, including former cabinet members, national security officials, military commanders, and diplomats.
Their support is open, lawful, and transparent, grounded in the resistance’s democratic platform and its record of exposing the regime’s crimes, including key elements of its nuclear weapons program later confirmed by international inspectors.
The insinuation that such backing is illegitimate or “bought” collapses under the most minimal scrutiny. The real scandal is not that Western figures support the NCRI, but that some commentators now seek to delegitimize solidarity with a people in revolt by laundering Tehran’s talking points through Western discourse.
At no point has any evidence ever been produced to demonstrate that the MEK paid anyone, even a single dime, to speak on its behalf or promote its cause. This allegation was subjected to formal scrutiny by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which conducted a thorough investigation and found no wrongdoing whatsoever. The persistence of this claim, despite its definitive dismissal by relevant U.S. authorities, underscores its function not as a factual assertion but as a deliberate smear—repeated to poison the well in the absence of evidence.
As for the politically-motivated terrorist designation, the outcome of the exhaustive legal and administrative reviews was unequivocal: the removal of the MEK from terrorist designations in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere—not as a political favor, but after years of adversarial legal scrutiny, evidentiary hearings, and judicial review, during which the allegations repeatedly failed to withstand examination.
To recycle these allegations today, as if they were fresh insights, is not scholarship; it is regurgitation.
3. “Cult” Allegations as a Tool of Dehumanization
The article’s lurid and unsubstantiated claims about internal practices rely almost entirely on sources promoted by Tehran or on outlets that have repeatedly depended on regime-linked narratives.
The allegations of forced sterilization, abuse, or coercion are so patently absurd that, outside circles affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), they have found no serious audience. There is not a shred of credible evidence to substantiate these wholly fabricated claims. On the contrary, several individuals who initially promoted these accusations later recanted, writing directly to the UN Secretary-General to state that they had been recruited by the MOIS and financially compensated to plant these false narratives in the media.
The reality is clear. Since 2016, following the completion of the relocation of the Mujahedin-e Khalq to Ashraf-3 in Albania, hundreds of international dignitaries and dozens of Western journalists have visited the site. Many have spoken privately and without supervision to residents and subsequently published detailed accounts of their observations. These include:
- At the time the President of Albania
- U.S. and European officials and parliamentarians
- Former senior government officials
- International NGOs
- Journalists from major media outlets
None corroborated these allegations.
The purpose of such language is transparent: to dehumanize a resistance movement that has demonstrated discipline, commitment, sacrifice, and organizational capacity—precisely the qualities required to dismantle a totalitarian state.
4. Ideological Misrepresentation and Historical Distortion
The article deliberately distorts and misrepresents the views of the MEK in the early 1960s and 1970s and fails to make any mention of the movements’ published plans and program for the future of Iran.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) has articulated, not today, not yesterday, or last year, but more than four decades ago, clearly, consistently, and publicly, a democratic platform based on:
- Popular sovereignty and free elections
- Separation of religion and state
- Gender equality
- Ethnic and religious equality
- Abolition of the death penalty
- Peaceful coexistence with Iran’s neighbors and
- A non-nuclear Iran
This is not hidden doctrine. It is codified, published, and repeatedly endorsed by sitting and former senior government officials, lawmakers, jurists, academics, women’s rights activists, and youth.
Freezing the movement in a caricatured past is not analysis; it is political erasure.
5. The Iran-Iraq War Smear: A Regime Narrative Recycled
The claim that the MEK “fought against its own people” during the Iran-Iraq war is one of the regime’s most notorious falsifications.
In reality, the MEK explicitly condemned Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and sent its forces to confront Iraqi troops in the early phase of the war, suffering significant casualties. Many MEK members were captured by Iraqi forces and held as prisoners of war.
The MEK’s presence in Iraq six years after the conflict started, was not to wage war against Iran, but to bring an end to a senseless carnage—a war that was deliberately prolonged by him for six years after Iraq had withdrawn behind internationally recognized borders. The regime used the war as a pretext to consolidate power, crush dissent, and export repression. The MEK sought to bring peace.
The MEK never fought the Iranian people; it is comprised of Iranian patriots. Nor did it collaborate with Iraqi forces. Its confrontation was directed exclusively against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the same repressive and ruthless apparatus that today is slaughtering protesters in Iran’s streets, firing on unarmed youth, and carrying out mass arrests and executions. Had there been any evidence to the contrary, it would long since have come to light, particularly given that the complete archives of the Iraqi government have been in U.S. custody since 2003.
Moreover, following a comprehensive 16-month investigation conducted between 2003 and 2004, including individual, face-to-face interviews with every MEK member in Iraq by a 70-person team drawn from seven U.S. government agencies, the United States concluded that there was no basis to charge any MEK member with violations of U.S. law. The investigation involved the Departments of State, Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA, FBI, and DEA. On that basis, the United States formally recognized MEK members as “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
6. The Political Function of the Article
The article’s conclusion exposes its true function. It does not engage with the organized resistance units active inside Iran. It does not address the slogans echoed nationwide, “Down with the oppressor, whether Shah or Supreme Leader.” It does not offer a democratic alternative rooted in the ongoing uprising.
Instead, it advances a single operational message: discredit the organized resistance, sow doubt among Western policymakers, and delay decisive international action at a moment when the regime is dangerously exposed.
That is not neutral analysis. It is objective service to the regime’s survival strategy, whether intended or not.
7. Sources That Are Neither Credible nor Scholarly
A close examination of the article’s sources only compounds its credibility deficit. One frequently cited figure is Aaron Reza Merat, an Iranian national who has repeatedly functioned as a transmission belt for narratives originating with the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence, while presenting himself as an independent journalist. Another is Louisa Hommerich, who has openly boasted of traveling to Iran and participating in regime-organized tours of Iran–Iraq war frontlines alongside women affiliated with the IRGC’s paramilitary Basij, even as she advocates Western engagement with Tehran.
The article further relies on reporting by Human Rights Watch on Iran during a period when its work was led by Hadi Ghaemi, who simultaneously served on the advisory board of the Tehran-aligned lobby group NIAC—an unmistakable conflict of interest. It also repeatedly cites Michael Rubin, who was allegedly granted exclusive access to IRGC archives during visits to Tehran in the 1990s, later gained notoriety for promoting the Iraqi con artist Ahmed Chalabi—whose fabrications helped propel the United States into the disastrous Iraq war—and has since reportedly received substantial honoraria for publishing op-eds that sanitize the record of a Persian Gulf autocracy.
These sources form a closed echo chamber of failed-policy advocates, ideological partisans, and agenda-driven actors rather than independent or disinterested authorities. As the adage aptly puts it, birds of a feather flock together.
Conclusion
History will record that when the Iranian people rose against one of the most violent dictatorships of our time, some chose to echo the regime’s slanders rather than confront its crimes.
As the NCRI’s President-elect, Maryam Rajavi, has repeatedly stated, the Iranian Resistance does not seek power, nor even a share of power. It fights and sacrifices so that the people of Iran may finally achieve their century-long aspiration for freedom, and so that sovereignty is returned to its rightful owners, the Iranian people, through free elections under international supervision. That is precisely why the Resistance is targeted so relentlessly by Tehran, and why its enemies, overt and covert alike, are so determined to deny its legitimacy.
The failure of this article is not merely factual; it is moral. And it will not age well.
Ivan Sascha Sheehan is the interim dean of the College of Public Affairs at the University of Baltimore where he is a professor of public and international affairs. The views expressed are the author’s own. Follow him on X @ProfSheehan.