Thread by @Mileva792

THREAD (on-going)
1) This is an English version (with some new additions) of the original post by @unrecognizableN. It is an important read if you want to better understand the mafia that is the Islamic Republic (IR) and the faces of their lobby #NIAC in the US. #MahsaAmini

2) Parsi was born 1974 in Ahvaz, Iran. His family immigrated to Sweden in ’79 where he later studied international relations and economics. Parsi has been ambassador of Sweden to UN in New York. He has worked in the Security Council and the General Assembly Third Comittee.

3) In the US, Parsi started working with Hoshang Amir Ahmadi for American-Iranian Council (AIC). You must be naive to think that IR has nothing to do with the introduction between Ahmadi and Parsi. It was a mutual win-win for all parties to introduce those two to each other.

4) In order to maintain the dictatorship of IR, Ahmadi's main purpose was lobbying for American oil companies to be present in Iran. Since Parsi had a special mission, this work wasn’t satisfying enough for him, so he established his own lobby organization, IIC in '97 until 2011.

5) Link to IIC's document tinyurl.com/2r5d3ne6
In 2001 Parsi and Ahmadi worked together to lobby hard against ILSA sanctions. ILSA was a '96 act of the US Congress that imposed economic sanctions on firms doing business with Iran and Libya.

6) One of the people who Parsi got close to was Bob Ney, a republican congressman. Ney had a business personality and the story of his financial corruption is long. Ney was sentenced to prison in 2006. Those interested can google the story of Jack Abramoff (corrupt lobbyist).

7) What is related to Iran is the story of Khamenei's purchase of the Sultan of Brunei's airplane. In 2001, the Ministry of Defense of Iran paid about 120 million dollars to famous Syrian arms smuggler and casino owner Fouad al-Zayat so they could lobby to bypass the sanctions >

8) and buy the airplane. The luxury plane (A340 with registration number V8-AC3, now in the Saudi Air Force performing VIP flights) never arrived to Iran and the money it was bought for was gone. Around this time Parsi started National Council of Iranian Americans (NIAC) with Ney

9) The first meetings for this council were held in June 2001. Note that this is before the events of 9/11. When later asked about the formation of NIAC, Parsi justifies it with the following reason: "After September 11 we saw that Iranians don't have a political voice in the US”

10) In regards to the political situation after 9/11, NIAC’s first fundraising event was held by Ney in 2003, and this was when NIAC started its actual work as a lobby. Ney was sentenced to jail in 2006, but NIAC had progressed so much by then that it no longer needed Ney.

11) In 2007, Hassan Dai @IranianForum published several articles in English in the US, officially accusing NIAC and Parsi of being mercenaries for the IR. Read here tinyurl.com/bdesb7mc
Parsi then filed a lawsuit in the Washington Federal Court putting Dai in the tortuous >

12) legal path of the American courts, almost defeating NIAC’s public opponent and leaving a lesson for others not to dare do such a thing again. Despite this, Parsi lost in court and was sentenced to pay the legal costs for Dai.
Link to court order tinyurl.com/4cpdh882

13) During the court process, emails and documents belonging to NIAC were examined. According to Dai, the greatest achievement was not defeating NIAC in court, but discovering the connection between this lobby organization and the IR – including the connection between Parsi and >

14) the company Atieh Bahar (you can google Siamak & Bagher Namazi), from which Parsi received salary to share protocols from meetings and negotiations of the council, hold various meetings with the officials of the IR regime, (e.g. Samareh Hashemi in Netherlands) >

15) make a financial transaction to Columbia University for an invitation to Ahmadinejad to give a speech there.
The court ruling shows that if Iranians had a competent and unified opposition, this was a good opportunity to make a strong legal complaint against NIAC >

16) in regards to the evidence obtained showing the connection between NIAC and the IR, and there was a good possibility to end them with all this.

17) Let’s talk about Parsi’s work schedule. Parsi once went from Washington to New York and Columbia University a few days before Ahmadinejad’s speech there, and after this Parsi met with then ambassador of IR to the UN, Mohammad Khazaee. Why is that?

18) During NIAC’s lifetime, many people have cooperated with this group, such as board members, employees, consultants, and members. I will briefly review some of these names.

19) Siamak Namazi’s father, Bagher Namazi, was the governor of Khuzestan during the Pahlavi period (the time of the Cinemarex fire). After the revolution, in ’83, he immigrated to the US. Siamak has a degree in urban planning and was with Parsi from the first days of the IIC. >

20) They even wrote a joint article against the Israel lobby (during Khatami’s presidency). Siamak was the CEO of Atieh Bahar, which was the international branch of Atieh (headquarter in Tehran) whose goal was to close oil and economic contracts between Iranian ministries and >

21) American companies. Closing these contracts were good for the IR’s economy, as well as being profitable for American companies. Link to Crescent case court judgement: tinyurl.com/mu77mxfk

22) By putting together the pieces of information that we have, such as the IR’s desire to communicate with the West during president Khatami, and, as mentioned earlier, NIAC reporting back to Atieh, one can understand how much their mission could have been coordinated by the IR.

23) In 2015, IR authorities arrested Siamak as he was in Iran for business. In 2016, as his father was coming to visit his son, IR authorities arrested him as well when he arrived in the country. Later that year, father & son were sentenced to 10 years in prison for >

24) collaboration with a foreign government. During Trump’s presidency, the Namazi family requested Trump’s help to release Siamak and Bagher from jail in Iran.

25) A cousin of Siamak is the wife of Bijan Khajehpour, who was one of the senior managers of Atieh Bahar, as well as part of the Wilson center (research institute) and one of the main persons in previously mentioned Crescent case.

26) Khajehpour in the court of defendants after the 2009 presidential election in IR. Many of the so called reformists were arrested for opposing the election results.
Also pictured during Obama, together with Parsi, engaged in negotiations to attract investors for IR in Vienna.

27) To make a long story short: Leila Zand is the name of a woman who during a period of time was very closely tied with IR. She worked for NIAC, and she once signed off on a written public statement on Iranian film director Mohsen Makhmalbaf about his trip to Israel >

28) (saying it was a betrayal to Palestinians, but Zand had lived in Israel for a year before).
Pictured: Zand with the Vice President of Ahmadinejad. Zand with Alan Eyre, first-ever Persian language spokesperson of the United States Department of State.

29) There’s a second thread by @unrecognizableN that dives deeper into the story of Zand and others, see here (in Farsi).

30) Alireza Mahdavi, the owner of American Logistics, one of Parsi’s old colleagues. With an official license from US government institutions, Mahdavi was allowed to apply for green cards from the Immigration department for people who were able to invest 500,000 dollars or more.

31) This makes it clear, how the mercenaries of the IR regime can travel easily to the US. In February 2015, the ABC news network reported about the inspection of Mahdavi’s company, see here tinyurl.com/4me2pxnd
Earlier, in July 2012, the American Federal Court indicted one >

32) of Mahdavi’s employees on charges of sending sensitive electronic devices to Iran. That same year, federal agents raided the building of said company to find documents. Interestingly, despite numerous reports, Mahdavi and his company were able to keep >

33) the green card application permit. See Mahdavis interview about the difficulty of traveling to the US… tinyurl.com/3hx9ex67
As you can probably tell, to really examine the names and activities of the people involved, you need to dive deeper which would require many >

34) threads of tweets. For those interested, there are keywords in these tweets that you can use to search and read more. In the following tweets I will introduce you to a few more of these people…

35) Hamid Dabashi, a sociologist and writer, as well as one of the theorists and periodical members of #NIAC. He’s professor at Columbia University and head of the lobby circle in the university.

36) Dabashi was the main inviter and organizer of Javad Zarif’s (Iran's then ambassador to the UN) visit to Columbia University, in December 2006.

37) Dabashi, while showing support for Obama’s letters to Khamenei during the height of the green movement, he simultaneously supported the green movement.
Dabashi was an advocate for participation in elections in the IR.

38) Dabashi was also one of the signatories of a letter sent to Federica Mogherini in defense of JCPOA (nuclear deal). Dabashi has always sided with the ”reformists” of the IR.

39) Dabashi implied in an article on Al Jazeera’s English site in November 2011, that critics and opponents of the IR are the fifth column or CIA collaborators.
On the one hand he complains about the oppression of Palestinians, on the other hand he supports the tyranny of the IR.

40) Dabashi did a lot of work for the election of Rouhani in the 2013 and 2017 elections. An article he wrote for Rouhani in Al Jazeera, in June 2013, even led to Rouhani officially praising Dabashi on Twitter. The article tinyurl.com/4znxtvks

41) Dabashi has always sought to make any protest only within the framework of the ”reformists” of the system. Dabashi’s red line is the ”radicalization” of people’s slogans and the civil struggles towards the principle of the system that is the IR.

42) Negar Mortazavi, born ’81, immigrated to the US to study at a young age. She worked at Voice of America Persian News Network until 2013. It’s said that VOA let her go because in her journalistic work she was too obvious about her views and sympathies with ”reformists” of IR.

43) During that same year, Mortazavi was appointed as NIAC’s Persian spokesperson and social media manager. She has said: ”I joined NIAC to work for peace between America and Iran.” Mortazavi joined NIAC just in time for NIAC’s propaganda for IR in the nuclear talks.

44) NIAC’s activity in the JCPOA negotiations can be seen as one of the high points of their work. But Mortazavi started her intense activity for the 2013 election, mostly on Facebook as she could reach more Iranians, since they were more active on that platform during that time.

45) Mortazavi has been very successful for #NIAC and helping them spread the propaganda of the regime, and you can see the influence she has had. The following clips are from different time periods, but the reasoning and opinions are always in line with the regime’s interests. twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

46) There were opinion polls conducted by Ebrahim Mohseni at University of Maryland. How reliable can a survey be, conducted from the US by calling some Iranians? Mortazavi & Zarif promoted the polls in major international TV channels by providing analysis based on the results >

47) especially in the field of IR’s nuclear program, sanctions and other topics that were in favor of the regime. See the linked clip with Mortazavi (and Gissou Nia, Mehdi Saharkhiz, Masih Alinejad) defending the IR and Rouhani’s negotiation team tinyurl.com/93kawwwj

48) Main takeaway of Mortazavi’s work: defending of the JCPOA, promoting the message that lifting of sanctions improve ordinary Iranians' lives, portraying the ”reformists” as ”different” compared to the ”hardliners” of the regime, promoting a totally false image of a democracy.

49) The false image also influenced Iranians in Iran to vote in the election, in favor of Rouhani. Interestingly, many of the speeches by #NIAC members from their conferences, and even the list of participants, have been removed from YouTube and NIAC’s own website ever since…

50) Nazila Fathi was born 1970 in Tehran. She studied English at Azad University, and for a while she worked as a translator for the offices of foreign publications, until she was hired by The New York Times as a reporter in 2000.

51) Previously in this thread it is mentioned that NIAC used a special strategy and policy to promote IR in the West. One of the principles of lobbying is to make it appear like the parties like each other. This is indeed what Fathi has done for many years in her reports >

52) for The New York Times, presenting the IR in a good light. In the 2009 election, Fathi reported about the ”reformists” and did not hesitate to report on candidate Mousavi’s campaign trips.
tinyurl.com/hsjm83du

53) In the aftermath of the 2009 election, with the protests turning violent, Fathi immediately left Iran with her family. According to herself in a later interview with Voice of America, it had been advised to her by security authorities to leave Iran.

54) After emigrating, due to Fathi being familiar with the brokerage method mentioned earlier, she was drawn to #NIAC. In the negotiations during both Ahmadinejad and Rouhani, she did her job well, rationalizing the IR. There are many examples of this, and one of them is >

55) Fathi’s use of the famous opinion polls from University of Maryland (the polls that Mortazavi also used). She would refer to the polls in her interviews and she was one of the constant speakers in meetings where these polls were promoted.

56) Fathi has published a book called ”The Lonely War”, in which she collected her memories and personal analysis along with her reflections of the social and political situation in Iran. She has said in an interview that the message of the book is that the people of Iran have >

57) reached such a level of political and social development that they do not want revolution and political instability. In an interview she has said, that when the government allowed Rouhani to be elected, it showed that the IR had heard the people in the 2009 protests.

58) By looking at her Twitter, one could see that political prisoners, according to Fathi, were limited to the likes of Jason Rezaian, the Namazis, Tajzadeh and Mousavi, and there was not a single mention of other individuals that were opponents of the whole Islamic Republic.

59) Fathi was an open opponent of President Trump, and her view on the JCPOA was that the US withdrawal from the deal would make Iran stronger through nationalism. Fathi has been an advocate for the JCPOA all along.