Shadowboxing with Reality: Michael Rubin’s Schoolyard Polemics Against the MEK

For more than four decades, the Iranian people’s struggle for freedom has played out not just in the streets, but also in the contested arena of international discourse. As Tehran’s rulers confront a deepening crisis of legitimacy, their defenders and enablers in the West increasingly resort to distortion, invective, distraction, and outright lies. Nowhere is this clearer than in a disingenuous campaign of vilification by Michael Rubin, whose pernicious attacks on the principal Iranian opposition, Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), say far more about his own obsessions than about the realities of Iran’s democratic resistance.

If MEK were truly “irrelevant,” as Michael Rubin ridiculously claims, his keyboard would have fallen silent long ago. Instead, like Ahab chasing Moby Dick, this week he’s churned out not one, but two 1,000-word jeremiads in less than 24 hours (one wonders if the AEI top brass is actually underwriting this drivel)—proof positive that the only thing shrinking faster than Tehran’s legitimacy is Rubin’s thesaurus. Not that I’m ungrateful; his latest tirades—the 22nd and 23rd so far, each as pathetic as the last—have certainly helped me sharpen my writing skills and enrich my vocabulary.

His latest claim that the MEK is destined for “oblivion” collapses under the weight of simple arithmetic: a movement with over 100,000 of its members and supporters (including my older brother) having been executed, many from different generations, currently in prison enduring torture, and some awaiting execution; a movement that is the prime target of the regime’s suppression, terrorism, and disinformation campaigns; and a movement capable of attracting delegations from 47 countries to Ashraf-3, Albania’s “bastion of freedom,” as well as the endorsement of 4,000 lawmakers from 41 countries—including 34 majority legislatures, among them 227 bipartisan members of Congress—130 former world leaders, and 80 Nobel Laureates, for its Ten-point Plan for a democratic, secular, non-nuclear republic in Iran, commands far more real-world traction than a self-proclaimed think-tank fellow recycling his own blog posts as footnotes.

Rubin's repeated use of “cult” mirrors the language the Iranian regime deploys whenever the MEK’s popularity spikes. Yet Ashraf-3 is no Jonestown. Accredited journalists, U.N. officials, the President of Albania, the former U.S. Vice President, Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, Homeland Security Secretary, Attorney General, Senators, and House members have freely toured the site, inspected its archives, and visited its museum exhibits. None required blindfolds, Kool-Aid, or loyalty oaths. Political science distinguishes clearly: cults isolate, movements mobilize. Rubin has never set foot in the place he condemns, highlighting more about his scholarly rigor—or lack thereof—than about the MEK. By his own admission, his past research was confined to the archives of the notorious Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), a U.S. designated terrorist organization.

A glance at Rubin’s hyperlinks reveals an ouroboros of self-citation: Rubin quoting Rubin to prove Rubin—rather like submitting one’s résumé to one’s mother for peer review. Or, as the Persian adage goes: “When the fox was asked, ‘Who is your witness?’ he replied, ‘My tail.’”

Scholarship demands external corroboration; propaganda thrives on repetition. Rubin prefers the latter, padding his indictment with the intellectual rigor of a Twitter thread. Worse still, his approach echoes the infamous words of Hitler’s propaganda minister: “Tell a lie big enough and repeat it often enough, and the whole world will believe it.”

Rubin sneers at former officials for accepting “MEK honoraria.” First, this is an affront to the hundreds of respected members of Congress, distinguished former officials, and Nobel Laureates who support the MEK out of conviction and principle, not greed. He asserts, “privately, many American policymakers who engage the group acknowledge they do it for the money but bear no special fealty to the Mojahedin.” If Rubin is so certain, let him name a single such official. I challenge him—just one.

Second, Rubin’s hypocrisy is glaring: public records confirm he himself consulted for the Lincoln Group, exposed for clandestinely planting pro-U.S. propaganda in Iraqi newspapers. Rubin, conveniently, declined to disclose how much he was paid. Moreover, in 2014, Camstoll Group, a UAE front, listed him among the journalists it cultivated while bankrolling anti-Qatar propaganda. A decade earlier the Los Angeles Times caught Lincoln Group placing made-to-order “news” in Iraqi papers; Rubin had quietly “reviewed materials” for that very operation. When discussing undisclosed paid advocacy, the arsonist shouldn't scold the fire brigade.

Third, “Sometimes an honorarium isn’t worth the embarrassment,” Rubin moralizes. Yet he pocketed government per diems from Bosnia to Bratislava and “would not comment” on how much the Lincoln Group paid him. Physician, heal thy invoice.

Rubin asserts, without evidence, that MEK “support inside Iran is negligible” and that I “create figures from whole cloth to appease the gullible.” If Rubin were a scholar by any standard, he could have visited the MEK’s website or YouTube channel to view thousands of clips from inside Iran, explored websites that amplify the activities of the Resistance Units, or even read regime newspapers filled with anxious warnings about those same activities. The regime’s Prosecutor General has publicly pleaded with MEK activists inside Iran to surrender in exchange for leniency. Since December 2023, an ongoing trial in absentia for 104 senior leaders has resulted in a call for death sentences for MEK activists—and even for participants in MEK-linked rallies abroad—labeling them "mohareb" (enemies of God). A regime so terrified that it even targets MEK’s European advocates, as seen in the November 2023 attempted assassination of former European Parliament Vice President Alejo Vidal-Quadras, who miraculously survived a bullet to the jaw, is hardly responding to an irrelevant opposition.

As if he had uncovered a smoking gun in his quest to discredit the MEK’s nuclear revelations, the over-zealous and breathless Rubin—donning the air of Lieutenant Columbo, or perhaps Inspector Clouseau—triumphantly declares: “In 2000, for example, the group provided a defector to CBS’s ‘60 Minutes,’ whom the Mojahedin identified as Ahmad Behbahani, the Iranian regime’s counterterror chief. The problem was that the man whom they ‘revealed’ as Behbahani was not even the right height.” It is well put, then, that as a former UN ambassador once quipped in the 1980s, Rubin has managed only to hang himself with his own shoelaces—and I am not kidding!

But what is the truth? For the record, it was not the MEK who served up this charlatan to CBS. As The New York Times wrote on June 16, 2000: “‘60 Minutes’ said it found the man from a tip provided by Mr. [Abol Hassan] Bani-Sadr [Khomeini’s first president]. It rushed to the refugee camp in central Turkey to obtain the information Mr. Bani-Sadr said the man was eager to disclose.” The supposed link between Behbahani and the MEK, meanwhile, can be traced back to the notorious—and at times delusional—memoirs of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, which were verbatim quoted by a dubious website in 2024, citing a June 8, 2000, statement by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Clearly, Rubin has swallowed the Ministry’s narrative hook, line, and sinker. Nice Try, but the fabrication is as glaring as it is absurd.

Lest we forget, when Rafsanjani was Speaker of Parliament, on October 3, 1981, he called upon religious judges to implement “divine edicts” against the MEK: execution, crucifixion, amputation, or banishment. Astonishingly, such a man—who openly advocated medieval punishments for dissenters—is now cited as a credible source, and that, too, with so little evidence. Perhaps, in Rubin’s view, this is unremarkable. But by any scholarly measure, Rafsanjani is the last person whose word should be taken as proof of anything.

And finally, to drive the last nail into the coffin of this claim: Ahmad Behbahani never spent a single day among the MEK. Case closed!

By contrast, Dr. Frank Pabian, a senior nuclear nonproliferation advisor at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the New York Times in 2010: “They (NCRI) are right 90 percent of the time…. 90 percent is a pretty good record.” Meanwhile, Rubin’s own Office of Special Plans propagated the discredited Iraq WMD narrative, costing America 4,500 lives and trillions of dollars. Pot, meet kettle.

The comparison Rubin draws between the MEK and Branch Davidians is preposterous and intellectually lazy. One operated in a democratic state; the other opposes a religious fascist regime explicitly committed to exterminating its members. Rubin either lacks the analytical skill to distinguish these obvious differences or deliberately ignores them.

Finally, for the record, Rubin’s allegations about Reza Pahlavi not paying anyone are misleading at best. Sources close to Pahlavi’s “mess[y]” and “self-defeating” operation, as Rubin laments, confirm he has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the London office of a high-priced U.S. lobbying firm to perhaps avoid disclosing financial details under U.S. lobbying laws. Needless to say, this largesse is drawn from resources stolen by his deposed and widely detested father from the Iranian people, adding yet another layer of irony and hypocrisy to Rubin’s stance.

Rubin’s talking points—“cult,” “irrelevant,” and “terrorist past”—are indistinguishable from regime propaganda and, unsurprisingly, are routinely echoed in state-run media outlets such as Kayhan, Mashregh News, Tasnim, ISNA, Young Journalists Club, Mehr News, etc. Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.

In sum, Rubin’s schoolyard polemics reveal nothing about the MEK, but much about Rubin himself: someone too busy shadowboxing Iran’s democratic opposition to recognize the real fundamentalist heavyweights in Tehran dancing circles around him. When Iranians ultimately reclaim their sovereignty and determine their own future—free from all forms of autocracy, whether religious or monarchic, as they inevitably will—Michael Rubin’s writings will hold about as much relevance for historians as yesterday’s hotel receipts.

Safavi (@amsafavi) is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)