She issued her call amid press allegations the Islamic regime is using its embassy to recruit Iranian-Canadians to serve Tehran’s interests and perhaps even carry out terrorist operations.
“[The embassy] has no purpose here,” said Afshin-Jam, a human 
rights activist who fled Iran as a child in 1979 after her father was imprisoned and tortured. “The embassy in Ottawa sometimes uses cultural events as an excuse to spread their own propaganda.”
The federal government did not respond directly to Afshin-Jam’s call, with Foreign Minister John Baird saying only that Canada would keep an eagle eye on the embassy to make sure it did nothing illegal. Afshin-Jam’s husband, Defense Minister Peter MacKay, has been silent in the week since his bride spoke out so forcefully.
Most political spouses in Canada are just known as the “wife of….” But Afshin-Jam was a celebrity in Canada long before her marriage a few months ago to MacKay. Some think she is the better known of the pair, at least outside the political scrum.
Afshin-Jam’s call for the embassy eviction follows an article in the Ottawa Citizen about an alleged mobilization effort promoted by Hamid Mohammadi, Iran’s cultural counselor in Ottawa.
In an interview with an Iran-based website aimed at Iranian expatriates in Canada, Iranians Residing Abroad, Mohammadi said, “We need to put into effect very concentrated cultural programs in order to enhance and nurture the culture in this fast-growing [Iranian-Canadian] population. It is obvious that this large Iranian population can only be of service to our beloved Iran through these programs and gatherings.”
Last Tuesday, the day before Afshin-Jam spoke out, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department warned Iranian diplomats against interfering in the “choices” of Iranian-Canadians who have “rejected the oppressive Iranian regime and have chosen to come to Canada to build better lives.” On Friday, two days after she called for the embassy’s closure. Foreign Affairs Minister Baird said his department will “watch very closely” what the embassy is doing. But he made no threat to shut it down.
Canada has already severely restricted relations with Iran. As a result of Iran’s lack of response to Canada’s concern over the death of dual national Zahra Kazemi in 2003, Canada has limited official contacts to a small set of topics, including human rights.
Iran’s top diplomat in Canada, Ambassador Kambiz Sheikh-Hassani, has denied the embassy is recruiting ethnic Iranians to be of service to Tehran, but many Iranian-Canadian activists have been trying to shut down the embassy for years because they say it monitors and intimidates Iranian expatriates.
There is also a fear among some security specialists that the embassy may try to recruit expats to attack American and/or Canadian targets in retaliation for sanctions.
Afshin-Jam said she believes embassy officials attended and recorded her March 28 appearance at an Advocates for Civil Liberties conference in Toronto. She said she and her relatives have received death threats — from whom, she is not sure — saying that if she does not stop speaking out against the Iranian regime, “we’re going to come get you.”
“Generally, I feel safe in this country, but more and more I feel unsafe,” she said, adding that she has hired security guards for some of her speaking engagements.
Afshin-Jam said the Iranian embassy in Ottawa is “not legitimate” and “does not represent our voices.” But she also said she did not want “innocent Iranians like students or family members needing visas to suffer as a result” of a complete shutdown. She appeared to want the embassy closed but the consular section left open.
The Islamic Republic has appealed to Canada to allow it to open a consulate in Vancouver on the Pacific coast, where most Iranian-Canadians live and where Afshin-Jam was reared. Canada turned down that request earlier this year. Vancouver residents must travel 2,200 miles to reached the sole consulate in Ottawa.
Iranian-Canadians call the embassy the “house of terror,” said Sayeh Hassan, a Toronto-based criminal lawyer who fled Iran 25 years ago and has for years pressured Ottawa to close the embassy. “I don’t want to see Canada become a safe haven for the Islamic regime and those affiliated with the dictatorship, rather than a safe haven for people who are running away from the dictatorship,” she told the National Post.
Ms. Hassan said the embassy uses its ties to university student associations to infiltrate campuses, pointing to a recent event hosted at Carleton University in Ottawa last month that celebrated the religious and political teachings of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
That event was organized by the Iranian Culture Association of Carleton University and the Cultural Center of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The cultural center is affiliated with the Iranian embassy. Last month, Maclean’s magazine revealed the head of the Carleton culture association is Ehsan Mohammadi — the son of the Iranian cultural counselor who recently mapped out the embassy’s plan to ensure Iranian-Canadians “occupy high-level key positions” and “resist being melted into the dominant Canadian culture.”
Afshin-Jam was among the seven activists and academics who last month wrote to Carleton objecting to the June 2 event, which, according to the cultural center’s own report “provided the perfect image of how great the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran truly was.”
“I was incensed upon learning that Carleton University collaborated with the Iranian Embassy and gave a platform to regime supporters,” Afshin-Jam wrote in a June 7 email to Carleton’s president, Roseann O’Reilly Runte. “[Ayatollah Khomeini] was a man who was personally responsible for the death and torture of countless innocent Iranians.”
The younger Mohammadi told Postmedia News last month that Afshin-Jam and the other letter-writers were not justified in their concerns because “it is against the principles of Multiculturalism, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, freedom of speech which are the significant principles of the Constitution of Canada.”
But Afshin-Jam said the university’s Khomeini celebration is precisely the sort of cultural event rolled out by the embassy in a bid to spread pro-regime propaganda: “They try to connect with the greater Canadian public and either confuse matters on what’s really taking place in Iran, try to befriend people in the Iranian-Canadian community and maybe even try to monitor them that way.”
The elder Mohammad’s remarks about recruiting expatriates are actually nothing new. The Islamic Republic has always had a policy of trying to stay in contact with the expatriate communities throughout the world. The regime often invites highly educated and successful expatriates from the science fields back to give lectures in Iran and advise students in their fields.
Embassies around the world regularly sponsor cultural events, both to promote the home culture and keep in contact with expatriates. This is true of all embassies, not just Iranian ones.
Iran, unlike many countries, does not believe that Persians should leave the Persian cultural fold and take citizenship elsewhere. Regardless of the government, there is a cultural norm to maintain contact with Iranian expatriates.
There is also a desire to attract investment from the generally wealthy exptariate communities.
The main concern of the Iranian expatriate communities is that Iranian embassies are known to spy on the expatriate communities to learn who is active in organizing opposition to the regime. It is widely assumed that the embassies helped organize the assassinations of opposition leaders that were quite common until the mid-1990s when such killings in Europe were tracked to Tehran and proved too embarrassing to be continued.
