October 30, 2020
Responding to the coronavirus epidemic, the Mojahedin-e Khalq shifted their annual Paris rally to the Internet this year and say they drew almost a fifth of all the members of the US Senate to speak to the group, an astounding turnout.
The Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the umbrella bloc of opposition groups led by the Mojahedin-e Khalq, held annual rallies in the Paris area every year from 2004 through 2018. Last year, they held the rally at their new compound in Albania where its military forces are now housed. News reports over the years have revealed that the group paid for transport from all over Europe and lodging in Paris to boost student turnout at the rallies.
Reuters reported that 18 sitting US senators were among those who spoke June 17, as did former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, and former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who have long backed the group.
The COVID-19 outbreak forced the group to make the rally virtual. It said the event was connected to 30,000 locations within Iran and 104 countries around the world.
“The mission of our generation is to overthrow the mullahs’ criminal regime and to restore the trampled rights of all the people of Iran,” the group’s leader, Maryam Rajavi, said during the six-hour event.
The online rally comes just two days after an Iranian diplomat and three others were ordered to stand trial in Belgium over their role in a failed plot to carry out a bomb attack at the gathering near Paris in 2018.
The Mojahedin-e Khalq were once listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, but no longer. A US court ordered the group delisted when the State Department was unable to show any terrorist acts committed by the group in the decade after it said it had sworn off terrorism in 1999.
