The National Iranian American Council is not having a good month. It often claims (falsely) that it is the largest Iranian American grassroots organization in the United States, but it is not: the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans is.
As mass protests erupted across Iran, NIAC President Jamal Abdi blamed U.S. sanctions rather than Iranian security forces for the sudden shut down of the Iranian internet. This was completely disingenuous and ignores years of discussion among Iranian security organs about how to control the internet. Just days before the eruption of protests in Iran, for example, the Iranian government announced that it would create its own official VPNs to prevent Iranians from using other VPN services to bypass the regime information bubble.
Last May, Gholamreza Jalali, head of the Islamic Republic’s chief cyber unit, said that the regime would shut the internet in time of crisis. Debates about creating a national intranet extend back a decade. It is inconceivable that Abdi would be ignorant of such things if he follows Iranian politics and the press. This raises the troubling possibility that NIAC sought to lie by omission.
At a Nov. 7 NIAC briefing on Capitol Hill, a congressional staffer reportedly asked the panel how a panel would be different if Tehran hypothetically created a shadow lobby in the U.S. to bypass the Foreign Agents Registration Act and reach out to the congressional audience. NIAC members were flustered but could not provide a substantive response.
Still earlier in the month, both the U.S. and Iran marked the 40th anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, NIAC President Jamal Abdi issued a statement remembering the event in which he got the basics of Iranian history wrong. He sought to create moral equivalence between the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran and the 1979 hostage crisis. What he ignored, however, was that Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had usurped his constitutional authority. This is why, at the time, and for years after, the 1953 episode was called a countercoup.
More egregiously, he ignored that the co-conspirators in that event were the conservative clergy, the very group which subsequently led the Islamic Revolution. He also forgot that the Carter administration did not break diplomatic relations with Iran until April 1980, when evidence emerged that the Iranian embassy in Washington, D.C., had helped coordinate the assassination of a former Iranian official living in Bethesda, Maryland. What is most interesting about Abdi’s remarks, however, is how closely they parrot a speech by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei given the day before in Tehran. Indeed, it almost seems as if NIAC was taking its cues from Khamenei’s speech.
NIAC often bristles at the suggestion that they are a de facto lobby for the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the past, their internal emails belied that claim, and they lost a lawsuit when they sued an Iranian American journalist who voiced this belief. Today, they still maintain that they put the interests of Iranian Americans first and do not follow Tehran’s lead. Alas, their actions this month suggest otherwise.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
