‘Regime falls from the bottom up’

OPINION:

Madame Maryam Rajavi, first of all, let me congratulate you on the remarkable historic achievement on Friday of the virtual conference that you held. It was well over 100 countries, over 30,000 locations, millions of people participated. And I have been getting texts and messages from all over the world about it. Most importantly, broadcasting it right into Iran so that the people who are oppressed can understand the single most important thing they need to accomplish regime change, which is hope that was deprived them for many, many years.

A combination of your steadfast leadership and courage of you, the NCRI, the MEK, and now an American government that is not a government of appeasement, but a government that seeks the best for the Iranian people, where it’s starting to feel, particularly with the situation inside Iran, that freedom is inevitable. All of the conditions that I’ve observed in countries that make the leap from totalitarianism to freedom, this is what precedes it. You’ve had now two years of demonstrations and protests that have been about political oppression, but also about economic oppression and about some of the most important things in life, the ability to feed yourself, feed your children, as well as to remain safe from just arbitrarily being shot and killed.

When this began back, a year and a half ago, the regime expected to put this out in very short order. But there were a couple of things that were different. They were met with an American administration that didn’t do what President Obama disgracefully did, turn his back when people were just asking for some words of hope, failing the test that Ronald Reagan set back in the ’80s when he embraced solidarity in Poland. It took another six or seven years, but the critical moment for the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, the liberation of many of the countries that are now your strongest supporters in Eastern Europe because they understand liberty, having experienced totalitarianism. You have those conditions now in Iran.

Up until COVID-19 happened, the sanctions that had been imposed by the Trump administration were much more onerous, they’re much more biting and much more effective than the ones in the Obama administration, which I always felt were not enforced properly. Then also there was at the very end when they entered into that very, very dangerous, I believe immoral, nuclear agreement that would have sent Iran on the path to being a nuclear power in 10 years or less. They accompany that with a shipment of $1.7 billion in cash. My government does not transport cash. Drug dealers organized criminals, mafia, revolutionary groups transport cash. Governments deal in wire transfers. There is something very wrong with this $1.7 billion that Obama paid to a murderous regime. Something very wrong with it when you consider that Iran does three things with its money.

That agreement is now over. President Trump in one of the bold moves of his administration rejected it, and really instituted sanctions enforced by a Treasury Department that’s serious about freedom for Iran.

That led to the protests. You need that to overthrow this regime. And now, the pictures in the street and the signs about overthrowing the Ayatollah, overthrowing the mullahs, and, as importantly, the pictures of Maryam Rajavi, of MEK, NCRI, even American flags. This is what happens when a regime falls from the bottom up. The conditions are there. It is going to happen. I do not know when. I would like to accelerate it because the first day that it happens is the first day people stop being killed, and particularly our people who are fighting for freedom.

But there is something that we can add to this that would really help, and it is an effort that we all have to make. We have got to get the European governments to finally support decency, to finally support what they supposedly stand for: democracy and freedom.

There is an alternative, and that alternative is demonstrating itself every day, including on Friday, by being able to do what you did and what you did last year in Ashraf and the year before when we were almost bombed in Paris. These gigantic world meetings that have so much impact. You show that you can stand up a government. You show that we would not have to delay a day. You have written an important chapter in how human beings strive for and obtain freedom, under the leadership of a truly great woman, Maryam Rajavi.