The Tehran regime targets Iranian researchers from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
While in Italy there are those who persevere in wanting to continue the collaboration with Iranian think tanks, in Iran the death sentences are invoked for analysts of Iranian origin, who allow themselves – from abroad, of course – to take critical positions in against the Shiite clerical regime.
Once again, under the eye of Tehran, the American think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), known for its expertise on the Iranian question and for its clear position in favor of a series of sanctions that directly affect the financial assets of the Khomeinist clergy and the Pasdaran.
Already in May 2020, the Iranian foreign ministry had announced that it would soon release a list of persons placed under sanctions and linked to the FDD. In that case, however, it was the think tank as a whole and its director, Mark Dubowitz, who were targeted.
Now Tehran raises the stakes: in an article published in Fars News – a news agency close to the Pasdaran – the Foreign Ministry is asked to include three FDD researchers of Iranian origin on the list of those affected by sanctions. They are Alireza Nader, Saeed Ghasseminejad and Behnam Ben Taleblu. The three are accused of supporting President Trump and the "economic war" against Iran. For this, the article concludes, they must be treated like Ruhollah Zam and Jamshid Sharmahd, two Iranian opponents who are today in the regime's prisons and who have been sentenced to death for their information and reporting on the crimes of the Islamic Republic.
It would be interesting what the leaders of Italian think tanks like the IAI and ISPI think of these threats to freedom of expression. The latter, in particular, has been collaborating for years with the Iranian government think tank IPIS, known for having organized, in 2006, a Holocaust denial seminar with the then president Ahmadinejad and for having held a hearing in the Commission in 2018. Foreign Affairs of the Chamber, in which Israel's right to exist was effectively denied. Unfortunately, we already know that these Iranian-American researchers are unlikely to receive any form of solidarity from many of their Italian and European colleagues.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-regime-di-teheran-prende-di-mira-i-ricercatori-iraniani-della-foundation-for-defense-of-democracies/ on Tue, 08 Sep 2020 05:03:00 +0000.