Iranian-American Cultural Association of Missouri: As Iranian-Americans We Are Proud of Our Political Campaign
ST. LOUIS, Nov. 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- As leaders of the Iranian American communities in California, Texas, and Missouri, we condemn the recent venomous and defamatory propaganda by a handful of discredited apologists of the murderous regime in Iran against us and former U.S. officials who addressed scores of conferences and seminars we organized on U.S. policy on Iran.
Our community members are very successful and taxpaying professionals, who came to this country after enduring unspeakable brutality and hardships at the hands of the ruling theocracy. Many of us have lost family members due to repression in Iran, and many have relatives among the ranks of the main Iranian opposition movement, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), which for nearly a decade enjoyed the protection of U.S. Military in Iraq. After the U.S. withdrawal, they were repeatedly targeted by the Iranian regime sponsored terrorist attacks in Camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq, before finally resettling in Europe earlier this year.
We have striven for the establishment of a secular, democratic, and non-nuclear republic in Iran, which also best serves the national security of the United States as well as global peace and security. In this endeavor, we have been privileged to enjoy the support of many patriotic American leaders who helped our communities inform U.S. policy-makers and the public about the threats posed to this country by the epicenter of Islamic extremism and the central banker of international terrorism, namely, the clerical regime in Iran.
Notwithstanding our three-decade-long and overwhelming bi-partisan support in both chambers of U.S. Congress, we are proud to have hosted more than 80 distinguished and patriotic former officials, including America's Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Speaker Newt Gingrich, Governors Howard Dean and Ed Rendell, and Ambassador John Bolton, whose names have been mentioned in the media recently. These conferences and seminars were in the exercise of our First Amendment rights as Americans, enshrined in the United States Constitution and therefore consistent with U.S. law.
These dozens of conferences, broadcast into Iran via satellite, and made public through traditional and social media, were meant to make the millions in Iran aware of the falsity of the narrative propagated by the ruling mullahs that America was the Great Satan.
We are proud that our community members burdened all the costs of organizing and facilitating these events, and we will continue to do so. In the interest of transparency, we welcomed and fully cooperated with the Treasury Department's thorough review of our activities that began in 2012 until the Department sent us "its final enforcement response," in 2013, saying that it had "completed its review" and cited no violations.
Signed,
Ahmad Moinimanesh, Executive Director, Iranian American Community of Northern California;
Ali Soudjani, President, Iranian American Community of South Texas;
Kasra Nejat, President, Iranian-American Cultural Association of Missouri
SOURCE Iranian-American Cultural Association of Missouri
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