The National Iranian American Council (NIAC) (of which Leftist establishment media darling Reza Aslan and Leftist “academic” Juan Cole are Board members) has been established in court as a lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Said Michael Rubin: “Jamal Abdi, NIAC’s policy director, now appears to push aside any pretense that NIAC is something other than Iran’s lobby. Speaking at the forthcoming ‘Expose AIPAC’ conference, Abdi is featured on the ‘Training: Constituent Lobbying for Iran’ panel. Oops.” Iranian freedom activist Hassan Daioleslam “documented over a two-year period that NIAC is a front group lobbying on behalf of the Iranian regime.” NIAC had to pay him nearly $200,000 in legal fees after they sued him for defamation over his accusation that they were a front group for the mullahs, and lost.
Now NIAC is enraged over Trump’s temporary block on visas from Iran. NIAC for eight years had Obama’s ear and was instrumental in bringing about the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. President Trump is making all the right enemies.
“Iranian Voices Slam Donald Trump’s Reported Visa Ban as ‘Shameful,’” by Ali Arouzi and Alexander Smith, NBC News, January 25, 2017:
TEHRAN, Iran — President Donald Trump provoked an angry backlash from Iranian voices after reports he would block visas for citizens of seven Middle Eastern and African countries and temporarily ban most refugees.
Trump was expected to sign executive orders Wednesday barring visas from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, according to congressional aides and immigration experts who spoke to Reuters.
He was also expected to ban refugees entering the United States for several months, except in cases of religious minorities escaping persecution, until stricter vetting is in place, the sources told the news agency….
“Donald Trump is making good on the most shameful and discriminatory promises he made on the campaign trail,” said the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based non-profit organization. “He called for a Muslim ban and is now taking the first steps to implement one. This will not stand. The American people are better than this.”
The organization called the reported executive order a “fundamental challenge to what America represents,” and claimed that “Donald Trump appears intent on throwing that America away and taking us down a slippery slope towards a dark future.”
The NIAC, which says it is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to strengthening the voice of Iranian-Americans, added that “a blanket ban based on national origin does nothing” to make America safe from terror.
People living in Iran were equally scathing of the reported move.
“I don’t have the money or the inclination to travel to the United States but to be branded a threat or a terrorist is deeply offensive,” Mohammed Reza Jafari, a 37-year-old bank teller, told NBC News. “Iranians are proud and dignified people this is absolutely the wrong way to treat us.”
The move was “certainly going to make things harder for Iranians who want to go to America … there are a lot of Iranians who have family in America and regularly visit and you can’t just stop that,” said Shahin, a Tehran travel agent who asked to be identified by his first name only….
Given this statement by Trump, Kheyre wondered why Saudi Arabia was not on the list of seven countries reportedly facing a visa-ban, as most of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the Gulf Arab country.
Also absent from Trump’s reported list were Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are a base of operations for a number of extremist groups….
They all should be added.