The Iranian Resistance said that Princeton University has been employing and increasing the platform of a “former collaborator with Iranian terrorists” for over 10 years.
They wrote that Seyed Hossein Mousavian “allegedly” cut his ties with the regime in 2009 when he became a “visiting scholar” at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but that his public advocacy since proves that this was “an act” to legitimise him and his promotion of “regime talking points” in the West.
For example, Mousavian tweeted last week that a “door of trust... desperately needs to be reopened between Iran and the United States” and that this must involve the US returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Resistance said basically amounted to the lifting of sanctions on Iran, even as they continue to violate the deal.
The Resistance wrote: “These are exactly the talking points of the Iranian regime pushing the US administration to re-enter the nuclear deal while neglecting the mullahs’ continuous and ongoing violations.”
They said that Mousavian spent five years in the 1990s “essentially [running] interference for the regime and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security while serving as Iranian ambassador to Germany”, beginning with his dismissal of the trial of regime assassins involved in the 1992 Mykonos restaurant terrorist attack in Berlin as a “joke”. The trial found that top-ranking Iranian officials, like the supreme leader and the foreign minister, were involved in the planning of the attack.
Once Mousavian moved to the US, he began collaborating with other notorious Iran lobbyists, like Trita Parsi and the National Iranian-American Council.
The NIAC was the subject of a 2020 letter from three US Senators to the Department of Justice, which accused the group of “troubling behaviour” through circulating documents blaming the regime’s malign actions on US foreign policy. Nine members of the House of Representatives sent a further letter this month and called on investigators to broaden their search of people being paid to promote regime talking points to Western entities. (This may be the result of the arrest and indictment of political scientist Kaveh Lotfolah Afrasiabi for doing just this in exchange for $265,000 from the regime.)
The Resistance wrote: “The persistence of this phenomenon is all the more troubling when one considers that suspicions regarding NIAC, Parsi, Mousavian, and others have been voiced over and over again, to little avail, by individuals and institutions that include those who are most frequently targeted by the regime’s coordinated disinformation.”
