by Jim Lobe
I just received this solicitation in an email:
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The release suggests that Richard Perle, a long-time member of the strongly pro-Chechen, anti-Russian American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (formerly the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya) and many, many other neo-con letterhead organizations, has now associated himself in some way with the ultra-Islamophobic Clarion Project (previously known as the Clarion Fund), which has been the subject of much commentary on LobeLog over the past several years or so. (Just type in “Clarion” in the Search Box.) It also shows that Clare Lopez, who used to flack for the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) as part of the Iran Policy Committee (IPC), has taken up a formal position at Clarion. Which is kind of strange since Perle’s long-time sidekick, Michael Ledeen, has strongly opposed any U.S. support for the MEK as a result of its quite tangible unpopularity (for completely understandable reasons, notably its alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war) in Iran itself. (I once had a bizarre conversation with Lopez about the MEK’s position vis-a-vis the United States during the 1979 Islamic revolution. She repeatedly insisted that the MEK was not anti-U.S. at the time. Having been engaged in some revolutionary tourism in Tehran at the time — specifically in September, 1979 — I assured her that the MEK was in the front lines of anti-U.S. demonstrations and that the group’s anti-American posters were particularly memorable and blood-curdling.)
You can draw your own conclusions about this coalition of pro-Likud, anti-Russian neo-con operatives, MEK apologists, and Islamo- and Iranophobes by scanning the Right Web profiles that I’ve linked to above.
