News from

 Jan. 20, 2015

For immediate release:

FDI, Public Enemy #1.

It’s not the first time, but today's article in the IRGC-controlled Mashregh News website, FDI once again makes the hit parade of IRGC enemies in the West.

The article repeats oft-cited claims that FDI is spearheading a U.S. government effort to overthrow the Islamic regime in Iran, and was reproduced verbatim in more than a dozen regime-controlled websites, most of them controlled by the IRGC or MOIS.

But in a break with previous such attacks, this one contained a special twist, blasting FDI for opposing (and exposing) the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), and its founder, Swedish-Iranian national, Trita Parsi. The author praised NIAC and Parsi for opposing regime change in Iran, supporting negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, and more generally for defending the Islamic Republic in the United States. The author claimed that a recent poll showed that 96% of Iranian-Americans saw Parsi as a "lobbyist" for the Islamic Republic.

The timing of this latest broadside against FDI is worth noting. On Sunday morning, helicopters Israeli reportedly killed a Hezbollah operational team in Syria that included Jihad Mugniyeh, son of the former Hezbollah military commander.

The elder Mugniyeh was identified by Argentinean prosecutor Alberto Nisman as the logistics coordinator of the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, and the July 1994 truck bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center that killed 86 people.

Half a world away, Nisman himself was found dead in his apartment that same night, an alleged suicide.

FDI CEO and president Kenneth R. Timmerman had been an expert witness in the AMIA case and was cited by Nisman in his 2006 indictment more than a dozen times. Timmerman was also instrumental in laying out the elder Mugniyeh's involvement in recruiting the al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks on America.

A side note on the picture of Timmerman that appears in the Mashregh News broadside: it was grabbed from a video taken at a Congressional campaign event at the B'nai Israel synagogue in Maryland in October 2012—but from a portion of the video that the campaign never posted online!

Stay tuned for more as this story develops.