Code Pink, the far-left anti-war group, has been slammed by Israel Project CEO & President Josh Block for embarking on a ‘peace delegation’ to the Islamic Republic of Iran, while ignoring “ordinary Iranians fighting for freedom against a regime that tolerates no dissent,” in an op-ed published in JNS on Thursday.
“From a feminist enterprise with a focus on human rights, one would expect meetings scheduled with local women’s rights organizations, activists and free thinkers, civil libertarians and opposition figures, even political prisoners,” Block said.
Instead, he wrote, Code Pink is meeting with representatives of the repressive regime in Tehran. The mullahs, he observed, are complicit in the killing of Syrian civilians at the behest of Bashar al-Assad, plot terrorist attacks in Europe, and sponsor Shiite militia in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.
“Code Pink is meeting with representatives of a system that arrest and sometimes murder women for taking off the hijab in an act of ultimate defiance against the draconian laws of the 1979 Islamic revolution,” Block continued. “Women that groups such as Code Pink have vowed to protect.”
He added: “They are legitimizing a regime that brutally oppresses workers and teachers who peacefully protest the Islamic Republic’s foreign adventurism at the expensive of a collapsing economy…People who are truly anti-war. Code Pink, not so much.”
In June 2018, protesters on videos posted to social media were chanting “Death to Palestine,” “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon” and “Leave Syria and think of us.” Other protesters were heard saying, “We don’t want the ayatollahs” and “Death to the dictator.”
Block charged that Code Pink has no interest in engaging with Iran’s suffering population because their stories wouldn’t “corroborate Code Pink’s strident anti-Americanism that has blinded them to the evil of the regime.”
“In the absence of any hint to the contrary, Block said, “Code Pink’s trip to Iran is a ‘peace delegation’ in name only. They are useful idiots in a perverted propaganda campaign for the mullah’s repressive and reactionary regime.”
Block concluded: “Whatever Code Pink thinks of the current U.S. administration or the policies of the Israeli government, the fact that many progressives consider America and Israel public enemy No. 1—not Iran, Syria, North Korea or other rogue regimes—demeans liberalism.”
[Photo: Elvert Barnes / Flickr ]