It turns out that Reza Pahlavi is not the only problematic would-be successor in Iran. Ivan Sascha Sheehan wrote in a June 30 Newsmax column:
Over the past eight years, the Iranian people have staged four separate uprisings against the theocratic dictatorship that has been ruling their country since 1979.
Each incident has met with ever more brutal repression than the one that preceded it, and in January of this year, thousands of protesters were killed across the country in mass shootings spearheaded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
In spite of all of this, public activism and explicit calls for regime change persist in the Islamic Republic, and since the January uprising, a network of “Resistance Units” has staged hundreds of operations challenging the IRGC and demonstrating its readiness to help implement the ten-point plan authored by Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi.
Last Saturday, Mrs. Rajavi delivered the keynote address at a global summit hosted by the National Council of Resistance of Iran at its headquarters outside Paris.
[…]Speaking at the summit, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared, “We know why we’ve been prevented from having a proper rally of the kind that was two months in preparation by Madame Rajavi and others, and that was because the French Foreign Ministry got on the blower, as we say, to Mr. Araghchi in Tehran, and they decided that on the whole, it would be more politic not to allow the Iranian opposition to assemble in that way.”
Sheehan was silent on the fact that Rahjavi was an official with a group called MEK, which the U.S. for years has considered to be a terrorist group (it aided Saddam Hussein’s regime in iraq) until it was delisted in 2012. That alone puts the idea that Rahjavi might care about democracy into doubt. We’ve documented how the ConWeb has wavered on MEK over the years.
Still, Sheehan insisted that “There is still ample opportunity for world leaders to signal real support for the Iranian Resistance and to make it clear, once and for all, that when the next clash between Iran’s regime and its people takes place, the international community will stand on the side of those aspiring to freedom.”