The Washington Timesreports on the latest Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) rally:

Thousands of supporters of an Iranian dissident group rallied here Saturday for the overthrow of Tehran’s theocratic regime at an event that featured speeches by several Trump administration allies — including Newt Gingrich and Rudolph W. Giuliani — as well as the former head of Saudi intelligence.

Gingrich and Giuliani and the other Americans that appeared at the rally have been shilling for the MEK for years, so it isn’t all that surprising that they would turn up again. However, this is the second time that a Saudi prince has appeared at an MEK event, and that suggests that Riyadh is either directly supporting the group or wants everyone to think that they are. Siding with a government hostile to Iran would be nothing new for the MEK, which worked for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. The Saudi embrace of a group so widely loathed in Iran is also consistent with their poor understanding of the politics of their neighbors and the Saudi leadership’s overall poor judgment.

The MEK is hated in Iran for its role in the war and for its terrorism against Iranians over the years. No one genuinely interested in the freedom of Iranians would have anything to do with such a group, but of course Saudi and American hard-liners couldn’t care less about Iranian freedom. They are simply looking for ways to stoke conflict with Iran, and they see this as a way to do that. Their desire for toppling Iran’s government is so great that they will pretend that a deluded cult is a legitimate opposition group because they think it creates the illusion that many Iranians share their goals. In reality, most Iranians don’t want regime change, and they definitely don’t want it forced upon them from the outside by people that clearly hate them.