Islam Times - US journalist says received $12,000 to support MKO

Islam Times - A US journalist says he received thousands of dollars for a speech he made against the State Department’s listing of Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) as a terrorist entity.

In February 2011, Carl Bernstein, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who also writes periodically for Newsweek, delivered a speech at the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan in return for $12,000, he told New York-based NGO ProPublica.

During his appearance, Bernstein challenged the State Department to publish any evidence they held against the terrorist organization and “have a show-cause hearing in court.”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, spoke in favor of the MKO at the Park Avenue hotel.

In an interview with ProPublica, Bernstein admitted that the pro-MKO events are "obviously … part of a lobbying campaign" and that stories focusing on speakers at such gatherings rather amount to "journalistic McCarthyism."

In the past few years, MKO and its sympathizers have invested considerable financial resources to bring high-profile speakers to rallies and gatherings in the United States and Europe to back the terrorist group.

The MKO fled Iran and settled in Iraq in 1986, where it enjoyed the support of the country's executed dictator Saddam Hussein, and set up its camp near the Iranian border.

The group - listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community - is notorious for carrying out numerous acts of terror against Iranian civilians and officials, involvement in the bloody repression of Shia Muslims in southern Iraq in 1991 , and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in the country's north under Saddam’s dictatorship.

In December 2011, the United Nations and Baghdad agreed to relocate some 3,000 MKO members from Camp New Iraq, formerly known as Camp Ashraf, in Diyala province to Camp Liberty - a former US military base near Baghdad International Airport.

Tehran has repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to expel the terrorist group, but the US has been blocking the expulsion by pressuring the Iraqi government.