PARIS | In the biggest gathering of its kind, thousands of Iranian dissidents — and no shortage of former high-level American officials from both sides of the aisle — will converge here Saturday for a giant rally calling for the downfall of Iran’s theocratic government.
Organizers say former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is coming, along with former Govs. Howard Dean, Bill Richardson and Tom Ridge, along with former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a host of others.
The event’s main organizer is the National Council of Resistance of Iran, whose persistence and tactics have given it a double-edged reputation even among some of Iran’s Western critics. NCRI leader Maryam Rajavi is slated to headline Saturday’s rally with a demand that Washington abandon the year-old Iranian nuclear accord and take a far more aggressive posture toward Tehran.
This year’s rally participants “represent the voice of millions of Iranians who are being oppressed in their country and who seek regime change and the establishment of a democratic, pluralist and non-nuclear government based on the separation of religion and state,” Mrs. Rajavi said in an email interview with The Washington Times this week.
“Their expectation of the next U.S. president, as with other Western leaders, is to abandon the policy of appeasement, which emboldens the Tehran regime to intensify the suppression of the Iranian people while continuing the policy of exporting terrorism to the region,” she said.
Mrs. Rajavi has explicitly called for “regime change” in Tehran, and this year she’ll do it to cheers from thousands of NCRI members and supporters. Last June, hundreds of buses ferried in activists from across France and beyond to fill a fairground and convention center in the town of Villepinte, just north of Paris.
