Amir-Abbas Fakhravar

Amir-Abbas Fakhravar (in Persian: امیرعباس فخرآور, Amir-Abbās Fakh-rāvar); is an Iranian opposition political activist based in the United States.

Quotes

• About military efforts: No one wants war, neither we nor you. Our greatest efforts have been focusing on own people and forces within our boundaries, without war, to uproot the zealot Mullahs governing our country and replace them with a secular, democratic government which respects human rights and freedom.
  • "Prepared Testimony of Mr. Amir Abbas Fakhravar to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security" (PDF). U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (July 2006). Retrieved on 2007-04-09.

Quotes about Fakhravar

I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic ~ Sheldon Adelson

• Student circles and journalistic circles don’t recognize him as a student leader.
  • Najmeh Bozorgmehr, the Financial Times' Tehran correspondent as quoted by Mother Jones

• Fakhravar seems to be a bit of a grifter, a crook, and a flim-flam man which, of course, makes him a perfect match for his newfound buddies. In short, he's the new Chalabi. Like Chalabi, there's even some sign that he's actually working with the Iranian security services.
  • Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic

• Fakhravar has shown himself to be a charlatan and snake oil salesman willing to say whatever and align himself with whoever is in power to further his abject career, placing him amongst the most reprehensible of the dregs of a politically and morally bankrupt bunch who have hitched their wagon to the hope that the Trump administration will lead the US to a war against Iran.
  • Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi of Goldsmiths, University of London, as quoted by Middle East Eye

• Fakhravar came across as a passionate, dedicated, and charismatic activist, who wants to go to the US to rally support for his cause. He claimed no interest in political asylum, because in his words, he is a "freedom fighter" and will return to Iran. He seemed to have little fear for his own safety. On several key issues, his views differed from the majority view heard here from Iranians in Dubai, such as his assertion that limited military strikes on Iran would rally the Iranian people against their government, not in support of it. His advocacy of full sanctions on Iran is also rare. Most Iranians we talk to either say change will come from within Iran, or they want the US to change their regime, but in an undefined, painless, bloodless way.
  • Jason L. Davis (May 2006), Classified cable leaked by Wikileaks

• Fakhravar has an uncertain reputation among Iran-based activists for exaggerating his political power. In 2006, many former and current student activists such as Ahmad Batebi and Nasser Zarafshan publicly refuted Fakhravar's claims about his background. Batebi, an acclaimed activist, remains in prison. Zarafshan -- a lawyer who represented the families of victims killed during the wave of "serial political murders" in November 1998, and who has himself spent five years in prison -- wrote a letter stating that Fakhravar was a known Iranian intelligence asset and that other activists were trying to avoid him.
  • Mehdi Khalaji, The Washington Institute

• I like Fakhravar because he says that, if we attack, the Iranian people will be ecstatic.
  • Sheldon Adelson, as quoted by The New Yorker

• Unfortunately, Fakhravar’s detractors, including some Iranian dissidents and exiles, insist that his story might as well be a Hollywood script.
  • Alan Weisman, Los Angeles Times

• THE SECULAR DEMOCRAT; Amir Abbas Fakhravar, 30, a former medical student, served time in Iran's notorious Evin prison after publishing an award-winning book, "This Place Is Not a Ditch," and launching a pro-regime-change student group. He has been championed recently by neocon thinker Richard Perle, who organized a private lunch for Fakhravar at the American Enterprise Institute last month, attended by Pentagon and State Department officials.
  • Laura Rozen, The Washington Post

• The same message is reiterated by 'native informants' [of neo-conservatives]... new ones like Amir Abbas Fakhravar, who advocated the policy of 'regime change' in his testimony to a Senate Homeland Security Committee in July 2006. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph in the same month, Fakhravar reverted to the other neo-conservative themes explored above, stating that the 'world has to do something whatever it takes so that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not become another Hitler'. Sitting safely in his office at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Fakhravar even promotes military action against Iran: 'Whatever the world does against the Iranian regime', he assures us, much in the same way Iraqi exiles did in the build-up to the Iraq war, 'the Iranian people will be supportive'.
  • Arshin Adib-Moghaddam (2007), "Manufacturing War: Iran in the Neo-Conservative Imagination", Third World Quarterly, 28 (3): 635–653, doi:10.1080/01436590701200513, JSTOR 20454950

• In 2006, neoconservative and former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle offered support to a recently exiled political prisoner named Amir Abbas Fakhravar. Perle claimed that Fakhravar was a well-known student leader who escaped from the infamous Evin Prison and then secretly fled Iran to the West. Fakhravar ended up testifying on Capitol Hill and was invited to attend a meeting of Iranian exile leaders at the White House. Unlike Sazegara or former political prisoner w:Akbar Ganji, Fakhravar seems to echo the neoconservative views on Iran. He told Mother Jones magazine that "any movement or any action whatsoever" by the United States would "help or enhance the people to rise up". But Fakhravar's star dimmed as his connections to neoconservatives became more apparent, and the exiled community questioned his bona fides as a student leader. Several former student activists said they had never heard of him when he was supposedly leading the student movement in Iran.
  • Robert Scheer and Reese Erlich,  The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis, page 98

• He is completely a fraud. Nobody knows him.
  • Vali Nasr, Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as quoted by Der Spiegel