Campfire Stories in Place of Evidence

Michael Rubin’s latest column (@AEI, March 2, 2026), alleging that the main Iranian opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/

MEK), is plotting to assassinate the son of the deposed monarchical dictator reads like a campfire story told by someone who forgot the flashlight. There are no named intelligence sources, no documents, no intercepts, no chain of custody—nothing an investigator could carry into a courtroom without being escorted back into the hallway by a bored clerk. What it offers instead is mood lighting: ominous verbs, dark hints, and the hope that readers will mistake suspense for substance.

Call it the Michael Rubin Method: skip the evidence, strike a match, and let “what if” do the work of “here’s proof.” It’s punditry as performance art—suggestive, combustible, and blissfully unburdened by verification. One expects a drumroll between paragraphs, or at least a smoke machine.

The tone lands squarely in Rodney Dangerfield territory. “I get no respect; my evidence won’t even talk to me.” Or: “My sources are so thin, when they wear a tie, it falls through them.” Swap the laugh track for footnotes and you have Rubin’s piece in a nutshell: a routine built on timing and bravado, not on facts.

And the “cult” smear? It’s the oldest shortcut in the disinformation handbook: if you can’t prove a crime, declare a pathology. Label the target irrational and you never have to test your claim against reality. Serious analysts don’t diagnose; they document. They bring dates, names, intercepts, and files—not mullah vibes.

Worse, Rubin has recently urged the listing of the MEK as a “terrorist organization,” a claim that mirrors, almost verbatim, the familiar delegitimizing chorus Tehran deploys whenever it wants to neutralize opponents. Authoritarians that wish to justify violence routinely manufacture villains; pundits who echo those fabrications without offering proof become part of the propaganda chain. If you intend to recover the mantle of a serious analyst, stop recycling Khamenei’s talking points.

Rubin’s column also ignores inconvenient countervailing evidence gathered on the ground. International delegations, former ministers, parliamentarians, and senior Western officials have visited the MEK’s relocated compound at Ashraf-3 in Albania and reported open access, public conferences, and numerous unscripted interactions with residents. These are not the hallmarks of a hermetic “cult” that lives only in the imaginations of distant critics.

Khamenei’s regime has a long record of concocting or amplifying terror narratives to justify repression and silence dissent—from the “chain murders” of dissident intellectuals in the 1990s to murky attributions of violence where investigative trails run cold. These are not pedantic footnotes; they are a pattern.

Now the central absurdity Rubin asks readers to swallow: why would the MEK squander even a second of its time plotting to “neutralize” Reza Pahlavi, a figure whose political relevance today resembles the emperor in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, striding about in imaginary robes while everyone politely pretends not to notice. The MEK is not a salon debating club; it is a disciplined, battle-tested, combat-ready, and nationwide political force that targets the regime’s real instruments of power, the compounds that protected the now-eliminated Ali Khamenei and the security apparatus that enforces his rule, not a marginal heir whose prospects of returning to Iran, let alone restoring a monarchy, are about as likely as a snowdrift surviving hell.

The irony is sharper still because Rubin has elsewhere treated Pahlavi as strategically hollow and politically marginal: nostalgia with a résumé. One day he’s too irrelevant to matter; the next, he’s so consequential the MEK must allegedly dispatch assassins. That contradiction exposes the argument’s core weakness: you cannot simultaneously dismiss a man as a non-entity and, at the same time, insist he’s the centerpiece of a lethal plot. Which is he? Evidence, unlike theater, does not tolerate such role changes mid-act. If analysis is to mean anything, consistency and proof must be required — not optional accessories in a pundit’s costume.

A few practical rules for serious policy commentary, rules Michael Rubin routinely ignores, are simple. First: if you accuse an organization of plotting murder, either name your sources or hand the raw material to law enforcement. Anonymous vibes are not evidence; they’re mood lighting. Second: if you demand a group be relisted as “terrorist,” specify exactly what new, verifiable facts have emerged since the highest courts in the land, in the US, the UK, the EU, and France, as well as administrative reviewers closed that file. Third: when the regime in Tehran invents a bogeyman, treat the claim as a lead to be interrogated, not a doctrine to be recited. Analysts analyze; megaphones amplify. Ignore these rules and you get what Rubin produces: cheap headlines that age badly and policy arguments that collapse under their own theatrics.

The responsible course is simple: less ventriloquism, more verification. Speculation without evidence should be retired quietly and without ceremony. Washington has no shortage of drama; it does lack disciplined analysis anchored in documents, sources, and verifiable trails. The Iranian people are already paying in blood for propaganda and paranoia. They do not need Tehran’s talking points laundered through the theatrics of Michael Rubin.

One last word to the professional propagandist: the mullahs are nearing the ash heap of history. Be careful what their files may reveal. The Iranian people are not known for redacting incriminating evidence—they publish it.

I am with the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and on X (formerly Twitter), at @amsafavi