Parsi is philosophical about the controversy, viewing it as a backhanded compliment. "The intensity of the attacks have tended to be tied to the group's level of success and prominence," he said in a phone interview. "The impression [critics] have given is that they're not happy to see another voice gaining prominence" in the debate over Iran.

The son of an Iranian academic who Parsi says was jailed by both the Shah and the ayatollah who overthrew the Shah, Parsi fled with his family to Sweden at the age of four. He came to the United States to attend the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, where he received a Ph.D.

He founded NIAC in 2002, to give Iranian Americans a voice on their status in this country and on relations with Iran. One of the group's first successes, in 2003, was to reverse Monster.com's automatic excision of any mention of Iran on job seekers' resumes, in what Parsi calls a misguided post 9-11 security measure.

The group has tried to pursue a nuanced approach to Iran's internal affairs: condemning human rights abuses, while urging the U.S. government to engage with the Islamic regime with which the U.S. broke off relations after the 1979 hostage crisis, hard on the heels of the revolution.

Parsi sees the group's advocacy for Iranian Americans at home and dialog with the regime as interrelated. Many Iranian Americans "are concerned about risk of war between countries," he says, not merely because of concern for friends and relations in Iran, but because "discrimination issues would also deteriorate very quickly" in the United States. Parsi also argues that the group's foreign policy stance tracks the views of expressed in polls of Iranian Americans.