Friday, August 19, 2022
From Ian:
Caroline Glick: Biden Ushers in an Era of Nuclear Chaos and War
Ben Shapiro: Salman Rushdie, Iran and Joe Biden
Douglas Murray: How is Biden still doing deal with Iran after assassination bids on US soil?
Caroline Glick: Biden Ushers in an Era of Nuclear Chaos and War
The propaganda campaign was so powerful that leading Democrats who opposed the deal, including then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Ben Cardin, refused to lobby their colleagues to stand with them against the agreement. By refusing to use their own political power to block an agreement with devastating, foreseen consequences, Schumer, Cardin and their colleagues ensured that it would be approved by the Senate. They also surrendered their power.
In the intervening seven years, the identity politics Obama introduced into national security issues have advanced to the point that Biden doesn’t even have to make the argument. It is understood automatically. The once-split Democrat Party united behind Obama’s deal in 2018 and committed its members to reinstating it after then president Donald Trump abandoned the agreement.
American Jews, who led the fight against the 2015 deal, have been sidelined in the Democratic Party, and have no appetite for further arguments with the party that is not only abandoning them, but empowering lawmakers like Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who demonize them.
Obama deployed U.S. intelligence agencies against U.S. citizens for the first time during the fight against the Iran deal. As The Wall Street Journal revealed in 2015, the administration unlawfully spied on AIPAC lobbyists and used their personal communications to undermine and demonize their efforts. Given that Republicans are currently the minority in both houses of Congress and therefore have little power to block Biden’s deal, activists no doubt are less enthusiastic about placing themselves in the administration’s sights by actively opposing Biden’s nuclear diplomacy with Tehran.
Last week, a Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim who has expressed his allegiance to Iran jumped onto a stage in New York and attempted to murder author Salman Rushdie. Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa—and Islamic judicial ruling—in 1989 calling for Rushdie to be killed for writing his Koran-based satire The Satanic Verses and placed a bounty on his head. Both Iran’s success in recruiting Shi’ite terrorists in the United States and the fact that Tehran’s bounty for Rushdie’s head has ballooned to millions of dollars in the 33 years since Khomeini first called for his execution, are testaments to nature of the threat the Iranian regime poses to the United States and to everyone on earth who values freedom.
As another Muslim apostate who faces a similar Islamist death sentence—Ayaan Hirsi Ali—explained this week, the West’s inability to recognize the permanent nature of Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie is linked to its desire to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran.
Hirsi Ali wrote, “The Western response to the fatwa, as to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was to negotiate. Then, as now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regime. The world of the West and the world of Islamism are totally irreconcilable. The sooner we realize that nothing will appease the fanatics of Tehran, the better able we will be to oppose them.”
Unfortunately, appeasement of Iran is now a firm principle of identity politics and progressive dogma. And so, it continues and escalates. According to media reports, one of Iran’s conditions for an agreement is that the United States do nothing in response to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ efforts to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Iran Envoy Brian Hook and other senior U.S. officials on U.S. territory. And Biden has apparently accepted the demand. The State Department’s statements on the attempted murder of Rushdie went out of their way to avoid acknowledging Iran’s responsibility, even though the assailant was in direct contact with regime officials on social media.
It is hard to see a happy end to this distressing tale. The only way forward at this point is for America’s endangered Middle East allies to join forces to block Iran’s path to nuclear hegemony and to push the Biden Administration off its devastating course.
Ben Shapiro: Salman Rushdie, Iran and Joe Biden
The response to all of this has been deafening from the Biden administration. The White House released an extraordinarily tepid statement "reaffirm(ing) our commitment" to "Truth. Courage. Resilience." Biden said that he stood "in solidarity with Rushdie and all those who stand for freedom of expression." There was no talk of reevaluating America's relationship with Iran.
Indeed, the precise opposite has happened. The Biden administration is pursuing a nuclear deal that would loosen sanctions on the Iranian regime while giving them a clear pathway to development of a nuclear weapon.
Instead of viewing the Iranian regime as an intransigent supporter of international terrorism from New York to Yemen to the Gaza Strip to Syria to Lebanon to Iraq, the Biden White House has decided that it must cut a deal at all costs.
The New York Times reported this week, "For the first time in many months, European officials expressed increasing optimism on Tuesday that a revival of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal may actually be agreed upon by Iran and the United States."
Biden's shocking alacrity in seeking a signature from the Iranian regime — a regime with the blood of thousands on its hands, including Rushdie's — demonstrates the abjectly foolish pusillanimity of this administration. It also shows the world's most radical regimes that radicalism will be tolerated by a Democratic White House so long as those regimes promise a revised balance of power in line with longtime Democratic shibboleths.
Biden wishes Iran to be at the center of a revised Middle Eastern power balance, in line with the idiotic thought of former President Barack Obama; he is therefore willing to kowtow to the mullahs while breaking with the Saudis. If you are the Taliban, the Biden administration will surrender; if you are Iran, the Biden administration will prostrate itself.
This isn't just cowardice. It's delusional cowardice. And it's dangerous, not just to Rushdie, Bolton, Pompeo and Trump, but to anyone who opposes predations by America's enemies.
When Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders Qassem Soleimani & Mohsen Fakhrizadeh were killed, @AgnesCallamard, then a U.N. official, sprang into action within minutes of their deaths to condemn their killings as “illegal.” A week after Rushdie's stabbing—silence. /2 pic.twitter.com/3TDhOXgMVT
— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) August 18, 2022
Douglas Murray: How is Biden still doing deal with Iran after assassination bids on US soil?
Well if you study the responses of the White House and State Department to this trio of outrages you will see something very curious. They condemn the attack on Rushdie as “appalling.” President Biden rightly praised Rushdie as someone who “stands for essential, universal ideals.” Which he does. But why no pointing of fingers? Why no clear calling out of the Iranian regime for its incitement and assassination plots?
The answer is that the current administration is in a difficult position because while this rash of assassination plots are going on the American government is busily trying to cosy up to the Iranian regime. All because the Biden administration is desperate to fulfil its campaign promise of getting into the P5+1 nuclear deal.
The whole thing is purest folly — even before you take recent events into account. When America was in the nuclear deal with Iran, the UK, EU, Russia and China it was meant to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. But amazingly enough the Iranians lied. Even when everyone including America was in on the deal the Iranians hid parts of their nuclear program. They continued to enrich uranium and develop other technologies that could only be intended to create nuclear weaponry.
President Trump of course pulled out of the deal and was right to do so. But Biden desperately wants back in, partly because that is common Democrat wisdom and partly just so he can reverse one of Trump’s strongest foreign policy moves. So America is in a very strange position. Qassem Soleimani was an Iranian general praised for his ability to kill.
Iran is a self-declared foe of the United States. It repeatedly incites the murder of this country’s citizens and the citizens of our allies, including Israel. Now it is plotting and carrying out the most brazen attacks imaginable on US soil.
So what precisely does the Biden administration think can be gained from getting Iran “on side.” They’re not on our side. They haven’t been since the Revolutionary Islamic government took over in 1979. And far from preventing Iran getting the bomb, a nuclear deal of the kind the US signed up to before could be one of the fastest ways to see them get one.
Of course that would be a disaster. If you like how Iran is behaving without nukes, you’ll love what they’ll be able to do once they have them.
In the last month alone Iran has been found committing three strikes against the US. Instead of sucking up to them is high time this country changes and calls them “out.”
A gentle reminder of what we're facing in the U.K. ??
— Wasiq Wasiq (@WasiqUK) August 18, 2022
"There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." pic.twitter.com/sIdY3dYJyK
Tel Aviv, August 18 - The director of a large outdoor facility offering rides, games, and other diversions acknowledged this afternoon that the miserable experience you and your loved ones had during your visit there resulted from a specific effort on her part to destroy your outing by arranging for more than the usual number of summertime day camp visits at the same time.
