Since the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, American policy against Iran was to treat it as an enemy. Its incessant support of terror attacks around the world, many targeting civilian Jews, resulted in its exclusion from normal diplomatic relations. It was — and remains to this day — the foremost state sponsor of terror. A pariah among nations.
The Obama Era
All of that changed with Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. His first major diplomatic act touched off the “Arab Spring”, a set of hardline revolts in many countries including Egypt, which had been the site of his first speech. Breaking with all American traditions, Obama slammed America’s foreign policies and sided with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood political element, which had once aligned with Hitler’s Third Reich.
Helping Crush the Green Revolution
Many countries resisted Obama’s empowerment of Islamist Dictatorships, Egypt under Morsi being the most successful example. But no country suffered more than Iran from Obama’s policies. With the support of a normal U.S. president, the populist Green Revolution would have succeeded in overcoming the theocratic Islamists and offered females some level of equality. But Obama wasn’t a normal president; he offered virtually no support to the young men and women of Iran. He has instead worked tirelessly to secure nuclear weapons for the leading terror state in the world.
Deceiving Congress
Iran’s nuclear ambitions were only possible thanks to Barack Obama. He drove Congress relentlessly to approve steps that would allow Iran to both build nuclear weapons and develop intercontinental ballistic missiles. Read that last sentence again, please.
Obama sent a clear message to Congress: If you don’t block this nuclear deal, we will bar Iran’s access to our financial system. The deal was clear, unequivocal.
It was also a lie. Obama lied, and so did others in his administration.
That’s the conclusion of a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. It alleges Obama officials pushed the U.S. Treasury to let Iran convert the equivalent of $5.7 billion of funds held in Oman’s Bank of Muscat from rials into dollars and subsequently into euros.
…Apart from the lie… [o]ur own State Department characterizes Iran as the No. 1 terrorist-supporting state on Earth. Every dollar it gets from us has an ultimate use that is highly questionable, which is the reason why the U.S. imposed sanctions in the first place.
Washington Times national security correspondent Bill Gertz in February of this year reported that some of the $1.7 billion that the Obama administration officially handed over to the Iranians had ended up in the hands of terrorist groups. Those terrorist groups included Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Iran’s own Quds Force, the dirty tricks and terror branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
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Cash For Hostages
Obama also set a precedent by paying a terror state for hostages. In cash.
WASHINGTON D.C. — The Obama administration is acknowledging its transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made entirely in cash, using non-U.S. currency.
A Treasury spokeswoman says the cash payments were necessary because of the “effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions,” which isolated Iran from the international finance system.
…An initial $400 million cash delivery was sent Jan. 17, the same day Tehran agreed to release four American prisoners.
The disintegration of Libya, the collapse of Egypt, and Turkey’s embrace of radical Islam, all took place under Obama’s watch. None of them were in the U.S.’ interest.
It’s clear from Obama administration actions, under both his Secretaries of State, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, that the Obama White House despised Israel and did all they could to undermine its security. How else can you explain the enabling of a terrorist-supporting regime?
The Obama administration failed to enforce its own “red line” in Syria on chemical weapons. By doing so, it in effect invited both Russia and Iran into that disintegrating country. Iranian troops today are within striking distance of our one true ally in the region, Israel.
The disintegration of Libya, the collapse of Egypt, and Turkey’s embrace of radical Islam, all took place under Obama’s watch. None of them were in the U.S.’ interest.
The Mideast has been a mess for decades, but things got markedly worse under Obama. A big reason is the Iran nuclear deal didn’t make anyone in the Mideast, Europe or U.S. safer. But it did empower the terrorist-supporting mullahs in Tehran.
More Pay-To-Slay On His Way Out of Office
Rather than abandon his official duties after his first two terms, Obama stayed in Washington. Before he left office, however, he did set off a fuse time bombs. 220 million time bombs, to be precise.
Hours before President Trump was inaugurated, Secretary of State John Kerry rushed the money to the terrorists. What kind of a difference would that $221 million make? The Palestinian Authority’s Martyrs Fund budget for 2017 allocated $153 million in salaries to terrorists who had been or were imprisoned by Israel and another $190 million to the families of the terrorists.[v] The $221 million amounted to a sizable percentage of the “Pay to Slay” budget that was used to incentivize murders like these. And it paid off. The number of Israelis killed in terrorist attacks increased in 2017.[vi] The number of lone wolf attack plots rose from 400 to 1,100. And the Martyrs Fund was a key mechanism for incentivizing these attacks, assuring surviving terrorists of a generous lifetime income and, in the event of their deaths, giving them the comfort of knowing that no matter what happens, their families will be very well taken care of.
The murders of Jews funded in 2017 included the Sabbath attack on the Salomon family who were celebrating the birth of a new member of the family when an Islamic terrorist burst in with a knife and a Koran, stabbed to death seventy-year-old Yosef Salomon, wounded his wife, Tova Salomon, and murdered Chaya and Elad, Yosef’s son and daughter. “I saw two houses; from one of them I heard voices and from the other I heard laughter. So I decided to get into the one that had laughter,” Omar el-Abed, the terrorist, later explained.[vii] The Israeli Defense Ministry estimated in 2018 that the murderer, who had smiled through the trial, had been paid 12,000 NIS, and would earn as much as 12 million NIS or $3.5 million throughout his life.[viii]
The Trump Era
The stunning populist victory of Donald Trump meant a quick demise for many of Obama’s pro-terror policies. It also resulted in the destruction of the ISIS scourge, another terror spawn of Obama’s people and policies.
Trump’s pragmatic view of Iran resulted in the demolition of Obama’s nuclear deal as well as the termination of various Palestinian terror funding initiatives. Trump’s Abraham Accords remain one of the most dramatic Middle East peace agreements in modern history.
And They’re Back!
The instant Trump departed the presidency in 2021, the ostensible Biden administration — led by cadres of Obama acolytes — reactivated funding for Islamist terrorism.
[After Trump was sworn in] the Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood—violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. In the Obamas case, the reason for staying in D.C. was ostensibly that their youngest daughter, Sasha, wanted to finish high school with her class at Sidwell Friends. In June 2019, Sasha went off to college, yet her parents remained in Washington.
By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.
Given the stakes, then, it seemed churlish to object to the Obamas’ quiet family life in Kalorama —or to report on the comings and goings of Democratic political operatives and office-seekers from their mansion, or to the swift substitution of Obama as party leader for Hillary Clinton, who after all was the person who had supposedly been cheated out of the presidency. Why even mention the strangeness of the overall setup, which surely paled next to the raw menace of Donald Trump, who lurched from one crisis to the next while lashing out at his enemies and probably selling out the country to Vladimir Putin?
In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.
But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.
What’s another $10 billion to Iran?
As part of Barack Obama’s de facto third term, Iran received yet another infusion of cash as recently as November of 2023. As Majid Rafizadeh put it:
Who needs the Nobel Peace Prize when you can have the Biden War Prize? That’s right, the Biden administration announced last week that it plans to give the Iranian regime another $10 billion in unfrozen assets from Oman.
The funds are apparently as a small token of appreciation for helping to orchestrate a war in the Middle East and targeting U.S. troops in the region at least 56 times, wounding at least 56 U.S. servicemen, many of whom suffered traumatic brain injuries—in just one month! Where does everyone sign up?
The total number of attacks on U.S. troops by the Iranian regime since U.S. President Joe Biden assumed office is (so far) 139—83 before March, and 56 since. This new $10 billion comes on top of the earlier “closer to $60 billion” it already gave the regime by not enforcing sanctions against it.
In short, Barack Obama has been funding the massive ramp-up of Islamic terrorism and attacks against U.S. interests since his first days in office.
It’s clear that Obama despises Israel and has — since 2009 — undermined its security. The Jewish state faces an extinction event thanks to his actions.
The public, which has witnessed all of these policies, must be asking itself: what explains Obama’s obsession with funding terrorism and the needless killings of American soldiers and Jews?
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