‘Death to America,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told a screaming crowd in Tehran Saturday. “The politics of America is to create insecurity.”
With U.S.-Iranian atomic-bomb talks in full swing, Khamenei’s crack was not exactly what diplomats call a confidence-building measure. Of course, Khamenei offered no olive branch. Realizing that Obama is desperate for any deal to burnish his leaden legacy — even one so flimsy that White House chief of staff Dennis McDonough admits it’s “a non-binding agreement” — Khamenei can say whatever he wants. Obama will keep begging the mullahs to sign a piece of paper that he will probably slip past Congress and send to the United Nations for approval — the Constitution be damned.
Far scarier than Khamenei’s words are Iran’s actions. Its long record of support for Islamic terrorism demonstrates why it cannot be trusted to comply with anything its leaders endorse.
During his March 2 AIPAC speech, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented a map showing how “Iran envelops the entire world with its tentacles of terror.” That chart offers a chilling guide to Obama’s partners in nuclear “non-proliferation.”
• The State Department has designated Iran an official state sponsor of terrorism since 1984.
• “With Iran’s help,” Representative Chris Stewart (R., Utah) recently explained in the Wall Street Journal, “Hezbollah has stockpiled about 60,000 surface-to-surface rockets in Lebanon while Hamas has stockpiled about 10,000 surface-to-surface rockets in Gaza, all for the stated purpose of wiping Israel off the face of the Earth” — not in a manner of speaking, but as a matter of fact.
• Jordan disrupted an eight-member, Iranian-backed cell in August 2014. It had planned to attack the Israeli embassy and American soldiers there.
• In July 2012, two Hezbollah terrorists detonated a bomb in Burgas, Bulgaria. It killed a local bus driver and five Israeli tourists and wounded 32 others.
• French officials that same month arrested Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, a Hezbollah terrorist who had conducted surveillance of Israeli tourists in Cyprus. He was nabbed while acting as a courier in Europe for the Iranian-backed militant-Islamic group.
• Five Iranian agents in 2012 tried to assassinate Israeli diplomats in Thailand using magnetic “sticky bombs” that attach to vehicles.
• Two Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force agents were arrested in Nairobi, Kenya. They were caught in June 2012 with 33 pounds of explosives. They planned to use them to blast American, British, Israeli, and Saudi facilities.
• Peruvian authorities in October 2014 arrested a Hezbollah terrorist in Lima “on suspicion of planning attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets.”
• Iranian agents in Washington, D.C., were poised to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States in October 2011. American officials said the disrupted conspiracy would have included attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. According to former congressman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.), then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: “The quickness of the decisions that were made in order for certain elements of this to fall into place tells us that it is clearly tied to the highest levels of the Iranian government.”
“Death to America!” explained Obama’s negotiating partner, Ayatollah Khamenei, last Saturday.
As Netanyahu told AIPAC: “This is what Iran is doing now without nuclear weapons. Imagine what Iran would do with nuclear weapons.”
To prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb, hitting the pause button on its radioactive R&D will not suffice. Its uranium-enrichment efforts must stop. All of its enrichment centrifuges must be boxed up and shipped somewhere safe, outside Iran. To verify this, trustworthy international inspectors must be given full access to all sites. This is the same deal that the late Moammar Qaddafi got when he surrendered Libya’s A-bomb program in 2003. Its remains now molder at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
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If the ayatollahs don’t like these terms, then squeeze their turbans with paralytic economic sanctions.
Obama may be unwilling or unable to make such demands. But if he has any spine to stiffen, he must remember this: The idea here is to prevent Jerusalem, London, and Washington from being decorated with mushroom clouds.
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.