As Iran Wages Proxy War on Israel, Biden Mulls Giving $10 Billion to the Mullahs
As Iran Wages Proxy War on Israel, Biden Mulls Giving $10 Billion to the Mullahs
When you can't make it clearer where you stand on the Hamas-Israel war.
Robert Spencer - NOV 17, 2023
Old Joe Biden couldn’t make it clearer where he stands on the Hamas-Israel war if he screamed “Allahu akbar” and blew himself up in a crowd of Jews.
The alleged president demonstrated, for anyone who was paying attention, which side he is really on in the Hamas-Israel conflict when he went over to Israel in late October and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He took the opportunity to announce that he was giving $100 million to Gaza, which means, despite his denials, $100 million to Hamas, as there is no entity in Gaza that is not controlled by Hamas and could both receive this money and keep it out of the hands of the terror group. As if that weren’t bad enough, now Old Joe and his henchmen are considering sending $10 billion to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the chief funder of Hamas. Yes, it’s so far beyond outrageous that it is coming up on outrageous from the other side, but it’s true nevertheless.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that “the Biden administration may approve a sanctions waiver on Tuesday that will allow Iran to access at least $10 billion in previously frozen funds held in Iraq.” Displaying an admirable talent for understatement, the Free Beacon noted that this is “driving concerns that the Biden administration is maintaining financial avenues for Tehran as the country’s terrorist proxies foment chaos across the Middle East.”
Now, why would the Biden regime even consider freeing up billions for Iran while the “Death to America, Death to Israel” regime is bankrolling not only Hamas, but Hizballah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in their jihad war against the Jewish state? There are three possibilities: the regime is either stupid, or evil, or both. In this case, the most likely answer is the third: the sinister, senescent, faux-folksy corruptocrat and his cronies are as clueless as they are immoral. Oh, and wrongheaded, and a hundred other things.
Biden and his team are stupid insofar as they apparently still believe that showering money upon the Islamic Republic will lead that rogue, terror-supporting regime to moderate its practices and possibly even grow friendly toward America and possibly even Israel as well. This is a ridiculous idea for the State Department wonks and foreign policy “experts” to have, but they have it nonetheless; in fact, American diplomacy has largely consisted of efforts to buy friends internationally for many decades now.
This seldom works with anyone, but it is particularly doomed to fail when tried upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the rulers believe the Qur’an when it says: “And the Jews will not be pleased with you, neither will the Christians, until you follow their religion.” (2:120) Efforts at winning hearts and minds are often seen through this prism, as cynical attempts to begin to lure pious Muslims away from Islam. But of course they have no idea of this in Foggy Bottom, where they’re all bound to believe the iron dogma that Islam is a religion of peace that not only has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, but nothing whatsoever to do with contemporary geopolitics.
The evil part of this bargain comes from the fact that if the regime really does manage to send $10 billion to the mullahs, a large part of it, if not all of it, will go for the jihad against Israel. When Barack Obama sent pallets of unmarked bills to Tehran in the dark of night, much of it ended up going to jihad terror groups. What are the chances that at least some of Old Joe’s $10 billion would end up with Hamas, Hizballah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Oh, about one hundred percent.
In response to such concerns, the Biden regime is pretending yet again that the American people have no idea of the most basic principles of economics. It insists that if it does send this $10 billion, it will be earmarked only for humanitarian purposes. The basic lesson of economics here is that getting $10 billion from the United States will free up $10 billion that the Iranian regime would have spent on food for its people, but which can now go to kill Israelis.
The new speaker of the House, in a classic example of failing to notice about fifty elephants in the room, just said that there wasn’t enough evidence to impeach Joe Biden. Well, the fact that the regime is even thinking about sending money to an avowed enemy ought to get Old Joe not only impeached, but tried for treason. But for that, we’d need some genuine opposition that had some guts.
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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 26 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest books are The Critical Qur’an and The Sumter Gambit. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.