Did you hear that Israeli spies saved the life of a U.S. general by foiling an Iranian assassination plot?
Probably not. But don’t feel bad — nobody else in America did, either. The legacy media in the U.S. reported very little (or not at all) on what should be one of the most important stories of the year. In Israel, however, news outlets erupted with the explosive story.
At the end of April, Israeli Mossad agents operating inside Iran apprehended and interrogated a man named Mansour Rasouli. Audio recordings and photos were released in which Rasouli, a high-level terrorist coordinator with Iran’s infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force, admitted that he had been ordered to arrange the assassination of a U.S. general stationed in Germany, as well as an Israeli diplomat in Turkey and a journalist in France.
Confessing to the terrorism plot, Rasouli explained that his counterpart in Europe had been paid $150,000 to “prepare for the assassinations” by working in tandem with affiliated international crime and drug lords.
Iran reportedly provides over $100 million per year to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the most violent terrorist organizations operating in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere. But now, pointing out that a top-level American military officer was one of the prime targets of the terrorism branch of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israeli officials have emphasized that the Iranian threat is not limited to the modern Jewish state.
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And it’s not just Israeli leaders who feel that way. Former President Donald J. Trump, for instance, has been warning of this threat for years.
“Iran’s hostilities substantially increased after the foolish Iran nuclear deal was signed in 2013, and they were given $150 billion, not to mention $1.8 billion in cash,” he said in January 2020. “Instead of saying ‘thank you’ to the United States, they chanted ‘death to America.’ … Iran went on a terror spree, funded by the money from the deal, and created hell in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq. The missiles fired … at us and our allies were paid for with the funds made available by the [Obama] administration.”
President Joe Biden and his colleagues, especially Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have attempted to return the U.S. to the Obama-era Iran deal, but negotiations have been mostly fruitless, even by Democratic standards.
One of the key sticking points for the Iranian regime is an action taken by Trump that critics have called a “poison pill”: listing the IRGC (which includes the Quds Force once headed by Gen. Qasem Soleimani) as a foreign terrorist organization, with all of the ramifications and sanctions thereof.
Is the IRGC a terrorist organization?
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Iran has demanded that Biden and Blinken remove the foreign terrorist designation from its militant branch responsible for violence and murder all over the world before any negotiation can continue. (Biden already removed the terrorist designation from Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Their trademark slogan is nothing short of, “Allah is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam!”)
In response, Biden reportedly offered to remove the designation in return for promises from Iran not to retaliate against U.S. officials for Trump’s killing of Soleimani. The Iranians flat-out refused this request and returned with their own unknown proposal. It can’t be good, though, because even Biden is balking at it.
Other Democratic politicians, such as Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, have encouraged the Biden administration to drop the foreign terrorist designation.
“It would be political malpractice for [the foreign terrorist designation of the IRGC] to be a sticking point,” he said. “I understand Republicans are going to over-hype the significance of the designation. And we’re going to have to be prepared to explain to the American people what the stakes are of not getting a [nuclear] deal and how practically insignificant that designation is.”
As the nuclear negotiations between Washington and Teheran have stalled, the Islamic Republic of Iran apparently felt the appropriate response to Biden’s hesitation was to order the IRGC and Quds Force to commit an act of murderous terrorism against an American target. The motivation was presumably vengeance for the deadly strike on Soleimani — nearly two and a half years later and long after Trump had vacated the White House.
The Israeli intelligence service commonly known as the Mossad stepped up to the plate, launching a daring mission inside Iran itself that ultimately saved the life of the American general as well as the Israeli diplomat and French journalist. And, probably to protect Biden and his disastrous negotiation, most of the American media has quietly shelved the story.
The American people are unaware of yet another massive failure of the Democrats: the direct funding and possible delisting of Iranian terrorist organizations that actively seek to assassinate top-level American military personnel.
In an unusual move, the Israeli government has chosen to disclose its intelligence operation, revealing Iran’s intended violence against American targets and exposing the disastrous incompetence (or worse?) of Biden & Co. In a method typical of Israeli culture and communication, the message from the Jewish state to Biden is both subtle and nuanced yet has the force of a Hellfire missile (like one of the missiles that former President Barack Obama refused to send to Israel during the counter-terror campaign of 2014).
On June 22, 1982, then-Sen. Joe Biden threatened to cut off aid to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin forcefully responded:
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
It appears that Israel is making the same statement to Biden four decades later: “We are not Jews with trembling knees. We will use all means available to us to protect ourselves, even if we have to operate in the heart of Iran itself.”
Biden may be willing to accept failure and allow a nuclear and terrorist-sponsoring Iran to go unchecked. Israel, however, has made it clear that it will not accept that reality.
It certainly won’t be the first time the Jewish people in Israel (and beyond) have faced such a diabolical, genocidal threat — indeed, it seems that in every generation a great enemy rises to destroy us. And unfortunately, this presumably won’t be the last time.
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