Iran is a breeding ground for terrorist activity, funding and controlling a global network of jihad terror organizations. Their containment can’t end with the Iran deal. My latest in The Federalist:
President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and vowed the rogue regime will never get its hands on nuclear weapons. That’s all to the good, but it does not by any means spell the end of Iran’s ability to stir up trouble worldwide.
Iran has been on a war footing toward the United States since 1979, mandates chants of “Death to America” in every mosque in the country at Friday prayers, and is actively working on numerous anti-American initiatives that could turn out to be even more lethal in the long run than nukes. In June 2011 Iran’s supreme leader, the ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared: “Wherever a movement is Islamic, populist and anti-American, we support it.” These were not empty words.
As I show in my book “The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran,” the Islamic republic is a breeding ground for terrorist activity, funding and controlling a global network of jihad terror organizations, ready to do Iran’s bidding up to and including the killing of its perceived enemies.
Chief in this network is Hezbollah, a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Most notoriously, Hezbollah was responsible for the murder of 241 U.S. servicemen in the bombing of military barracks in Beirut in 1983.
Iran has also been implicated in bankrolling the 1996 bombing of the Saudi Arabian Khobar Towers, which housed members of the U.S. Air Force, and in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 people were killed.
Iran’s Hezbollah doesn’t just operate in Lebanon. It continues to target the United States through Mexico, where it has teamed with drug cartels along the U.S. border. This partnership is mutually beneficial: Hezbollah gets massive amounts of cash to finance its jihad operations, and the drug cartels receive extensive training in ways to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies. That is one principal reason the Mexican drug cartels have adopted what up until recently had been two trademarks of jihad groups: kidnapping and beheading.
It’s not just Hezbollah that Iran bankrolls. Despite the Sunni/Shiite divide, the Sunni jihad groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as the Shi’ite Houthis in Yemen and the Iraqi Shi’ite group Kata’ib Hezbollah, are all funded by the Islamic republic. Nor does Iran work only through jihad terror groups: It has funded the Spanish left-wing populist party Podemos, a vivid illustration of how the international left and the global jihad movement can and do make common cause against the West….
Read the rest here.