Bennett, Lapid ‘Refuse to Believe’ Bidenites Will Lift Terrorist Designation From Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps

Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid have issued a joint statement about reports that the Bidenites are about to remove the terrorist designation from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Surely this can’t be true, Bennett and Lapid would like to believe. Surely the Bidenites can’t sink this low. Apparently, the Israeli leaders still harbor hopes that they are dealing with sensible, rational, even moral men. How wrong they are. Their response to such reports is here: “Israel’s Bennett, Lapid ‘Refuse to Believe’ US Would Lift Terrorism Designation Against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards,” Algemeiner, March 18, 2022:

…In a joint statement, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid reiterated the view that the IRGC is a “terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans.”

“We refuse to believe that the United States would remove its designation as a terrorist organization,” the pair declared. The IRGC was originally designated as a terrorist organization by former President Donald Trump’s administration in April 2019.…

The IRGC is not just a “terrorist organization.” It is the largest, best-financed terrorist organization In the world. It is the terrorist heart of a terror state. It terrorizes Iranians both inside Iran, where it has murdered thousands, and outside Iran, where it has killed enemies of the regime. It is the godfather to the other terror groups to which it transfers, on behalf of the Iranian terror state, both weapons and money — to the Houthis in Yemen, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza.

This week, attention shifted to media reports of US willingness to remove the IRGC’s designation in return for a public commitment from Iran of de-escalation in the region. The State Department responded that no decision had been made on the IRGC designation and “any speculation to the contrary is simply uninformed.”

Or perhaps now, with Israel’s expression of disbelief, the State Department is quickly rethinking its plan. Notice that it did not deny that such a plan was being cosidered, but only that a decision had not yet been made.

Separately, the director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry emphasized on Friday that “Iran remains the world’s largest terror state.”

Marking the 30th anniversary this week of the March 17, 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, which killed 29 people, Alon Ushpiz tweeted: “No international agreement can clear the name of the murderers — part of terror groups within a terror state — and the only way to face them is through an uncompromising effort to prevent them from ever repeating the attack that took place 30 years ago.”

It is clever that Israeli leaders have taken this tack, of feigned amazement rather than rage. They might have simply denounced the Bidenites’ move. Instead, they appeared to give the Bidenites the benefit of the doubt – “of course we can’t believe these reports, they can’t possibly be true, we know you would never do such a thing.” Such a remark (“we refuse to believe…”) now should lead the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, and the execrable appeaser Rob Malley – to save themselves not just from Congressional anger but still worse, from ridicule, by rethinking that planned removal of the terrorist designation from the IRGC.

The Israelis ought to follow up right now by releasing another statement, along these lines:

We have heard more details about that report. It seems, or so we have been told, that if Iran promises that the terrorist IRGC will cease to target Americans, then Washington will remove its terrorist designation. As long as the IRGC “only” targets non-Americans — Israelis, or Emiratis, or Saudis – the organization will no longer be considered “terrorist.” This cannot possibly be true. After all, why stop there? If the terror group Hezbollah promises to attack only Israelis and Lebanese, and to spare Americans, will it cease to be a terror group in the view of the Bidenites? What about Hamas? Could it, too, promise to refrain from attacking Americans, and thereby have its terror designation removed – even if it continues to kill not only Israelis, but Canadians, British, French, Germans and so many others?

Scarcely believable, of course, but all too possible. Haven’t the Bidenites given the P.A. hundreds of millions of dollars in aid without any quid asked for that gigantic quo? Haven’t they renewed payments to UNRWA even though that organization has still not revised its textbooks, so full of antisemitism, as it has repeatedly pledged it would do? Haven’t the Bidenites promised to reopen the “consulate to the Palestinians” in east Jerusalem, thereby ignoring the express language of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations? 

We will have many more plans by the Bidenites that sensible people will “refuse to believe.” There is, alas, no end to this.