Joe Biden has found a new group of people to bribe.
This is how the Biden administration does business: If there’s a WNBA player who is not really famous, goes to Russia, brings drugs with her, and then gets arrested and stuck in jail, what does Biden trade to get her back? Answer: Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer nicknamed “Merchant of Death,” who was convicted on four counts including conspiring to kill American citizens.
Bad trade.
Now we have a similar type of trade. Iran apparently has released five Americans from prison, but has placed them under house arrest in Tehran. So they’re not fully released and they are not being sent back to the United States.
What exactly did we have to do to get them out of jail and into house arrest, which is essentially being imprisoned? All we had to do was give Iran access to $6 billion in oil revenue.
Here’s the question: Considering that means we just paid $1.2 billion per hostage, do you think Iran might, just might, take more hostages in the future? A fantastic way to incentivize people to take hostages is to pay them billions of dollars for hostages. This is abhorrent. Iran is a terror state. Is Biden going to use this as the predicate to argue that relations with the Iranian ayatollahs are warming?
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We should remember at this point that the Iranians are directly responsible for hundreds of American deaths in Iraq. Iran is the most nefarious force in the Middle East. Whether we are talking about backing the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Hamas terrorist groups in Gaza, every bad thing happening in the Middle East right now can be laid at the doorstep of the Iranians. In contrast to Biden, Ronald Reagan was able to free the Iranian hostages by threatening the Iranian regime.
Meanwhile, as Biden snuggles up to Iran, the Saudis are perfectly willing to normalize relations with Israel, another major step toward Middle East peace. They’ve been wanting to do so since the Trump administration. That’s the reason why the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco — all very friendly with the Saudis — have normalized relations with the Israelis. Saudi Arabia clearly wants to do that. I’ve seen public officials from Saudi Arabia directly talk about this.
What’s the holdup? The holdup is that Biden put pressure on the Saudis not to do it unless Israel made concessions to the Palestinians — but the Palestinians happen to be governed by terror groups connected to Iran. And Biden is funding Iran.
The countries making peace with Israel are not democracies. The reason they stay in power is because they enrich their people through economic growth. If the economic growth collapses, they also collapse. So they have a strong interest in creating economic ties with the strongest economic power in the region, which is Israel. That could lead to a lasting Middle East peace.
And Biden, funding a government that is a deadly enemy of Israel, is standing in the way of all of that.