Biden’s Handlers Allow Members of a Foreign Terrorist Organization to Enter the U.S.
What could possibly go wrong?
By Robert Spencer
Fifty people on the terror watch list have been apprehended at the Southern border so far this year, and there is no telling how many got across without being caught. And now Old Joe Biden’s handlers have opened up a new way for terrorists to get into the United States: Iran International English reported late Friday that “the Biden admin has decided to lift a controversial ban on the entry into US of Iranian men who’d been conscripted into IRGC, a Foreign Terrorist Organization, as part of their compulsory military service, as they don’t ‘pose a national security or public safety risk.’” The IRGC is Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which the Trump administration designated a terrorist organization in 2019. In their avidity to roll back every last thing that Trump did, Biden’s handlers are once again actively endangering Americans.
This decision to allow certain IRGC members into the country is a compromise move designed to get the Iran nuclear deal negotiations moving again. Those negotiations were galloping forward, with the Biden team bent on appeasement and the Iranians getting all they wanted and then some. But then the Iranians, dizzy with success, got a little greedy and demanded that as a condition of the deal, the United States remove the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation from the IRGC. In a stunning and inexplicable development after an unbroken record of appeasement, the Biden team balked, and the negotiations stalled. Now, the United States is trying to get them going by allowing low-level IRGC members into the country while maintaining the terrorist designation.
This is, unsurprisingly, unwise. The IRGC was designated a terrorist organization with good reason. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a joint statement on March 18, declaring 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.” You refuse to believe that the United States would do such a thing? Gentlemen, Joe Biden is in the Oval Office.
Lapid and Bennett also noted that the IRGC “directs and instructs Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, and that the body is responsible for attacks against American civilians and American forces throughout the Middle East, including in the past year.” They added, “They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they refuse to surrender to them.”
Iran International added that “Secretary of Homeland Security and Secretary of State, in consultation with US Attorney General, concluded that the ban shall not apply with respect to an individual who provided insignificant or limited material support to an FTO (like IRGC) under routine social transactions.” So you see, all is well. Biden’s handlers are only allowing in IRGC members who were “conscripted” into the organization, and who didn’t help it all that much. So what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. The fact that a man was forced into an organization doesn’t automatically mean that he dissents from its agenda and goals, and the fact that he provided it only “insignificant” support in the past is no indication of what he might do in the future. To prevent actual jihad terrorists from entering the country, American officials would have to question IRGC members closely and intelligently, with full awareness of the nature and activities of the IRGC itself, and a full and honest understanding of Islamic jihad in general, uninfluenced by political correctness and wokeness. How likely is it that American officials in the Biden administration, which doesn’t acknowledge that there is such a thing as Islamic jihad at all and insists that Islam is a religion of peace, will be capable of carrying out such questioning? About nil.
The hostility of the Iranian regime to the United States is abundantly established. Under this new arrangement, what would prevent the mullahs from sending IRGC terrorists into the country? They would, of course, be carefully vetted on the Iranian side, so as to ensure that they had been conscripted into the organization and had previously provided it with only “insignificant” support.
Those who assume that the mullahs would never do that because they want the nuclear deal are naïve. Back in 2015, as Obama’s original nuke deal was being concluded, 192 members of Iran’s 290-seat parliament declared, “The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of ‘Death to America’ under the pretext of a nuclear agreement.” This slogan, they said, had “turned into the symbol of the Islamic republic and all struggling nations.”
This aggressive stance has not changed. Just days ago, the IRGC resumed its Obama-era practice of harassing U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz. And now Biden’s manifest weakness will only invite more Iranian aggression.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.