I just don't understand why President Joe Biden and his top officials keep denying that Iran is the key paymaster and planner behind the barbaric Hamas invasion out of Gaza.
To his credit, President Biden thus far has fully supported Israel, to his credit. His Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a veteran of the successful war against ISIS, is pledging U.S. military deployment to Israel if need be. This is good, but here's Joe Biden on "60 Minutes" over the weekend:
SCOTT PELLEY, "60 MINUTES": "Is Iran behind the Gaza war?"
PRESIDENT BIDEN: "I don't want to get into classified information, but to be very blunt with you, there is no clear evidence of that at this point."
PELLEY: "At this point no evidence that Iran is behind any of this?"
BIDEN: "Correct. Now, Iran constantly supports Hamas and Hezbollah. I mean that, but in terms of where they would, did they have foreknowledge that they are planning the attack there? There's no evidence of that at this point."
Well, on October 9, the Washington Post ran a long story, "Hamas received weapons and training from Iran, officials say" and the day before, on October 8, the Wall Street Journal ran a headline story, "Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks."
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Ali Baraka, who is a Hamas bigshot, was telling Russian TV that "our allies are those that support us with weapons and money. First and foremost, it is Iran that is giving us money and weapons." And all these stories talk about meetings in Beirut just prior to the Hamas invasion. Those meetings included Iran puppet Hezbollah. European officials are quoted as confirming Iran's key role.
So, why is Biden protecting Iran? What's he hiding? He and his top people keep telling us the Iranian economic and energy sanctions have not been lifted or relaxed, but we already know from key data sources that Iran has accumulated $80 billion of oil revenues, a huge increase in oil sales to China, an enormous jump in their foreign exchange reserves... all in the last couple of years.
Where's that coming from? These are hard facts. The U.S. has not blocked Iranian shipping, or airplane overflights, or applied secondary banking sanctions to Iranian commerce of any kind. We have not booted them out of the world dollar system.
We know this. Why lie about it? Incidentally, if Iran's not calling the shots, then why is the Iranian foreign ministry ludicrously claiming today, Monday, that Hamas was ready to release its hostages if Israel ceases its airstrikes along the Gaza strip?
Now, this is an insane story. Not a shred of truth to it and, of course, Israel will do no such thing. As former American ambassador to Israel David Friedman, who will be here in just a moment, has written, "Israel must achieve complete annihilation of Hamas."
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No more containment. There isn't going to be any such stupid deal with Iran or Hamas, or any of these terrorists, but it sure sounds like Iran is the spokesperson for Hamas. Of course, Iran has been bankrolling and master-minding all these terrorist groups, for many years. Iran is the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, and perhaps the rest of the world, for that matter.
The question is why would President Biden quibble over this? Because that's what his "60 Minutes" quote sounds like. He doesn't want to give away classified info -- so he's doing one of these ambiguous quibbles.
My final thought? Let the Israeli Defense Forces take care of Hamas in the Gaza strip. As for the U.S.? Let me suggest that the U.S. could really make a great contribution if it implemented all of the energy, banking, and business sanctions on Iran that have been mandated by Congress. One way to crush Hamas is to bankrupt Iran. No quibbles.
This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the October 16, 2023, edition of "Kudlow."
