The Iranian nuclear deal was supposed to have encouraged Tehran to act like a normal, civilized country. The Europeans are so enamored of the deal that they still believe in that fiction and want to preserve the agreement at all costs.
In truth, the tiger has not changed its stripes. The New York Post is reporting that the Dutch government believes that Iranian intelligence was behind the assassinations of two Iranian dissidents, while the Norwegian government said in October of 2017 that it had thwarted another assassination plot against a prominent critic of Tehran.
This week, the Dutch government confirmed that Iran’s intelligence ministry was behind two assassinations in the Netherlands – of Ahmad Mola Nissi in The Hague in November 2017 and Ali Motamed in Amsterdam two years earlier.
In this case, the mullahs allegedly hired Dutch gangland types to carry out the murders. As the US government has repeatedly emphasized, Hezbollah, Iran’s Shiite terror proxy in Lebanon, has close connections with organized crime worldwide.
The Dutch bombshell followed October’s announcement by the Danish government that it had thwarted an Iranian plan to assassinate a leader of the separatist Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz. Swedish authorities arrested a Norwegian citizen of Iranian extraction for his alleged role in the plot; he has been extradited to Denmark.
Tehran was also behind a foiled bombing in France last summer. That attack was supposed to target a gathering of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, the Marxist-Islamist cult that helped bring the mullahs to power in 1979 but has since turned against them.
Had the Paris plot succeeded, it could have shattered hundreds of innocent lives in the French capital’s urban core. Among the attendees at the MEK gathering: former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
The French government concluded “without any doubt” that Iran’s intelligence ministry was behind the attempted attack, which had been operationally led by a Vienna-based Iranian spook posing as an intelligence official, on orders from Saeid Hashemi Moghadam, the Islamic Republic’s director-general of intelligence, who answers directly to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Both France and Germany have recently carried out major raids against Iranian spy-terror networks. The Germans found that Iran was gathering information so it could draw up a list of targets for assassination, should the regime choose to carry them out. The list included many Jews and other supporters of Israel, including a former member of the Bundestag, Reinhold Robbe, head of the German-Israel Society.
Since the Islamic revolution in 1979, the U.S. State Department has identified Iran as the world’s number-one terror state. And for good reason:
Other notable entries in Iran’s black book of terror include the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, the deadliest single attack on US Marines since World War II; the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 20, most of them Americans.
The targeting of dissidents abroad is also par for the course for the regime. Such operations began with Shahriar Shafiq, the Shah’s nephew and a high-ranking officer in the former regime’s navy, struck down by Iranian agents in Paris in December 1979.
Foreign assassinations continued unabated throughout much of the 1980s and ’90s. Operations targeting domestic dissidents inside the country were carried out in tandem but with even greater efficiency – and impunity.
This is the nation an American president considered worthy to treat with.
The murder arm of the Iranian government is the Quds Force – a select organization of operatives who work exclusively overseas. They answer directly to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Lest anyone believe that the terror attacks by Iran are executed by rogue elements in their intelligence services, it would be wise to examine the relationship of the Revolutionary Guards with the supreme leader. The Rev. Guards are the sharp end of the stick of both foreign and domestic policy in Iran. They don’t move without his say-so.
Despite all this evidence, the E.U. continues to look for ways to revive the nuclear deal and circumvent sanctions. The Europeans believe that the alternative – war – is too horrible to contemplate. But there are several ways to destabilize an already unstable regime that don’t involve armed conflict. Under Trump, those options are being pursued.
The Europeans should get their heads out of the sand and support us.
Source » americanthinker