Hamas atrocities expose peril of liberals’ long embrace of Palestinians and Iran

As evidence of civilian atrocities mounted, President Joe Biden emerged in public to unequivocally denounce the Hamas terror attacks as “pure unadulterated evil” but his repudiation cannot hide the long embrace by his party’s liberals of the two main actors behind the staggering violence that rocked the Middle East: the political and military leadership in Palestine and their backers in Iran.

Even as American hostages remained in peril, the beheaded torsos of innocent civilians were collected from Israeli streets and Hamas and Tehran celebrated the bloodletting, many liberals in America were still trying to express empathy for the attackers.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib flew a Palestinian flag outside her official congressional office, while Rep. Ilhan Omar suggested Israel’s counteroffensive might be a “war crime.” Biden’s secretary of state tweeted, then deleted a call for a “ceasefire” just as Israel ramped up its rescue missions. The U.S. Department of State’s Palestinian Affairs Office literally implored Israel to “refrain” from “retaliatory attacks” before reversing course. On the streets of liberal cities and the campuses of left-leaning universities like Harvard, many even suggested Israel deserved blame for Hamas’ attacks.

Security experts said the weekend attacks exposed the peril of a decade-long Democrat pursuit of an elusive deal to end Iran’s nuclear and terrorist activities combined with a romanticism in liberal academic and political circles of a Palestinian "struggle."

That "struggle" has repeatedly resorted to inflicting terrorist casualties on innocent civilians dating to the days of Yasser Arafat and the Achille Lauro ship hijacking, where a wheelchair-bound American Jew was executed and thrown overboard.

Over the years the names of sponsoring organizations have changed – Arafat’s PLO and the related Palestinian Liberation Front of yesteryear or today’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad – but the ties to Iran’s mullahs and the tactics of indiscriminate violence have remained the same, the experts said. Some suggested the weekend’s attacks were even more vile and heinous, akin to the horror inflicted by ISIS in the last decade, and that reality can no longer be ignored.

“The danger is not just to Israel,” former Obama-era Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told Just the News on Tuesday night. “The enemy we face in Hamas is the same enemy that America faces in ISIS and Al Qaeda. It is a radical, medieval, vicious, brutal, barbaric, jihadist group.

“It’s not a clash of civilizations … it's a clash between a civilization and a different universe, a very dark and evil universe. And you have to believe in evil,” Oren said during an interview conducted from a bomb shelter with the Just the News, No Noise television show. “These are people who behead babies, repeatedly rape young women and strip them and march them naked through the streets of Gaza so they can be spat upon and beaten, who take entire families out and shoot them.”

Former Trump-era Deputy National Security Adviser Victoria Coates said the blame isn’t just with Palestinian-sympathetic congresswomen and academics, it also falls on the Biden administration for sending millions in aid to Hamas-controlled Palestine and for appeasing Iran with eased oil sanctions and a recent $6 billion in unfrozen assets in the name of seeking a nuclear deal even as Tehran continues to sponsor terrorism and toss out UN nuclear inspectors.

“There are the $6 billion that was paid in ransom recently. It's not what funded this particular attack. That's what they'll use to fund the next attack,” Coates told "Just the News, No Noise" on Tuesday evening. “But what has funded this attack is the tens of billions of dollars that have been pouring into Iran.”

Reuters reported in August that Iran oil exports had leapt to 2 million barrels a day under Biden despite U.S. sanctions as American officials allowed China to traffic in Tehran’s oil. The impact on Iran’s economy was clear: its cash on hand has exploded since Donald Trump left office.

“Just look at their foreign currency reserves,” Coates said. “It was $4 billion when we left office. It's now over $70 billion. So instead of being on the verge of default, they're fat and happy. They've got money in the bank. And this (violence) is what they're spending it on.”

Coates said Biden himself also sent a poor signal by waiting three days until Tuesday to make a public appearance condemning the Hamas attacks even as he reportedly hosted a barbecue over the weekend at the White House and conducted interviews with federal prosecutors in a classified documents probe.

“I welcomed the President's strong words of support for our great ally, Israel, unfortunately, as you say, the track record just isn't there to match the rhetoric,” she said. “And we have seen first of all, just after the attacks happened on Saturday, we basically didn't see the president all day Sunday and all day Monday. They had a nice party at the White House, and everybody took Monday off for the long weekend. That's nice. But guess who didn't take the Monday off? The terrorists who are holding Americans hostage and the Israelis who are trying to punish them," Coates continued.

Biden administration officials dismissed such criticisms, insisting that despite the deleted pro-Hamas tweets and prior appeasements to Iran that the president stands unequivocally with Israel and its right to defend itself. Administration officials also have refused to confirm reports from European intelligence that Iran helped plan the attack, even after Hamas made comments confirming such a connection.

Longtime intelligence expert Fred Fleitz, the former chief of staff to the National Security Council, said while it may take days or a few weeks for U.S. intelligence to pinpoint the exact nature of Iran’s role in the attacks, he has little doubt Tehran was involved.

“I think Iran was definitely involved," Fleitz told the John Solomon Reports podcast. “….I find it disturbing that the Biden administration is discounting an Iranian role before they have the evidence, even if they don't think Iran was involved. They don't have the evidence yet. They shouldn't be saying anything, because Iran might have been involved. And it looks fairly clear that the Biden administration wants to absolve Iran from being involved, because it wants to continue its efforts to revive Obama's terrible nuclear deal with Iran. They don't want this to distract from that."

“I think the most important evidence was when the Hamas spokesman thanked Iran for helping them carry out the mission,” he said. “And then you're right, the Hamas spokesman backtracked on that, because the Iranian government got worried that Israel might retaliate against Iran.”

Oren rattled off prima facie evidence of Iran’s complicity with Hamas during his interview with Just the News.

“Hamas is extensively backed and trained by Iran. The Islamic Jihad organization as the other terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip is wholly owned and operated by Iran. Ninety-plus percent of the rockets fired at us, including the rockets fired at this neighborhood, are made in Iran and smuggled into the Gaza Strip,” Oren said. “The other 10% are manufactured by Iranian trained Palestinian engineers. So that's a deep, deep and pervasive involvement. We also suspect that the scope and complexity of the Hamas terrorist raid on our population was too complicated for the Palestinian terrorists to mount by themselves.”

Security experts said there is strong reason to fear Iranian-backed terrorists could have already crossed the porous southern U.S. border to be activated in the future against Americans, bringing the horror of what just happened in Israel closer to home. Biden himself raised the concern during his Tuesday press conference.

“I'm very worried that our southern border hasn't been defended, because we have to assume that Hamas has sent fighters into the U.S.” Fleitz said.

Coates added that “Maybe the biggest threat from that particular alphabet soup of terrorism is Hezbollah. Because we know Hezbollah has been active in Latin America, they've carried out attacks against Jewish targets in Argentina, for example. So they're here. And the notion that they haven't tried to cross the border in the last two and a half years is pretty disingenuous.”

Coates said pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the weekend in several liberal cities in America like Chicago and Philadelphia were further evidence that Iranian-friendly agents were working on U.S. soil. “This is literally Palestinian supporters, showing us as the United States that they are here. And you can only imagine what else has crept across the border if these are the folks who are coming out publicly and protesting and so it's kind of a veiled threat,” he said.

Fleitz said the next phase for Israel will be a ground war to evict Hamas from the Gaza Strip, one he warned could be filled with bloody urban warfare and be used by Iranian and Palestinian sympathizers to create new emotion in America.

While Biden has dispatched munitions and the U.S.S. Gerald Ford with a carrier strike group to help Israel immediately, Oren said the next phase of help needed from America will be diplomatic in nature when sympathetic nations try to punish Israel for its Gaza counter-offensive with sanctions and they appeal to liberals on U.S. soil.

“The diplomatic Iron Dome will be that America will defend us in international arenas where we are being condemned,” the ambassador said. “And that's an important service which the United States can give us because those kinds of nations can serve as the basis for sanctions and boycotts against Israel, which can be strategically very dangerous to us.”