Order Robert Spencer’s new book, Holy Hell: Islam’s Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It: HERE.
The denial has been near-universal, and has come from everyone from whom you’d expect it to come. Over ten years ago, on July 28, 2015, two weeks after Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran was finalized, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Republican representative Ted Poe of Texas asked him, “It is the policy of the ayatollah — if you can answer for him — that Iran wants to destroy the United States? Is that still their policy, as far as you know?”
As The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran details, Kerry replied, “I don’t believe they’ve said that. I think they’ve said ‘Death to America’ in their chants, but I have not seen this specific.”
Poe wasn’t buying it: “Well, I kind of take that to mean that they want us dead. That would seem like that would be their policy. He said that. That — you don’t think that’s their policy? I’m not mincing words. Do you think it’s their policy to destroy us?”
To that, Kerry responded, “I think they have a policy of opposition to us and of great enmity, but I have no specific knowledge of a plan by Iran to actually destroy us. I do know that the rhetoric is uh, is beyond objectionable. I know that we, you know, are deeply concerned with Iran’s behavior in the region, deeply concerned with their past activities. Which is why President Obama felt—”
When Poe interrupted, Kerry interrupted him in turn, saying “If they did want to destroy us, they’ve got a much better shot of doing it if they had a nuclear weapon.”
Aware of how bad Iran’s frequent public chanting of “Death to America” made his Iran deal look, Kerry asked the Iranians to stop it. He recounted before the Council on Foreign Relations, “I also told them that their chants of ‘Death to America’ and so forth are neither helpful, and they’re pretty stupid.”
The Iranians, however, not only rejected Kerry’s request, but ramped up the genocidal rhetoric. On November 2, 2015, a commanding majority of the Majlis, 192 of its 290 members, agreed to this statement: “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.”
The assembled parliamentarians also added their support to the assertion that “Death to America,” which continued to be chanted at every Friday prayer in Iranian mosques as well as at anti-American protests, had “turned into the symbol of the Islamic Republic and all struggling nations.”
Chanting “Death to America” was and is the “symbol of the Islamic Republic.” A communal desire to destroy the United States and commit mass murder of its citizens is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s very identity.
Speaking about the nuclear deal in July 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the United States, “We think this is not only a threat to us. We think this is a threat to you as well. Iran has killed more Americans than anyone other than al Qaeda. They’re going to get hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel their terror and military machine.” He added, “Iran is different. It’s a zealot country. It’s killed a lot of Americans. It’s killing everybody in sight in the Middle East.”
Even as the Islamic State was horrifying the world with its barbarism, Netanyahu saw Iran as the greater threat: “Iran’s growing aggression is several times more dangerous than that of IS, which is dangerous enough. And this aggression, which aims to reach every corner of the world, has the ultimate true aim of taking over the world.”
That assertion met with widespread derision. The anti-Israel paleocon writer Justin Raimondo quipped: “For a country that’s on the way to world conquest, Iran should surely be spending more on the military: their $10 billion defense budget is relatively minuscule.” Juan Cole, a far-left American academic and member of the advisory board of National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), the Islamic Republic’s lobbying group in Washington, ridiculed Netanyahu’s claim, calling it “silliness.”
Yet Netanyahu’s assertion was not as overstated as Cole and others wanted Americans to believe. Echoing the Israeli prime minister’s claim that Iran had global ambitions was Iran expert Ali Wambold, whose understanding of the aspirations and goals of the Islamic Republic was well founded: “I can claim some understanding of Iran…. My family ruled the country as Shahs of the Qajar Dynasty between 1785 and 1925, and again under a democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, between 1951 and 1953.”
Wambold pointed out that the Constitution of the Islamic Republic “proclaims ‘the ideological mission of jihad,’ which it defines as ‘extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world,’ through Iran’s Army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” Thus, he said, “to treat with the Islamic Republic over the particulars of its weaponry while failing to address the very purpose of its bellicosity is delusional. The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action does nothing to change the fact that, in plain Farsi, Iran is committed to world conquest by Islam, with its clerics as warlords. Those to be conquered include America (the ‘Great Satan’), Israel (the ‘Little Satan’) and the Sunni-led Gulf States.”
The Islamic Republic may never have been able to realize this goal, but it has caused a great deal of trouble in attempting to do so. If it remains in power, it will keep on behaving the same way.
