Is Obama Serious about Isolating Iran?

 Benjamin Weinthals

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, delivered a speech on Friday — the close of the holy month of Ramadan and the celebration of international al-Quds day — to urge the elimination of Americans and Israelis in the Middle East.

“The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land . . . In the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists,” said Ahmadinejad , who has previously called for “a world without America and Zionism.” Pro-Palestinian rallies marking al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day) blanketed Iranian cities, attracting millions of demonstrators (according to Iran’s state-controlled media). Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, established al-Quds Day in 1979 to advocate the obliteration of Israel.

Coinciding with Ahmadinejad’s genocidal intentions toward the U.S. and Israel, his country’s drive to obtain nuclear weapons is reaching its end game. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, David Feith, an assistant editorial features writer at the paper, delves into “what Obama isn’t saying about Iran.”


He outlines Obama’s reluctance to aggressively enforce sanctions targeting Iran’s energy sector. “All of Iran’s major oil-trading partners — 20 of them — received exemptions from U.S. sanctions,” Feith writes about the administration’s decision to decrease pressure on Tehran.

Sadly, the Obama administration has made no real effort to convince its European allies to outlaw Iran’s instruments terror, namely the Lebanese-based Hezbollah group and its parent organization, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The U.S. designated Hezbollah a global terror entity in 1995 and the Bush administration blacklisted the IRGC as a global terrorist organization in 2007. Hezbollah uses Europe as a base to raise funds for its organization and murder Iranian dissidents.

A New York Times report this Wednesday explained how Hezbollah’s strength is growing in Europe. Traditionally, Germany has tolerated Hezbollah; the number of active members in the Federal Republic increased from 900 in 2010 to a current figure of 950 Islamists. In 1983, only a year after Hezbollah’s founding, the organization killed 58 French paratroopers in the Beirut barracks bombing that also killed 243 U.S. Marines.

The Obama administration’s cherished multi-lateral approach is limping along, badly wounded. After all, if the United States cannot wield its political and economic muscle to convince the EU to ban organizations that murder Americans and Europeans, then it is not an encouraging sign with respect to the campaign to isolate Iran’s regime across the globe.
Writing in his New York Post column this week, Benny Avni noted that that top U.S. diplomats are struggling to persuade U.N. head Ban Ki-moon to not attend a meeting of Non-Allied Movement countries in Iran. Avni notes, “if the West’s top diplomats can’t use their tact and talent to convince even the most pro-Western UN chief in memory to keep Iran off his itinerary, how will they ever manage to isolate Iran so completely that the mullahs will quit their most prized pet project?”

All of this helps to make the case that Obama’s timidity toward Iran’s rulers, and Europe’s meek posture toward Hezbollah and the IRGC, reminds the mullahs that he is not serious about stopping their nuclear-weapons program.
— Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.