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** Danger to Western Lives Takes Off, Thanks to the Biden Administration ([link removed])
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by Majid Rafizadeh • September 29, 2023 at 5:00 am
* Even though Iran is a party to the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, the Islamist regime has long violated it, as it has other commitments, by taking foreign hostages as pawns to extract economic concessions and achieve geopolitical and financial gains.
* We can now expect the Iranian regime to arrest or abduct more Americans anywhere it can. Collecting hostages is now big business. Other hostile governments will most likely be tempted to abduct Americans, as well.
* Secret attempts by the Biden administration to reach an interim deal with the mullahs have threatened to add not only an estimated $100 billion into Iran's economy, but also, worse, to catapult an Iranian nuclear menace onto the world.
* "This exchange operation is in fact one of the most successful and effective negotiation [efforts] ever to happen to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In essence, we released a few Iranian prisoners in exchange for some prisoners whose sentences were about to end, and, on the other hand, we succeeded in releasing billions of dollars of our blocked resources without committing to anything else." — Senior Iranian security source, interview with Fars News, August 12, 2023.
* After Obama transferred this $1.7 billion to the Iranian regime to release five Iranian-American prisoners, the theocratic establishment became more emboldened than ever.
* "The Trump administration secured prisoner releases without ransom payments...." — Saeed Ghasseminejad, Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Fox News, September 18, 2023.
* Increased revenues will also allow the IRGC and Khamenei to crush more easily any domestic protests against their government. The other priorities of Iran's regime are to "export the revolution," and regional military domination. Targeted for this project are Yemen, Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Latin America, Lebanon and Iraq -- and strengthening the regime's militias and terror groups. America and Israel are presumably being fattened up for eventual extermination.
* That is what $6 billion has bought us. And the "Iran Nuclear Deal," which will enable the Iranian regime legitimately to have as many nuclear weapons as it likes, is not even dead.
We can now expect the Iranian regime to arrest or abduct more Americans anywhere it can. Collecting hostages is now big business. Pictured: Three of the US citizens who were held hostage in Iran, Siamak Namazi (back), Emad Sharqi (L) and Morad Tahbaz (C) disembark in Doha, Qatar on September 18, 2023. (Photo by Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images)
The Iranian regime has lately been collecting hostages: Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray from New Zealand, detained in July 2022, Johan Floderus, a European diplomat from Sweden detained in April 2022, and Bernard Phelan from France detained in October 2022.
This escalation in hostage-taking of Europeans by Iran's regime should not come as a surprise: the Belgian government last year proposed and ratified legislation that paved the way to transfer terrorists who have been convicted abroad back to Iran. The so-called treaty between the Belgian government and the Iranian regime was designed to secure the release of Iranian diplomat-terrorist Assadollah Assadi.
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