Obama’s Love Affair with the Mullahs

Americans were reminded over the weekend of yet another of President Obama’s shameful legacies, as news broke that Iran — the country toward which Obama has spent half of his presidency making appeals — hanged nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri for spying for the United States.

“Amiri had access to confidential military secrets and was connected to our No. 1 enemy, the Great Satan,” regime spokesman Gholamhosein Mohseni-Ejei told reporters in Tehran. “He was sentenced to death in primary court, and the sentence was confirmed by Supreme Court,” Mohseni-Ejei said.

The regime that believes the U.S. is not only its greatest enemy, but also literally the devil, is the regime with which Obama wanted to normalize relations.

The regime that believes the United States is not only its greatest enemy, but also literally the devil, is the regime with which Obama wanted to normalize relations — the regime that his efforts have brought one step closer to having a nuclear arsenal.

In his inaugural address, Obama made what many observers believed to be a direct appeal to the Iranian regime. “To those [in the Muslim world] who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist,” he said.

But despite few, if any, signs of the Iranian regime’s willingness to unclench its fist, Obama extended a hand of friendship. Indeed, after the election of Hassan Rouhani as Iranian president, a hard-line conservative cleric who has somehow succeeded in portraying himself as a modernizing moderate, Obama practically threw this hand of friendship in the Iranian regime’s face.

[lz_graphiq id=5F1lHcGeKep]

In August 2014, the year after Rouhani’s election, the Obama administration began bilateral talks with Iran over its nuclear program as part of the P5+1 negotiations. Nearly one year and more than 10 rounds of talks later, members of the P5+1 and Iran signed the Iran nuclear deal in July 2015.

News of the deal was met with some confusion, if not anger, at home, and the Obama administration needed to garner support for the deal among the American people — including some less-than-enthusiastic Democratic lawmakers — if they were to accept it. In order to do this, the Obama administration launched a concerted propaganda operation worthy of the Iranian regime itself.

The administration knew the Iranian regime was still dangerous and knew full well its desire for obtaining nuclear capabilities was not limited to the purpose of cheaper energy — but it needed to make the American people believe otherwise.

In a New York Times profile, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, revealed that the passage of the Iran deal was the result of a well-planned misinformation campaign.

“In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. ‘We created an echo chamber,’ [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. ‘They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,'” The Times reported.

[lz_related_box id=”183445″]

The Obama administration lied to the American people because it believed citing “Iran nuclear deal” under Obama’s list of accomplishments was more important than keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of an oppressive regime run by hard-line Muslim clerics.

Liberals protest that such an analysis is unfair to Obama, that one shouldn’t overlook the importance of ushering in a new era of openness and diplomacy with a once-hostile regime. But Obama’s radioactive olive branch did nothing to lessen the Iranian regime’s anti-American hostility. Less than six months after the deal was signed, images of handcuffed and blindfolded U.S. Navy personnel held prisoner on an Iranian ship emerged.

“We won’t allow negotiation with the Americans on other issues,” Ayatollah Khomenei was quoted as saying in September 2015. “God willing, there will be nothing left of the Zionist regime in 25 years,” he added.