{"id":228370,"date":"2020-10-23T11:24:03","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T10:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/?p=228370"},"modified":"2023-02-01T05:38:03","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T04:38:03","slug":"to-confront-tehrans-terrorism-abroad-address-its-terror-at-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ncr-iran.org\/en\/blog\/op-ed\/to-confront-tehrans-terrorism-abroad-address-its-terror-at-home\/","title":{"rendered":"To Confront Tehran’s Terrorism Abroad, Address Its Terror at Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Iran_Terrorism_23102020\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ali Safavi<\/strong><\/p>\n

37 years ago, on October 23, 1983, at 6:22 in the morning, a truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives drove into an American Marine compound in Beirut, Lebanon. 241 US service personnel were killed in the terrorist attack orchestrated by the Iranian regime and executed by its proxy Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

30 years later, the US District Court ordered the release of $1.75 billion in Iranian frozen assets to set up a fund for families of victims of the 1983 bombing. That money was never delivered to grieving families. Instead of demanding Tehran to pay up, the Obama administration astonishingly paid exactly $1.7 billion in cash to the regime in 2016. The irony, right down to the similarity of the figures (1.7), cannot be overlooked.<\/p>\n

There are those who say that the maximum pressure campaign is the main culprit for Tehran’s unbridled terrorism. But, in fact, the US appeasement policy that cultivated the Iran nuclear deal in 2015 remains to be the main motivator for the regime’s terror.<\/p>\n

Paying the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism billions of dollars in cash, even as it is found guilty of murder by American courts, is perhaps not the smartest thing to do; especially if you want to avoid enriching terrorists who kill Americans in Iraq.<\/p>\n

This is not a partisan quibble. Historically, administrations of both parties have been fond of appeasing Tehran simply because it is the least costly option during a four-year election cycle. Long term, however, appeasing terrorist theocrats multiplies their ambition.<\/p>\n

By 2018, the regime, killing with impunity for 40 years, graduated to a new level of terrorism. Previously, the regime used proxies. In June 2018, however, it used one of its official diplomats, Assadollah Assadi<\/a>, a counselor in its embassy in Vienna, Austria, to transport a sophisticated explosive in his diplomatic pouch.<\/p>\n

Assadi personally delivered the bomb to Luxembourg where he handed it over to a sleeper cell. The explosive was supposed to be detonated at a major international gathering<\/a> of opponents of the Iranian regime, the main opposition Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK)<\/a>, in a Paris suburb.<\/p>\n

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Iran news in brief, July 3, 2018<\/div><\/div>
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