symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 2, 2001 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman, | Archie Dunham

Q: Should the United States renew the Iran Libya Sanctions Act?

Yes: The Iranian terrorist regime poses a danger to the United States and its allies.

On June 2, a massive blast triggered by a Palestinian suicide bomber ripped through a nightclub in Tel Aviv killing 20 people and injuring more than 80. The terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. Both groups, which are affiliated with the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat, are financed by the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran through official subsidies approved each year by Iran's state parliament, or Majlis.

Terrorists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad regularly travel to Iran, where they are trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards and by the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) in bomb-making techniques. They are taught how to use false documents, pass border inspections and transfer money worldwide. They are instructed how to maintain clandestine contact with their Iranian government handlers. Without state support from the Islamic Republic of Iran, terrorist attacks such as this latest suicide bombing would be far more difficult.

On April 12, 1996, the Israelis arrested Hussein Mohammed Mikdad, a Lebanese Shiite who subsequently admitted that his Iranian handlers had instructed him to hand-carry a bomb onto an E1 A1 flight originating in Tel Aviv. The only reason the Israelis caught Mikdad was his own incompetence. While preparing the bomb in his East Jerusalem hotel room, he suffered the misfortune of setting it off in his own lap. Mikdad entered Israel on a forged British passport provided him by Iranian intelligence.

The Israelis had less luck with the Iranian-trained bomber who drove an explosive-rigged van into an Israeli bus in Gaza on April 9, 1995, killing seven Israelis and one U.S. citizen, a 20-year-old student from New Jersey named Alisa Flatow. Lawsuits filed by her parents led a U.S. court to condemn the government of Iran to pay her family $247.5 million in damages.

Advocates of lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran argue that the re-election of a so-called "moderate" cleric, Mohammed Khatami, as Iran's president on June 8 will end the terror spree and that sanctions only reinforce his hard-line opponents. But since Khatami's first election as president in 1997, he has met repeatedly in Tehran with the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Iran's subsidies to these groups have continued unabated at the rate of around $100 million per year. In fact, as Ministry of Islamic Guidance in 1983, Khatami was one of the original founders of the worldwide Hezbollah movement.

Last October, after one such meeting with Hamas terrorists in Tehran, Khatami proclaimed that only the annihilation of the state of Israel would bring peace to the Middle East. "They are basically an occupying entity," he said of the Israeli government. "Naturally, any government that is based on oppression and injustice may stay in power for a while, but ultimately it is doomed to failure.... Real peace can only be achieved through an end to occupation."

Inside Iran, the reign of terror has accelerated under Khatami's presidency. Despite his claims to promote "liberalization," Khatami's security forces have closed reform-minded newspapers, assassinated dissidents and, in May, shut down Iranian access to the Internet.

On the evening of Nov. 22, 1998, mysterious intruders burst into the Tehran home of secular opposition leaders Darioush and Parvaneh Forouhar, hacking the elderly couple to death and sexually mutilating their corpses. It turned out the murderers were members of Iran's security services, acting on orders from a top deputy of one of Khatami's key government ministers.

Since the gruesome murder of the Forouhars, agents of Iran's security services have executed another half-dozen secular writers. Despite his protests of innocence, Khatami has done nothing to stop such killings or to restrain the intelligence services from their reign of terror.

On the contrary. In July 1999, students at Tehran University revolted against domestic repression and called for greater freedom. In response, the Tehran police stormed student dormitories, killing five students, including at least one person thrown to his death from a three-story window. Instead of backing the students and their calls for reform, the "moderate" Khatami called on students to end their demonstrations.

Many of those who support lifting U.S. sanctions on Iran argue that tree trade would subvert the radical Islamic regime by exposing ordinary Iranians to Western culture. But Iranians are very sophisticated, thank you. Many of the current regime's leaders were in fact educated in the West. Tens of thousands of Iranians travel every year from Iran to the United States, while several times that number travel regularly to Europe and even to Israel. U.S. sanctions did not exclude the sale of consumer goods to Iran until 1995. The reason Western notions of freedom and free trade do not flourish in today's Iran is not because they are foreign concepts, but because the regime has demonstrated again and again that it brutally will quash any challenge to its monopoly on power.