“Our naval forces should take 10 or 20 Americans as hostage every month. For each one of them, we should get $1 billion.”
By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine
The Islamic takeover of Iran was built on taking hostages. But until the Obama and Biden administrations began paying huge ransoms for hostages, Americans weren’t constantly being taken hostage.
Iran takes Americans hostage to make money. If you doubt that, here’s a top terror leader saying it.
A top political strategist and Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officer told supporters that Iran should kidnap hostages and ransom them back to the United States for “blood money.”
“Here’s how the IRGC generates funds. The IRGC detains a spy like Jason Rezaian,” Hassan Abbasi can be heard saying in a video that surfaced on Wednesday. “The U.S. pleads for him to be released, and we ask them to pay for him. Our government gets paid $1.7 billion to hand over this spy. By detaining one spy, the IRGC earns the $1-2 billion, which it was supposed to receive from the government budget.”
“Do you want to solve the sanctions problem?” he continued. “Our naval forces should take 10 or 20 Americans as hostage every month. For each one of them, we should get $1 billion. If we get $1 billion per week, and the year has around 50 weeks. That’s at least $50 billion.”
They’re up to $6 billion for this round of hostages. That’s 5 hostages for $6 billion (plus the release of some Iranians from U.S. custody) which comes out to $1.2 billion per hostage.
So Iran is overperforming.
The Biden administration and its media apologists are spinning this as “humanitarian aid”. We already know that’s nonsense. Iran will get access to money through its Qatari allies. And that money will be used to finance terrorism and its nuclear program.
We now know why the Biden administration’s political and media allies were hyping an imaginary Israel-Saudi deal ahead of this shameful ransom payment. A payment that, like Obama’s ransom payments, is illegal.
Americans are barred from financing terrorists. Yet Obama and Biden have been able to bend the law and get away with it.
But that’s no surprise from an administration headed by a longtime ally of the Iran Lobby.
After September 11, Biden proposed, “this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran.” At a 2003 Senate hearing, he suggested that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons because it felt “isolated”.
In 2007, Biden became one of only 22 senators to vote against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization and warned that if President Bush took action to stop Iran, he would impeach him. A year later, he told Israelis that they would have to accept Iran’s nuclear program and proposed reopening a US diplomatic presence in Tehran. He also suggested cutting off Radio Liberty broadcasts that provided a voice for Iranian dissidents.
Beyond the campaign cash, Iran became the second largest enemy state to intervene in the 2020 election when its hackers conducted a false flag operation in Florida pretending to be Republicans and tried to hack sites reporting election results. What was Iran getting in exchange for all of this? Biden offered billions in indirect sanctions relief and put the Iran Lobby in charge of restarting the Iran Deal that would let the terror state build up its nuclear program.
We could put an end to this by ending the ransom payments and criminalizing further travel to Iran. But the hostage-taking is a convenient way for certain special interests to send money to Iran in an endless chain of arms for hostages.