Tag Archive for: Houthis

Group Biden Removed From Terror List Storms U.S. Embassy in Yemen, Takes Hostages

My latest in PJ Media:

Isn’t great that America is back and the adults are back in charge? America is back, all right: all the way back to 1979, the last time we had a president so weak that enemies of the United States stormed one of our embassies and took hostages. On Thursday, the Yemeni media outlet Al-Masdar Online reported that Houthi jihadis in Yemen, which are backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, stormed our embassy in Sana’a, seizing “large quantities of equipment and materials.” Just days before that, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), they “kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy.” Biden’s team promised America would be back, but didn’t say anything about Jimmy Carter coming around again as well.

A State Department spokesman confirmed the Yemeni report, saying: “The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release. The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.” They are being “detained without explanation and we call for their immediate release.” The U.S., the spokesman continued, is “concerned about the breach of the compound” and is calling “on the Houthis to immediately vacate it and return all seized property.”

Yeah, I’ll bet the Houthis are shaking with fear now. Because Biden’s handlers are really going all out on this one: deploying the Navy? Sending in the Marines? Immediately imposing crippling sanctions? Come on, man! The Biden team, said the State wonk, “will continue its diplomatic efforts to secure the release of our staff and the vacating of our compound, including through our international partners.” That’ll show ‘em.

Contrast that weak and uninspired response with what is going on among the Houthis themselves. Last June, according to MEMRI, the Houthis’ Al-Eman TV featured an Islamic scholar, Dr. Ahmad Al-Shami, telling a room full of children that “the scam of 9/11 was a theatrical show produced by the Jews and the Americans. They killed a group of their own people so that they could have a pretext.… All of this is done under the pretext of fighting terrorism, which ‘emerged from your midst of Muslims and Arabs.’” Al-Shami declared: “When we say ‘Death to America,’ it means life for all the nations that America is killing. When we say ‘Death to Israel,’ it means life for all the people, around the world, in whose killing and corruption Israel is taking part.”

The students then began chanting “Allahu akbar! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse be upon the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

Charming. Yet when Donald Trump had the Houthis designated as foreign terrorists, the Leftist political and media establishment was (as always regarding anything and everything Trump did) outraged. No fewer than twenty-two aid groups that were operating in Yemen demanded that the designation be revoked “immediately,” and when his handlers gained control of the presidency, Old Joe Biden did just that. Trump was right again. If any group deserves to be considered foreign terrorists, it’s the Houthis.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Group Biden Removed From Terror List Show Gratitude by Screaming ‘Death to America!’

My latest in PJ Media:

When Donald Trump had the Yemeni Shi’ite Houthis, a client group of the Islamic Republic of Iran, designated as foreign terrorists, the Leftist political and media establishment was (as always regarding anything and everything Trump did) outraged. No fewer than twenty-two aid groups that were operating in Yemen demanded that the designation be revoked “immediately,” and when his handlers gained control of the presidency of the United States, Old Joe Biden did just that. But in this case as in so many others, Trump turns out to have been right again. If any group deserves to be considered foreign terrorists, it’s the Houthis.

In May, the U.S. Navy seized thousands of assault weapons, machine guns, and sniper rifles from a ship that appeared to have been heading to Yemen to aid the Houthis. Those were likely intended to be used against Saudi Arabia, but two weeks after Biden’s handlers revoked the terror designation, Yemeni political analyst Salim Al-Muntaser made it clear that the Houthis (who call themselves Ansar Allah, or Helpers of Allah) had another goal in mind as well: the end of the American presence in the Middle East. Al-Muntaser boasted that “Ansar Allah’s strikes have worn Saudi Arabia down, and have turned their American weapons into scrap metal. The advanced American Patriot missiles cannot intercept drones and ballistic missiles that are considered primitive. Therefore, there is no longer any significance to American presence in the Middle East. Soon we will witness a complete American withdrawal.”

This would, he said, lead to the destruction of Israel: “After that, there is no doubt that the Zionist entity will not be strong enough to face the resistance axis. I will not be surprised, and I expect that missiles will be launched from Saada and Sanaa in Yemen towards the so-called ‘Tel-Aviv’ and the Zionist entity will be destroyed.” Turning his attention to the Houthis’ patrons in Tehran, he added: “The Islamic Republic does not need the nuclear agreement. It does not need to sit at the negotiating table. It is the Americans and the Zionists who needs this. They are terrified by the thought that the Islamic Republic would produce nuclear weapons and exterminate the Zionist entity.”

There may be very good reasons for the U.S. to reduce its presence in the Middle East, and for our new woke military to give up both Wilsonian adventurism in the Islamic world and social engineering among the troops, and concentrate instead on actually defending the United States. However, Al-Muntaser made it clear that the Houthis were an entity that is hostile to the United States. For Old Joe’s bosses to take them off the foreign terrorist list was just as wrongheaded as their relentless appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and, in fact, was another manifestation of that appeasement.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Takes ‘Death to America’ Terrorists Off Terror List, Replaces Them With Republicans

Democrats say Muslim terrorists aren’t terrorists, but their political opponents are.

The Biden administration responded to protests against its stolen election by embedding a domestic extremism office into the National Security Council. The man in charge of making it happen, Joshua Geltzer, had previously denied that Black Lives Matter was a terrorist threat and had attacked the Trump administration’s response to Antifa and BLM violence in Portland.

That means that the only domestic extremists the NSC will be fighting are Republicans.

Even while the Biden administration is preparing to double down on Obama’s abuse of the national security state to target his political opponents, it’s also giving real terrorists a pass.

Joe Biden, whose biggest bundlers included the Iran Lobby, announced he was ending support for American allies fighting the Houthis, and then went even further by preparing to remove the terrorist organization whose motto is, “Death to America”, which took American hostages and tried to kill American sailors, from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.

The motto of Iran’s Houthi Jihadis is, “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” The Houthis took over parts of Yemen as a result of the chaos unleashed by Obama’s pro-Islamist Arab Spring. Since then they’ve been engaged in a protracted war while causing a local famine by confiscating food from the local population.

Last year, the Trump administration had finally secured the release of three American hostages, Sandra Loli, an American aid worker who had been held for 3 years, another American who had been held for a year, and the body of a third American, in exchange for 240 Houthis, including three dozen Islamic terrorists who had been trained in the use of missiles and drones by Iran.

Like those launched at the USS Mason.

The Houthis lived up to their “Death to America” slogan by repeatedly launching cruise missiles at the USS Mason which had been protecting shipping in the area. And they lived up to the second half of their slogan by ethnically cleansing the remaining local Jewish population, locking them up, and confiscating their homes and land. Local reports stated that the Houthis were “cutting off water & electricity to Jewish homes and preventing Jews from purchasing food.”

“No Jew would be allowed to stay here,” one of the Jewish refugees said.

The Iran-backed Islamic terrorists fight using 18,000 child soldiers. The soldiers, many abducted, some as young as 10, are taught to hate America and to kill enemies of Iran.

None of this stopped Biden’s State Department from taking the Houthis off the terror list.

“Secretary Blinken has been clear about undertaking an expeditious review of the designations of Ansarallah,” the State Department claimed. “After a comprehensive review, we can confirm that the Secretary intends to revoke the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist designations of Ansarallah.”

‘Ansarallah’ or ‘Defenders of Allah’ is what the Houthis call themselves. Blinken had only been confirmed on Tuesday. By next Friday, he had already somehow completed the “comprehensive review”, amid all the other minor business like China, Russia, and a global pandemic, and decided that the Islamic terrorists whose motto is “Death to America” aren’t really terrorists.

How can the Biden administration deny that Islamic Jihadis backed by Iran who attacked Americans are terrorists? The State Department claimed that this, “has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens.” Not to mention the attacks on the USS Mason.

But the Biden administration isn’t even going to pretend to care about attacks on our military.

The Bidenites are claiming that they’re taking the Houthis, whom they don’t deny are terrorists, off the list of designated terrorist groups because of the “humanitarian consequences”.

That’s a lie, no matter how often you hear it in the media, because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would be providing licenses to “humanitarian activities conducted by non-governmental organizations in Yemen and to certain transactions and activities related to exports to Yemen of critical commodities like food and medicine.”

That’s despite the fact that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen was caused by the Houthis.

Nevertheless the media, echoing propaganda from the Iran Lobby and Qatar, a close terrorist ally of Iran, has falsely claimed that the Houthis are the victims of the Yemen famine. A number of politicians, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans, as well as various aid groups, have pushed this same disinformation campaign about the causes of the Yemen famine.

America and its allies have spent billions providing food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to Yemen. That aid has been seized by the Houthis who have used it for their own troops or to resell on the black market. This is a familiar problem from Syria to Somalia, and aid groups have refused to honestly address their complicity in aiding the terrorists who caused the crisis.

There’s no money in admitting that the aid an organization is providing is being seized by the terrorists, prolonging the conflict and worsening the humanitarian crisis. Some aid organizations share the same goal as the Houthis of worsening the crisis because it boosts their donations.

That’s why international aid organizations don’t want to talk about the Houthis taking their food donations, or about their use of child soldiers. “It’s a taboo,” an anonymous aid official had said.

When Secretary Pompeo announced that the United States was finally designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, the United Nations took the lead in claiming that it would cause a humanitarian crisis. But the UN’s World Food Program had already admitted that its food shipments weren’t getting to the starving people because the Houthis were intercepting them.

The Middle East director for UNICEF also admitted that the Houthis were seizing food.

An Associated Press investigation found entire stores seling “cooking oil and flour displaying the U.N. food program’s WFP logo.” The former Houthi education minister said that 15,000 food baskets that were supposed to go to hungry families instead went to the Houthi terrorists whom the Biden administration is defending. Massive amounts of aid have been pumped into Yemen, and the famine has only grown worse because the Houthis have used starvation as a weapon.

The only way to end the famine is to end Iran’s grip on Yemen through its Houthi terrorists.

That’s obviously not what Biden or the Democrats have in mind. The loudest Democrat voices against designating the Houthis as a terrorist group have a troubling history with Iran.

“Reversing the designation is an important decision that will save lives and, combined with the appointment of a Special Envoy, offers hope that President Biden is committed to bringing the war to an end,” Senator Chris Murphy tweeted.

Murphy had been among the loudest voices against the designation.

And Murphy had met with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif last year. That same year, he had advocated lowering sanctions on Iran for “humanitarian reasons”. Biden had also joined the push to use the pandemic as a pretext for reducing sanctions on the terror state.

That same year, the Left succeeded in forcing out Rep. Elliot Engel, one of the few remaining pro-Israel Democrats, and replaced him with the militantly anti-Israel Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whose election was backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her antisemitic ‘Squad’.

Engel, who had served as Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was replaced by Rep. Gregory Meeks, a strong backer of the Iran Deal. Meeks’ position was cheered by Iran Lobby groups. As far back as 2009, Meeks had declared at a hearing, “I have developed a tremendous appreciation for the work of the National Iranian American Council. I am pleased that we will hear the perspective of NIAC’s President, Mr. Trita Parsi.”

Emails released allegedly showed Parsi telling Iran’s Foreign Minister, “I am having a meeting with Gilchrest and Meeks, and they asked for our assistance in getting some communication going between the parliamentarians.”

Speaking to the Islamic Republic News Agency, the official state news agency of the Islamic terrorist state, Chairman Meeks allegedly stated that he was willing to travel to Iran and had been engaged in dialogue with Iranian legislators.

Meeks took the lead in attacking the designation of the Houthi Islamic terrorists as terrorists, arguing that, “No solution in Yemen will be sustainable unless the Houthis are involved.”

And that gets at the real reason why Biden and Democrats oppose the designation.

It’s not about humanitarian aid, which would have kept on going anyway, only to be stolen by the Houthis. It’s about supporting Iran’s bid to take over parts of Yemen in order to control shipping and tighten the grip of the Islamic terrorist regime over the entire region.

The ‘diplomatic’ solution advocated by Biden and the Democrats would finalize Iran’s grip over parts of Yemen. Designating the Houthis as terrorists would get in the way of another in a series of Islamist dirty deals with Iran that began with Obama and that will continue on under Biden.

Even while the Democrats insist loudly that the Houthis must be part of the solution in Yemen, they just as vocally cry that the Republicans must be isolated and eliminated in America.

The Democrats militarized D.C. with an armed occupation and are criminalizing political dissent. They have claimed that one riot, after a year full of them by their own activist wing, requires a permanent state of emergency that will be run through the National Security Council.

The Biden administration is not only taking the Houthis, and likely other Islamic terrorist groups, off the terror list, it’s putting the domestic political opposition on its terror list. This is an extension of the same Obama policy that illegally shipped foreign cash to Iran even while it was using the NSA to spy on pro-Israel members of Congress and on the Trump campaign.

The Democrats are happy to fight terrorism by designating their domestic political opponents as terrorists while removing the “Death to America” Houthis who have kidnapped and killed Americans, who fired on the USS Mason, and ethnically cleansed Jews, from the terror list.

And what do the Houthis plan to do with their newfound support from the Biden administration?

In addition to sanctioning the Houthis, the Trump administration sanctioned three of their leaders, beginning with Abdul Malik al-Houthi. The Houthi leader has made it clear that he intends to build up the same missile program that was used to attack the USS Mason.

“To have rockets that could reach far beyond Riyadh, this is a great achievement,” he said, referring to the Saudi capital.

He also promised to send terrorists to fight against Israel.

“Many of Yemen’s tribesmen are ambitious to fight against Israel, and they are looking for the day to participate along with the freemen of the Islamic nation against the Israeli enemy,”

This is the terrorist group that the Biden administration and the Democrats are bailing out even while they’re criminalizing the Republican political opposition as terrorists.

“Death to America” is something that the Houthis and their Democrat supporters can agree on.

COLUMN BY

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Surrenders to Iran’s ‘Death to America’ Jihadis in Yemen Who Attacked USS Mason

Not exactly a surprise.

The Biden foreign policy team is crawling with Obama’s pro-Iranian echo chamber foreign policy trolls and the Iran Lobby was among his biggest bundlers.

Iran’s expansion into Yemen via the Houthis, a Jihadist group whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel,  A Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam”, has been backed by the media and the foreign policy establishment which falsely kept blaming the Saudi campaign against the Houthis for the famine when in fact it was the Houthis who had caused the famine by stealing humanitarian aid. This didn’t stop Islamists and the media from keeping the famine lie going anyway.

Or the Biden campaign from adopting it as a talking point.

The Houthis had meanwhile fired on the USS Mason (“Death to America” is right in their motto) and were ethnically cleansing Yemen’s Jewish population.

Despite all that, the Biden administration is now very predictably dropping support for the Saudi campaign against the Houthis, calling for a diplomatic solution, and dispatching a special emissary.

In other words, they’re surrendering to Iran and the Houthis.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, had pushed a terrorist designation for the Houthis on the way out the door, leading to outrage from the Democrats, their media, and even some Republicans. The Biden team is going the other way by rolling over for the, “Death to America” Jihadis leading to another of Obama’s “Victories for Islam”.

The Yemen mess spilled over due to Obama’s Arab Spring. Just wait for the Biden Islamist Winter.

COLUMN BY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Helping Protect Itself Against Iran, Israel Helps Protect Many Others by Hugh Fitzgerald

Not long before tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran reached an unprecedented high point, with the possibility looming of a war that could engulf many other countries besides those two, Israel located a secret Iranian site in Beirut, right near the airport, in the midst of a heavily-populated area (surrounded by thousands of civilians, as a way to discourage Israeli air attacks). The site, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, holds radioactive material and missiles. The Israelis, after all, have been running circles around the Iranians for years. They assassinated, one after the other, four key Iranian nuclear scientists right in the middle of Tehran. They concocted the fiendishly brilliant Stuxnet worm, the first computer program that caused real-world damage, for it sent messages to the computers it infected, the computers that were regulating Iran’s centrifuges, causing those computers to send messages that made the centrifuges speed up and destroy themselves and even damage other centrifuges. At the same time, other messages were sent back that the computer program was working perfectly.

The Israelis have destroyed, in Syria, hundreds of Iranian missiles, and have kept up the bombing of Iranian bases in Syria, and of Iranian soldiers on Syrian bases, preventing any kind of permanent Iranian outpost to be established. Some time ago Israeli agents carried out a night-time raid in a nondescript commercial district in Tehran, lasting six hours and 29 minutes, bringing away 50,000 pages of documents, and countless discs, which constituted the most important part of Iran’s secret nuclear archive, proving to the world that Iran had never abandoned its nuclear project, and had gotten much farther with it than the world previously believed.

In locating the site in Beirut, Israel again did not just itself but the entire Western world a great service. For the missiles whose guidance systems Iran is improving for Hezbollah, and the nuclear material that Iran is storing in Beirut, to be someday used either by its forces or possibly by Hezbollah, are not a threat only to Israel. Iran has designs on Yemen, as its proxy war against Saudi Arabia, that has already lasted several years, demonstrates. Iran would love to project and solidify Shi’a power in Yemen, right on the Arabian Sea, and to be able to threaten Saudi Arabia from the south, made easier by the porous border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Iran has a desire, too, to deal a direct blow to Saudi Arabia itself, as the richest and most powerful Sunni state, whose clerics talk of the Shi’a as if they were Infidels. That could mean supporting the discontented Shi’a in Saudi Arabia, some 15% of the population, almost all of whom are located in the Eastern Province, where the major oilfields are to be found. Iran also wants to take revenge on the United Arab Emirates, for helping to fight the Shi’a Houthis  in Yemen and, Iran now suspects, helping Arab separatists in Khuzestan, in southern Iran. Of course, Iran always proclaims as its chief enemy, more so even than Israel, the Great Satan, America. All of these countries have reason to be grateful to Israel for slowing down, for several years, Iran’s nuclear project. Stuxnet alone, a computer worm which destroyed 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz Enrichment Plant, set back Iran’s nuclear project, according to the German scientist Ralph Langer, by as much as two years.

These acts of derring-do did not end there. Israeli agents managed to locate in a dusty part of Tehran the top secret Iranian nuclear archive, to break in, to blowtorch open the many steel doors, to go through the archives and select the huge amounts of material that they then spirited out of Iran to Israel. This archive offered proof to the world that the Iranians had continued to work on their nuclear project after they had supposedly stopped, and that they had gotten much farther along than anyone suspected.

During the last few years, the Iranians have tried to establish their own bases in Syria, and from there hoped both to threaten Israel from closer up than from Iran itself, and to supply Hezbollah with more advanced weapons. But no matter where they put those bases in Syria, and even when the Iranians tried to conceal themselves inside  Syrian bases, Israeli planes have always managed to find and to bomb them. And the Israelis have been staggeringly successful at interdicting Iranian weapons shipments meant for Hezbollah.

And now Israel has uncovered, and shown to the world, a secret Iranian facility near the airport in Beirut, which contains fissile material and machines to manufacture precision-guided missiles. At this point, the Iranians may wonder: do we empty the facility of its contents, or will Israel, with its uncanny spying ability, including eye-in-the-sky drones, be able to see everything that comes out of that building and where it is taken? And if, and when, these machines and that material are taken out of the facility, and are in the open, will it not be easier for Israel to bomb both? Perhaps, by making public its knowledge of this facility, the Israelis are hoping to lure the Iranians into doing just that. It is hard for the Iranians, who have so often been outsmarted by the Israelis, to know what to do. What can Israeli spy drones and spy planes and spy satellites and human spies, find out? Do the Iranians try to smuggle the material and machines out, or do they keep everything as it is, but move even more civilians into close proximity to the building, in the hope that this civilian presence will dissuade Israel from attacking it?

As the Iranians have discovered, to their great displeasure, wherever or whomever or whatever they try to hide from Israel, the Israelis always find them out. The Israelis identified, and then assassinated, four of Iran’s top nuclear scientists; they found, and sabotaged, the computers that controlled the centrifuges at Natanz, they found the secret nuclear archives in Tehran and spirited them away, they found and bombed Iranian bases in Syria, and they found, and showed to the world, the once-secret Iranian facility in Beirut. Iran’s rulers are surely in a quandary.

All of this limits Iran’s aggressive plans. Israel has accomplished these feats in order, of course, to protect itself. But the rest of the West, and some Arab states, too, should recognize that they also benefit from these fantastic acts of human and technological derring-do. Some, at least, from agents in Langley to princes in Riyadh, know enough to be grateful. And so should we.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.