The White House quietly announced that President Obama signed Senator Ted Cruz’s anti-terrorist ambassador bill into law. The bill was written to prevent the admission into the United States, any representative to the United Nations who has engaged in espionage or terrorist activities against the United States.
Senator Cruz offered his gratitude to the White House in a public statement.
“Thank you President Obama for joining a unanimous Congress and signing S. 2195 into law today,” Cruz said. “We have shown the world that when confronted with virulent anti-Americanism, we can stand together in defense of our national security. The combined, bipartisan support of both the Congress and the President sends Iran–and other rogue nations–the clear signal that the United Nations is not a back door through which they can attack the United States of America.”
Breitbart Texas previously reported the unanimous passage of the bill in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
“Congress has voted unanimously in support of a bill to reject Iran’s deliberately insulting nomination of a known terrorist – one of the 1979 hostage-takers – to be their ambassador to the United Nations,” said Sen. Cruz in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas after the bill’s passage.
A previous Breitbart Texas article reported, “Iran recently appointed Hamid Aboutalebi to be their next ambassador to the UN–once an active participant in the group of terrorists who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.” This prompted Sen. Cruz to submit the bill which has moved with blinding speed through both houses of Congress.
On April 11, President Obama formally rejected Iran’s visa application for Aboutalebi. The Obama Administration specifically cited Aboutalebi’s connection to the Iranian student occupation of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 that led to the hostage crisis.
Iran rejected the Obama Administration’s denial of the visa stating “This decision of the U.S. government has indeed negative implications for multilateral diplomacy and will create a dangerous precedence and affect adversely the work of intergovernmental organizations and activities of their member states,” Iran’s Deputy U.N. Ambassador Hossein Dehghani was quoted as stating in a Fox News report.
The bill, now U.S. law, represents a refreshing change of pace in the highly partisan-charged atmosphere that currently reigns in Washington, D.C. The bill received unanimous support in the Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate. While many describe Senator Cruz as a highly charged icon of the conservative right, he was able to bridge the gap and bring the entire Congress and the White House together on this issue.
While the issue is now codified into law, there was already precedent for the Obama Administration’s denial of the visa. During the 1980s, the White House denied visas for several Iranians who had played roles in the embassy hostage crisis or other acts against American citizens according to Fox News.
Iran has not indicated whether it will submit another name at this time.
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