The Western world has “collective amnesia” about the role globalist governments on both sides of the Atlantic played in financially empowering Iran to the point where it felt confident enough to launch a direct strike on Israel, Brexit leader Nigel Farage argues.
Mr Farage argued on Monday that the administration of Barack Obama, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, as well as neoliberal Eurocrats in Brussels, should all face blame for enriching the Islamist regime through the lifting of sanctions in the ill-fated Iran Deal, which allowed billions to pour into Tehran, and thereby enable the radical Shia government to not only fund its terrorist proxies in the region but also to launch over 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles at Israel on Saturday evening.
“It was Obama as president, backed up by Biden as vice president, along with their friends in the European Union in Brussels, who put in place the JCPOA, the agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation,” Farage told Fox Business.
“In doing so, they removed sanctions, they freed up tens of billions of dollars and Iran have used that money to fund the Houthis, to fund Hezbollah, to fund Hamas, and now to fund 350 missiles and drones being aimed at mainland Israel.”
“It seems as if we are on a collective amnesia about how Iran got itself strong enough to be where it is.”
The so-called Iran Deal, officially the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was inked in 2015 in Vienna by representatives from Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, United States, as well as Angela Merkel’s Germany and the European Union.
Despite the Islamist regime in Tehran being the world’s top sponsor of terrorism and being bent on the destruction of America, President Obama and a globalist coalition in Europe agreed that in exchange for supposedly halting its nuclear weapons programme, the West would provide sanctions relief — to the tune of $150 billion — to Iran.
The influx of foreign capital facilitated by the lifting of sanctions not only stabilised the Iranian economy, thereby facilitating the continued rule of the theocratic regime in Tehran but also enabled the Islamist government to fund terror groups, with even the Obama administration admitting at the time that Iran would use “some portion of that money” (from sanctions relief) to fund terror activities in the Middle East.
Before President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, the sanctions relief saw Iranian oil exports soar, peaking at 2.8 million barrels per day in 2018. The European Union was a leading destination for Iranian fuel, with EU nations importing 8.2 billion euros in crude oil from Iran in 2018. Although EU imports of oil from Iran dramatically declined following the reintroduction of sanctions by the Trump administration, oil revenue has been acknowledged by the Biden administration as one of the top funding sources for the Islamic regime’s military and for its terrorist proxies.
In conjunction with the Iran deal, the Obama administration also freed $1.7 billion in Iranian assets the United States had held since the 1970s from a failed arms deal with the Shah and which the U.S. refused to pay back to the Islamist government following the 1979 Iranian revolution. According to CNN, $400 million was flown to Iran in 2016 on “wooden pallets stacked with Swiss francs, euros and other currencies” for the first instalment by the Obama government.
Amid criticism of sending such large amounts of money in essentially untraceable hard foreign currencies, the U.S. Treasury argued that cash payments were necessary because of the “effectiveness of U.S. and international sanctions” in blacklisting Iran from international banking systems. However, the U.S. House of Representatives foreign affairs committee disputed these claims, highlighting that the Obama administration itself on at least two occasions had used wire transfers to send money to Iran.
Continuing the policies of his former boss, President Joe Biden has also lifted billions in sanctions on Iran, with the White House renewing a sanctions waiver to Tehran for up to $10 billion in assets held in Oman in November — just weeks after the Iranian-sponsored Hamas terror group committed the worst actor of terror in the history of Israel, killing around 1,200 people and kidnapping hundreds more and holding them hostage in Gaza.
The Biden administration re-approved the sanctions waiver just last month, while at the same time imposing sanctions on Israel for “extremist settler violence” in the West Bank. Biden also allowed sanctions on Iran’s missile and drone programmes from the U.N. Security Council to expire on October 18th, just days after the barbaric Hamas attack on Israel.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage said that from an outsider’s perspective, there has been a distinct lack of leadership from America in the Middle East conflict under the 81-year-old president.
“Where is America on the world stage?” Farage questioned, adding: “It could not be further away from the speech that Biden gave… he said ‘America is Back’, as if somehow we were getting Western world leadership coming from President Biden.”
“He was at the beach for most of the weekend, probably photographed having ice cream.”
While Biden and other globalist leaders have called on Israel to not retaliate against Iran, Mr Farage said that argued that Israel should be “clever” and take a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook and target “senior leading figures” within the Iranian military, as the former president did in the targeted drone strike that killed Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
“There is no doubt that within Iran, itself, the regime is not very popular, it stays there through brute force, through the use of the army. Israel should retaliate and it should be clever.”
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