The Hadith of the Islamic Shiite tradition talks about the Prophet Muhammed’s talking donkey, which he named Yaʽfūr. (“The Beginning and the End” by Ibn Kathir, Chapter Six: “The Conversation of the Donkey.”)

According to Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran has become not only a regional but also an international power. Salami attributed this transformation to Teheran’s large investments in developing its advanced military technology and defense industry. Salami did not thank the Biden administration for facilitating these developments, but he should have. It was the Biden administration’s lifting of sanctions on Iran’s oil sales that provided the Islamic Republic with hundreds of billions of dollars to invest not only in its defense industry but also in its “resistance” proxies in the region and around the world.

The United States feeble response to Iran’s direct aggression against US forces, as well as its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and others, allowing their violent disruption of more than 50 percent of the commercial shipping in the Red Sea, is suitably understood by the mullahs as weakness.

The Biden administration’s furtherance of President Obama’s disastrous policy to turn Iran into the leading power in the Middle East and its reluctance to act in its defense and regional interests strengthen Iran’s resolve to toss the United States from the Middle East. Iran’s supreme leader and preachers regularly bray for “Death to America.” But the Biden administration and, if elected, the anointed Democrat presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, will most likely continue supporting Iran and its proxies and recklessly turn a deaf ear to the blaring braying of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Abdul-Malik al-Houthi‘s repeated dictum, “Death to America.”

Shite Iran, like radical Sunni groups (the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wahabis, and their like), incite Jihad—the holy war—and promote the spread of Jihad through preaching, among other things, for al-Jihad bi-al-Lisan, which means Jihad of the Tongue, al-Jihad bi-al-Qalam, which means Jihad of the Pen, and, importantly, by Al-Jihad bi-al-Mal—the Financial Jihad; namely, raising money to support the Jihad warriors known as the Mujahideen.

The foremost funder of jihad in the world today is the small but very wealthy and powerful Qatari Emirate, which shares the world’s largest natural gas field with Iran.

While Iran is leading the wars in the region, arming and training its proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the Palestinian territories, and elsewhere, Qatar is funding the Jihadist terrorists and their supporters in the West.

Qatar has donated billions of dollars to Western academic institutions, publications, media, and think tanks and invested heavily in sports clubs, real estate, businesses, and politicians. Some of these “donations” are public, but many are not.

Why does the US allow the funding of Jihadi terrorists and their supporters in the West? Most such groups are designated as terrorist organizations, yet the money from Qatar, Iran, Turkey, international and national NGOs, and even the US government keeps flowing, as are statements of moral equivalence between the terrorists attacking Israel and Israel fighting for its survival. “They have a point,” both President Biden and his VP Kamala Harris say about the terrorists’ supporters who disrupt traffic and public events while braying, “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” as they burn Israeli and American flags.

Biden’s famous whisper “Don’t” has done nothing to stop Iran and its proxies from attacks anywhere but has thwarted Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas in a timely fashion or severely punish Hezbollah. Moreover, the Biden administration has done little, if anything, to stop Iran’s belligerent and determined expansion throughout the Middle East and its completion of the development of nuclear weapons.

Unlike Biden, the Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump has been paying attention to the braying of Iran and the radical Islamists. Criticizing the Biden administration—including Kamala Harris—for foreign policies, the mollification of Iran, and mishandling of the Israel-Hamas and Hezbollah wars, Trump is aptly warning of “World War III.”

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• This article was first published by American Greatness on Aug 28, 2024.
• Rachel Ehrenfeld, PhD, is director of the American Center for Democracy and author of “The Soros Agenda” and “Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It.”