https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20000/danger-to-western-lives-takes-off-thanks-to
Even though the current Iranian government is a party to the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, Tehran has long violated it, as it has other commitments, by taken foreign hostages as pawns to extract economic concessions and achieve geopolitical and financial gains.
We can now expect the ruling mullahs of Iran to attempt to target, detain, capture, arrest, and kidnap more Americans anywhere they can. Collecting hostages is now Big Business. Other hostile governments will most likely be tempted to capture Americans, as well.
Secret attempts by the Biden administration to reach an interim deal with the mullahs have threatened to add not only an estimated $100 billion into the treasury of the Iranian regime’s economy, but also, worse, to catapult an Iranian nuclear menace onto the world.
“This exchange operation is in fact one of the most successful and effective negotiation [efforts] ever to happen to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In essence, we released a few Iranian prisoners in exchange for some prisoners whose sentences were about to end, and, on the other hand, we succeeded in releasing billions of dollars of our blocked resources without committing to anything else.” — Anonymous senior Iranian security source, interview with the Fars news agency, August 12, 2023, reported by MEMRI on September 6, 2023
After Obama transferred this $1.7 billion to the Iranian regime to release five Iranian-American prisoners, the theocratic establishment became more emboldened than ever.
“The Trump administration secured prisoner releases without ransom payments….” — Saeed Ghasseminejad, Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Foxnews.com, September 18, 2023
Increased revenues will also allow the IRGC to crush more easily any domestic protests against the government. Other priorities of Iran’s regime are to “export the revolution,” and military domination. Targeted for this project are Yemen, Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad Latin America, Lebanon and Iraq — and strengthening the regime’s militias and terror groups. America and Israel are presumably being fattened up for eventual extermination.
That is what $6 billion has bought us. And the “Iran Deal” that will enable the Iranian regime to have as many nuclear weapons as it likes, is not even dead.
The Iranian regime has lately been collecting hostages: Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray from New Zealand, detained in July 2022, Johan Floderus, a European diplomat from Sweden detained in April 2022, and Bernard Phelan from France detained in October 2022.
This escalation in hostage-taking of Europeans by Iran’s regime should not come as a surprise: the Belgian government last year proposed and ratified legislation that paved the way to transfer terrorists who have been convicted abroad back to Iran. The so-called treaty between the Belgian government and the Iranian regime was designed to secure the release of Iranian diplomat-terrorist Assadollah Assadi.
Assadi was arrested in 2018 for plotting to bomb a huge rally held outside Paris, organized by an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Last year, Assadi was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Belgian court for masterminding the terror plot. Had it been successful, it could well have been the worst terrorist incident in modern European history.
