By: Andrew C. McCarthy – nationalreview.com – October 31, 2023

Our David Zimmermann has reported on FBI Director Chris Wray’s acknowledgment in today’s Senate testimony that antisemitic threats are reaching historic highs. Wray has further testified that terrorist threats against the United States have also skyrocketed.

The increase is obviously triggered by the outbreak of war in the Middle East, which was started by jihadist proxies of Iran, which — as even the Biden State Department acknowledges — has been a vigorous state sponsor of anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism for over 40 years. You’d think it might be a huge story, then, that those proxies have killed 33 Americans, abducted ten others, trapped hundreds of other Americans in Gaza, and attempted over two dozen attacks on U.S. forces in the region.

Nope.

As Fox News reports, after noting that the threat of terrorism had been elevated this year even before October 7, when Hamas launched its war on Israel, that war “has raised the threat of attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.”

Unlike the Biden White House, Wray did not mince words about Iran, noting that both Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian terrorist proxies, and that their history raises the specter of “those groups’ intentions here in the United States” in light of the ongoing war.

I am grateful that Director Wray is sounding the alarm, but there has not been nearly enough attention in the media to anti-American jihadist terrorism. While the murder of over 1,400 Israelis is the most significant and defining element of the October 7 savagery, it was also — as Charlie powerfully observed yesterday — one of the most significant terrorist attacks against Americans . . . ever.

And the siege hasn’t ended. Hamas is holding approximately ten American hostages abducted during the attacks. Moreover, there are approximately 600 Americans trapped in Gaza because the jihadist regime will not let them exit. Meanwhile, Iran’s other regional proxies have targeted American military installations in 27 attacks (and counting) since October 7 — including several already this week. So far, casualties have been minor, with 21 of our troops having suffered minor injuries (all are said to have returned to duty).

Yet there is little coverage of this in the press, much less the kind of saturation coverage that would engulf a Republican administration if one were in power — and especially if it appeared, as does the Biden administration, not merely impotent but determined to constrain the response of Israel, the only government that is fighting the jihadists who killed and abducted our citizens.

Hamas killed 33 Americans on October 7. To put that in perspective, it’s nearly twice as many Americans as were killed when al-Qaeda bombed our naval destroyer in 2000 (the USS Cole attack in Yemen, in which 17 died) and our air force barracks in 1996 (the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 died). Hamas slew more than twice the 14 Americans killed in the 2015 jihadist mass murder carried out by Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, and the 13 killed in the 2009 jihadist mass murder carried out by Nidal Hassan. Hamas killed about five times the number of Americans murdered by the jihadist cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 (the six adults killed in that attack included a woman in the late stage of pregnancy).

It is just mind-boggling that such atrocities against Americans are not a major, daily story in the United States. It has been a week since Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated during a United Nations Security Council meeting that 33 Americans had been killed — and since, roughly simultaneously, Blinken’s State Department conceded that ten Americans were being held hostage. There’s been little mention of it since.

There are three reasons for this suppression, as obvious as they are unacceptable.

The first, as Charlie observed, involves “the echoes of Jimmy Carter’s failures” in the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–80. More than anything else, they cost Democrats the presidency — just six years after the media and Democrats collaborated in the saturation coverage of the Watergate scandal, gleefully driving the previous Republican administration from office. Joe Biden’s presidency would be in big trouble if, less than 13 months before Election Day, a jihadist regime’s killing of Americans were to become a major story, and the American hostages a continuing, page-one crisis. Ergo, the story is being buried beneath what we’re supposed to see as just another Israel–Hamas war.

Second, Democrats have long-standing alliances with Muslim Brotherhood–tied organizations that for decades have championed Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. Relatedly, the Brotherhood’s most consequential project in the United States for the past 60 years has been the Muslim Students Association, which now boasts chapters (often, with offshoot chapters) in nearly every American university. That is a prime driver of the virulent antisemitism that has festered on campus for years, although many Americans seem only to have discovered it, and been shocked by it, in the past three weeks. These Islamist allies of American progressives have been unabashedly zealous in their support for Hamas — even after its October 7 barbarities were well documented, even after it was revealed that Hamas had killed 33 Americans, and even though Hamas is currently holding American hostages. That is not a story to which the media-Democrat complex cares to draw the attention of the American public — especially with the 2024 campaign already in full swing.

Third, there is Iran. You remember, the Death to America and Death to Israel regime? If you hadn’t noticed lo these 44 years since those refrains first echoed from Khomeini’s revolution, the regime in Tehran is very serious about its war on us, even if the bipartisan Beltway persists in the delusion that a great rapprochement with Iran is just around the next corner — we just need to appease the revolutionary jihadist regime with another concession, or ten.

Iran arms, trains, and funds Hamas; it is inconceivable that the October 7 atrocities would have happened without the mullahs’ green-light. Hamas was empowered to kill Americans by Iran. Hamas is empowered to hold Americans hostage because of Iran — which has lots of experience on that score. Iran’s Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon and Houthi proxies in Yemen are actively engaged in the war against Israel. Iran’s proxies in Iraq and Syria are the forces attempting to strike American military installations in the region.

As Iran has openly threatened the United States, plotted operations against the United States, vowed to kill former U.S. officials, unleashed Hamas, and carried out attacks against U.S. forces, President Biden has rolled back sanctions — enriching Iran even as the administration itself acknowledged that Iran uses its oil revenue to support its jihadist proxies’ anti-American terrorism. And now, in a development as predictable as it is infuriating, Iran’s proxies have slaughtered 33 Americans, abducted ten others, trapped hundreds more in Gaza, and repeatedly attacked our troops.

No, we wouldn’t want that to become a story.

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Source: Iran’s Jihadist War on America? No Need to Discuss That | National Review