Free Republic

While working on terrorism-related issues during my congressional career, I soon understood not only that Iran had earned its reputation as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but also that the country’s leadership considered terrorism a viable replacement for standard political and diplomatic statecraft. A recent criminal court ruling in Belgium reinforces this fact. Since the time of the 1979 revolution, the use of proxies in terror operations abroad afforded the regime some measure of plausible deniability and made it more difficult for the U.S. or its allies to hold Iranian officials directly accountable. Still, it was shocking when...

In a hasty speech on Wednesday, February 3, Rouhani warned the United States and Europe that "no clause of the JCPOA will be changed." and "no one will be added to the talks" ... He was referring to the US-European plan to involve Saudi Arabia in the new JCPOA talks and to add a missile program containment clause and curtailment of the regime's ambitions in the region to the JCPOA. He, whose wild dreams of a return to the Obama era are not being realized, seemed, like Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, to be hopeless and helpless in the face...

This is the reality: A career diplomat crossing European borders in a rented car while carrying a professionally-made bomb, which bears a design favored by jihadists. In Luxembourg, he hands over the bomb to two would-be terrorists, long-standing residents of Europe who just look like any ordinary young married couple. They accept it with a clear mission in mind: to bomb a political rally in the largest convention center in France, located in the suburbs of Paris. If the plot is successful, it will kill many among the tens of thousands of people in attendance, among who were hundreds of...

Achille Lauro What happened during the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985? AP Photo Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, 1985 On October 7, 1985 four heavily armed terrorists representing the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, with some 100 mostly elderly passengers on board, in Egyptian waters. The hijackers demanded that Israel free 50 Palestinian prisoners, and to prove their determination, they shot and killed a disabled American tourist, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, and threw his body overboard with his wheelchair. After a two-day drama, the Egyptian government, unaware that Klinghoffer...