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Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lauded President Donald Trump with making and keeping peace in the Middle East during his term while lambasting what he sees as the Biden administration’s nonsensical decision to try and resurrect a nuclear deal with Iran made by the Obama White House.
In an interview with Fox News host Mark Levin, Netanyahu predicted that were the deal to be made, Iran would be put back on a course to develop nuclear weapons that the “theocratic regime” would then use to threaten the world.
“First of all, they can take the entire world hostage,” he said.
“Once you have a predatory, and especially in a rogue theocratic regime like this, have nuclear weapons, they can use them in two ways: One, they can threaten you directly with atomic bombs. Secondly, they have a nuclear umbrella, which is … to threaten you with conventional weapons like regular missiles or terrorists or anything else,” he continued, adding: “That gives them awesome power.”
Netanyahu went on to speculate that Iran would then also be different than other nuclear powers like Russia and China because of the dangers they pose to so many other nations like Israel and the Arab states, as well as European allies of both Jerusalem and Washington.
“I think it changes history. And that’s why I took the unusual step of coming to the Congress, speaking there — something that was not easy to do,” he said.
Netanyahu addressed Congress in 2015 about the emerging and growing Iranian threat, certainly to Middle Eastern stability but also to the region.
“I think it’s important to prevent Iran from having those means,” he told Levin.
“And by the way, if you want to understand how bad this deal is, it not only gives Iran the freedom with an international legitimacy to enrich uranium and an unlimited quantity with much more sophisticated centrifuges in just a few years, it also gives them money, an enormous amount of money to boot,” he warned. “It’s so absurd — they’re lifting sanctions from these terrorists.”
Netanyahu blasted the Biden administration for potentially lifting sanctions on “terrorists” in the Iranian government before going on to reference an incident last week in which Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards admitted to targeting a U.S. consulate in Irbil, Iraq with a missile that struck nearby.
“Those people who are firing these missiles, those people who have murdered Americans left and right, those people who are responsible for more terrorism around the world than anyone else – those people are going to be lifted off sanctions. That’s what the Iranians are demanding,” Netanyahu said.
“So this is absurd. This is the kowtowing of the democratic world — unfortunately, of the rest of the world — to this rogue regime, giving it both the weapons of mass death, an enormous pile of cash to boot… It just doesn’t make sense,” he continued.
Later, Levin noted that when Trump and then Netanyahu left their respective offices, there was “peace breaking out all over the Middle East” and that “Iran really was being contained, their economy choked off.” He also noted that Trump vowed Iran would never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon while he was president, which is why he killed the deal made by Obama’s administration.
The host then mentioned the Abraham Accords — which, according to the site Stand With Us “are a series of treaties normalizing diplomatic relations between Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, facilitated by the U.S. Administration[1] between August and December, 2020. In the span of five short months, these four Arab states joined Egypt and Jordan in making peace with Israel.”
In response, Netanyahu explained that they were actually the “one good thing” that came out of the Obama-era nuclear deal.
He said that after he spoke to the U.S. Congress in 2015, Israel was contacted by several Arab Gulf states, with the notion of a security agreement floated. He noted that many “clandestine” meetings followed, with progress being made on many fronts that eventually culminated in the Trump administration-led accords.
“The Gulf countries saw that somebody was willing to stand up to Iran, so we formed this…tacit alliance based on a common security concern,” he said. “But also I think they saw the power of Israeli innovation, the power of the free market that we unleashed here.”
“What has happened with the Abraham Accords is amazing,” he added.
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