The United States is foolishly turning its back on Israel - opinion

On April 1, 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed, “The first day of God’s government in Iran.” Few people know that Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution would have never succeeded without the help of a liberal American president who was hellbent on overthrowing the shah of Iran to install a cleric, all in the name of human rights.

I wrote a major book on this subject, Jimmy Carter: The Liberal Left and World Chaos, in 2009 after interviewing more than 100 primary leaders who were aware of the plot. I met with empress Farah Pahlavi in Georgetown at her home. She had read my book and told me it was 100% true.

She said that on New Year’s Eve 1977, when Carter visited with her and her husband and signed the guestbook, he told the shah, “You will release political prisoners [and] give freedom of the press and freedom of religion. If you don’t, I will not be giving you any replacement parts for your helicopters or your planes. I can do this under a new law that suspends foreign aid over human rights.”

The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, said to the empress when he left, “If I do what he is asking, the Russians will invade Afghanistan. Iraq will attack Iran. There’ll be an Islamic revolution in Iran with Khomeini taking over the country. And who knows what horror will come upon the earth?”

Everything that the shah predicted came to pass.

I met with the late French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who told me that Carter called for a summit on the French island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean with him, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl Schmidt, and British prime minister James Callaghan. D’Estaing told me that it was there that Carter shared his plan to overthrow the shah and put Khomeini in power. He said Carter believed that because Khomeini was a cleric, he would be a Ghandi-like figure. He told Carter in French, “You’re a bastard of conscience. You betrayed an ally.”

Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) founder and former Mossad chief Isser Harel told me on September 23, 1980, at his home with a senior adviser to prime minister Menachem Begin, “When Ronald Reagan puts his hand on the Bible, the hostages will be released.” He also said, “The first terrorist attack would be in New York City and your tallest building, because America is developing a tolerance for terror.”

When Reagan put his hand on the Bible during his inauguration, my phone rang. It was Reuben Hecht, Begin’s senior adviser, saying, “Harel’s a prophet. It’s happening exactly as he told us.”

What I found out later was that Carter had used Cyrus Vance, the former US secretary of state, to negotiate through the Algerians to buy back hostages. The Iranians were holding back because they were using it to try to keep Carter from being reelected. On the morning of the inauguration at 4:21, Carter wire-transferred $7.9 billion from the Federal Reserve to the Bank of England to buy back the hostages.

The Biden administration is doing precisely the same thing as Carter foolishly did 44 years ago, putting enormous pressure on the State of Israel to agree to a ceasefire and not launch a military operation against Hamas in Rafah.

Israel's crossroads with the Biden administration 

THE PROBLEM is twofold if Israel agrees to the Biden administration’s demands. First, the war on terror against the Iranian proxy Hamas will be lost. Second, the hostages will die. A high-level credible source in Jerusalem told me during my recent visit to Israel that the majority of the Israeli hostages are in Rafah.

Instead of supporting Israel’s efforts to defeat terror and rescue the some 130 hostages, the US abstained in a UN Security Council vote on March 25 calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza that was unanimously passed without the precondition of a release of hostages held by Hamas.

President Joe Biden is more focused on winning his election with the support of Israel-hating progressives and Muslims than Israel winning its 9/11 war on terror.

When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 22, the Israeli leader told him that he appreciated the Biden administration’s support for five months, but there is no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah and eliminating the battalions to get the hostages back. “And I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to – we will do it alone,” the prime minister said.

Imagine the pain of Israelis who watched their loved ones being raped, burned alive, and beheaded, and seeing protesters screaming in the streets of America and on university campuses “From the river to the sea,” supporting Hamas on the university campuses and in the streets of America. The United States is foolishly turning its back on Israel.

Biden had better read God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3, “Bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” Throughout history, those who have lifted their hands against Israel have been cursed by God. The last thing America needs is to lose God’s blessings.

The writer is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and #1 New York Times bestselling author with 119 published books. He is the founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Jerusalem, the Ten Boom Holocaust Museum in Haarlem, Holland, and the Jerusalem Prayer Team, the largest pro-Israel Facebook page in the world.