OPINION:
On Friday, Jan. 3, 2020, President Donald Trump led our nation in one of the most important political and military acts since Ronald Reagan. He directed the U.S. military to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a bloodthirsty terrorist who routinely tortured and murdered thousands of his own citizens, a man who was the lead architect for exporting Iran’s brand of Muslim butchery across the region and around the globe.
The Wall Street Journal’s Reuel Mark Gerecht reports that under the guidance of Soleimani, and his Quds Forces, there are presently variations of Hezbollah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Soleimani helped instill a radical anti-American ethic not just in the Middle East. His reach extended to northern Africa and Europe, if not around the globe. “Not since the early Ottoman Empire,” says Mr. Gerecht, “has the world seen such a variegated collection of Muslims, tens of thousands, come together to fight under the flag and direction of a foreign Muslim power.”
Mr. Gerecht goes on. “Over the past decade, Soleimani assisted Bashar al-Assad in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and the displacement of millions.” He was a “cult figure among Shiite holy warriors … who saw in him an Iranian paladin who made Sunni Arabs tremble.”
In 2019, Soleimani led in the cold-blooded killing of hundreds of Iranian demonstrators in Tehran. Many young men and women died as the result of shots in the head and chest from special forces snipers.
In 2009, he instructed his Revolutionary Guard to put down Iran’s pro-democracy Green Movement. The methods he used to silence his own people were mass arrests, rape and murder.
“It’s an excellent bet,” writes Mr. Gerecht, that “the foiled bombing of Iranian dissidents in Paris in June 2018, which could have killed hundreds, as well as the attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf and the Saudi oil facilities last year, and the repeated recent attacks on American bases in Iraq, which killed and wounded Americans — all had Soleimani’s fingerprints.”
Proof of Soleimani’s effectiveness was even admitted by Hezbollah, just this past week, as it pranced upon the world’s stage and brazenly boasted of having “70,000 missiles” targeted directly at Israel; bombs they are prepared to drop at a moment’s notice from Iran.
And there’s more.
Lots more.
Soleimani is the man who, according to Dan Andros with Faithwire.com, directed his Iranian militias to unleash a reign of terror on Iraqi dissidents that included even the torture of children, such as drilling holes in a young boy’s legs while his father was forced to watch.
Finally, under Soleimani’s lead, Christians across Iraq have been enslaved, crucified, beheaded and virtually exterminated from a land they have occupied since the days of the early apostles.
And yet, despite this man’s barbarity, our sage Democrats (nearly every single one of them) have been falling over themselves to criticize President Trump.
Examples:
Nancy Pelosi: The action to kill Soleimani “risk[ed] provoking further dangerous escalation of violence.”
Elizabeth Warren: “The president’s reckless move escalat[ed] the situation with Iran and increase[ed] the likelihood of more deaths …”
Cory Booker: “We have a president who has … made that region less stable and less safe.”
And not to be outdone, our nation’s resident rocket scientist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, rushed to her iPhone to tweet that Donald Trump was “threatening to target and kill innocent families, women, and children …” and that he was a “monster.”
“Provoking further violence”?
“Likelihood of more deaths”?
“Make the region less safe”?
“Threatening to kill innocent families and children”?
A “monster”?
Can these people possibly be serious?
America just killed a tyrant who led his army and its proxies in executing thousands of innocent civilians, not only in his own country but worldwide. Our president just removed an enemy, who little more than a week earlier, had attacked a U.S. embassy and burned it.
Mr. Trump just “eliminated” a devil of a man who encouraged his soldiers to rape young girls and to drill holes in a little boy’s legs, and our progressive know-it-alls in Congress stumble over themselves to claim Mr. Trump is the monster?
Crisis always exposes a person’s true character. It’s a window to the soul. Over the past handful of days, our president has shown himself to be confident, bold, yet restrained for the country’s greater good. Democrats, on the other hand, have proven what many of us already knew: They are feckless cowards who value nothing but themselves and their power.
As former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation, Nikki Haley so shrewdly observed: President Trump kills this sadistic butcher, and our Democrat leaders can’t seem to restrain themselves from rushing to build Soleimani a shrine. One almost suspects they will do likewise for Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot and Hitler while they’re at it.
In case you had any doubt, we are living in an Orwell novel.
Endnote: The AP reports that the last sighting of Joe Biden was of him wandering in the fields of Iowa, aimless and confused, in an awkward attempt to appear relevant.
• Everett Piper, former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, is a columnist for The Washington Times and author of “Not A Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery 2017).
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