Pompeo to Iran After Nuclear Deal Violation: ‘We Are Not Done’
Iranian officials announced on Monday that the Islamic regime continues to violate the terms in the nuclear deal brokered during the Obama era, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shot back at the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Summit in Washington, DC.
“We’ve implemented the strongest pressure campaign in history against the Iranian regime, and we are not done,” Pompeo said to a cheering crowd on Monday.
“We’ve cut off billions in funds that the Islamic Republic — Iran’s leadership — would have used for various nefarious purposes, not the least of which would have been their efforts to destroy the state of Israel,” Pompeo said.
“It is also the case that, under President Trump, Israel haters such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad received far less blood money to pursue their terrorism than ever in recent history,” Pompeo said.
Iran announced a major violation of the nuclear deal on Monday by surpassing its 3.67 percent enrichment limit for uranium and threatened to proceed to the dangerous 20 percent level, which would put Tehran only a small step away from producing weapons-grade nuclear material.
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi simultaneously portrayed the new enrichment step as something Iran suddenly noticed it needed to do to fuel its peacetime nuclear power plants and as the second step in Iran’s plan to intimidate Europe into rescuing it from U.S. sanctions, as quoted by Iran’s state-run Tasnim news agency:
The current level of uranium enrichment is fulfilling Iran’s demands for fuel necessary for running the reactors of nuclear power plants, Kamalvandi noted, adding that Tehran could easily produce 20-percent enriched fuel whenever it wants to.
“If the remaining countries in the deal, especially the Europeans, do not fulfill their commitments seriously, and not do anything more than talk, Iran’s third step will be harder, more steadfast and somehow stunning,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said, referring to a September 5 deadline Iran has set for European action.
Pompeo also used his remarks at the CUFI summit to remind attendees that, while critics of Evangelical Christianity say people of faith want to turn America into a theocracy, religious liberty is a cornerstone of American and Israeli values and the real threat to those values come from the Iranian regime.
“You know, a lot of people get spun up in the wrong ideas that American Evangelicals want to impose a theocracy on America,” Pompeo said. “I wish they’d been concerned about the real theocratic takeover that has been happening in Iran for the last four decades.”
Iran’s Islamic regime has deprived its people of the “most basic, simple, fundamental right — their right to worship.”
“That same twisted, intolerant doctrine that fuels persecution inside Iran has also led the Ayatollah and his cronies to cry out, quote, ‘Death to Israel’ for decades now,” Pompeo said.
Like other speakers from the Trump administration, Pompeo made it clear that the United States stands with Israel and will defend it against all of its enemies, including Iran.
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