When Did America Become a State Sponsor of Terror?

When you consider the topic of state sponsors of terrorism, what countries spring to mind? Iran would have to be at or near the top of the list. Venezuela has been making a splash in that league recently also. One could even consider putting Mexico on the list given the gauzy way that the government colludes with the drug cartels that they are supposedly fighting to eliminate. But what about the United States? Have we dipped a toe into the terror sponsorship pool? That probably just sounds silly, but it’s an argument being made by Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media this week and, while disturbing, some points are being made that deserve attention. 

Joe Biden launched his parade of foreign policy debacles by reinvigorating the Taliban with his criminally botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also gifted them a kajillion dollars’ worth of U.S. military equipment. It was a perverse sort of terror starter kit.

Biden and his handlers still claim that the withdrawal was a success, by the way. 

We’ve seen that the Biden administration is doing all that it can to preserve what is left of Hamas so that the organization can regroup, rebuild, and kill more Israelis. As my friend Stephen Green wrote last week, Joe Biden has made us a terror-sponsoring state. 

Yesterday, Mr. Green wrote about the once again very active killers of the Islamic State. ISIS is a terror network that Stephen reminds us is the worst of the worst:

The definition of what it is that we’re talking about is fairly basic and well-established. A state sponsor of terror is any nation that provides aid, comfort, or material support to groups engaging in acts of terrorism. The term terrorism is equally easily defined as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” So with the terminology established, let’s engage in a bit of self-reflection.

Kruiser starts with Afghanistan and Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from the country in 2021. That was a massive, deadly blunder, but did it cross the line into some form of support of terrorism? Well, we handed over an entire nation to the Taliban, a group that is listed as falling under terrorist organization sanctions. We gifted them with billions of dollars worth of weapons and military equipment, much of which is showing up on black markets around the world. That sounds like a pretty close match to me. If the terror-supporting shoe fits, you may as well wear it.

Then there is the aforementioned nation of Iran. Joe Biden lifted most of the restrictions and sanctions we had previously placed on them. He sent them pallets of cash amounting to billions of dollars and allowed them to resume shipping oil all over the world, including to our adversaries. And it was all done in the vain hopes of dragging them back into Barack Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal. That’s a very large pile of “material support” no matter how you look at it, and at least some of that cash went to fund and arm the Houthis. 

That brings us to Hamas. I can hear the protests beginning already. “Surely we’re not supporting Hamas!” Well… perhaps not directly, but these days we’re certainly skipping around in the same ballpark. The Biden administration is increasingly pushing Israel to back off on the (hopefully) final push into Rafah. They will almost certainly fail, thankfully, but it’s the thought that counts in this case. Also, we have been funding massive amounts of aid that goes into Gaza and until only recently, most of it was seized by Hamas and used to supply their terror tunnels. 

For the past three years, terror groups have been experiencing something of a renaissance. Cash and weapons have been more plentiful and we rarely drop missiles on any targets of significance. So has the United States actually joined the ranks of state sponsors of terror? The answer might make it uncomfortable to look in the mirror.