Ayatollah Khamenei or Senator Sanders?

Who says it better, Ayatollah Khamenei or Senator Sanders? Listening to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader this morning and the Vermont independent yesterday, we at times couldn’t tell. Their almost identical message: America must stay out of the war. The Islamist spews threats, while the socialist cites faux-legalities. Their messages, though, boil down to allowing the Tehran regime to obtain the means to achieve its darkest dreams. “The Americans should know that any U.S. military intervention will undoubtedly be accompanied by irreparable damage,” Ayatollah Khamenei declared in his first televised address since Israel struck Friday. As to President Trump’s “complete surrender” demand, he added, “intelligent people who know Iran, the Iranian nation, and its history will never speak to this nation in threatening language, because the Iranian nation will not surrender.”Nor should it, according to Mr. Sanders. The top mullah, who calls for erasing Israel off the map, gets a pass from the Vermonter, while the elected Israeli leader is “a war criminal under indictment by the International Criminal Court.” Therefore, Mr. Sanders says, “the United States must not be involved with another Netanyahu war, not militarily or financially.” After all, he says, the Israeli prime minister “ignored international law to start this war with Iran.”Sounds familiar? “International law” is a favorite of the mullahs and their minions. Striking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities “constitutes a grave violation of international law and UN Charter,” the Iranian ambassador at the United Nations human rights council, Ali Bahreini, said today. Mr. Sanders added, too, that supporting Israel takes away from addressing global “existential threats,” like climate change and wealth inequality. Moreover, the socialist legislator avers, “Israel’s attack was specifically designed to sabotage American diplomatic efforts.” Yet did it? President Trump, whose envoy conducted those efforts, now reminds us that he gave Tehran 60 days to negotiate — and then came the 61st day. Addressing the ayatollah, Mr. Trump said today, “Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.”The mullahs may still have a country, but the supreme leader’s threats from a bunker increasingly sound hollow. True, Iranians can still harm American interests. They might, for one, block the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes. Yesterday, though, Iran’s national television threatened a “surprise the world will remember for centuries.” Iran then launched a number of ballistic missiles — with scant effect.For Mr. Sanders, Israel, which he personalizes through its elected leader, is the bad guy. Iran? Not so much. Some disagree. Operation Rising Lion is “the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us,” Chancellor Merz of Germany says. “Otherwise we might have faced months or years of terror from the regime, and possibly with a nuclear weapon in hand.” Mr. Trump reminds us that for at least 15 years he opposed an Iranian nuclear weapon. The senator from Vermont cites recent congressional testimony of the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, the appeasers’ newest heroine claimed. “I don’t care what she said, I think they were very close to having one,” Mr. Trump countered Tuesday. While that debate rages, a regime-mounted clock at the heart of Tehran counts down the minutes until Israel will be destroyed. “For 40 years, they’ve been saying, death to America, death to Israel, death to anybody else that they didn’t like,” Mr. Trump says. At the front line, Israelis “are not waiting for those threats to materialize to the point where it is too late to address them,” the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, told troops Wednesday. Those threats are not gone but now seem as spent as the 86-year-old Khamenei is. So is Mr. Sanders’s old shtick.

Ayatollah Khamenei or Senator Sanders?

Ayatollah Khamenei or Senator Sanders?

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