On Saturday, Hamas attacked Israel, making it the bloodiest day in the country’s history and resulting in more Jews dead since the end of the Holocaust. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s response was less than ideal in many ways. This is especially with regards to the $6 billion that the United States released to Iran as part of a prisoner exchange, a move that was announced on the anniversary of September 11, no less. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in his Monday edition of “The Verdict,” was among those calling out the administration for this, but also other, moves.
Early on in the podcast, Cruz emphasized how “infuriating” the brutal attack on Israel was. And, it has to do with the role Democrats played. “I’ll tell you what is infuriating about this. This was paid for by Joe Biden and the Democrats,” Cruz pointed out, mentioning “this is something that the corporate media desperately wants to avoid,” though he nevertheless wished to “be clear.” As Cruz explained it, Hamas was supported by Iran. Coverage from the Wall Street Journal has confirmed as much, as the senator addressed, with his co-host Ben Ferguson reading from the report later in the podcast.
“This attack this massacre, this horrific assault on Israel, was funded by Iran. Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies. They work for Iran. They work under the direction of Iran. They are funded by Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that these attacks were planned, were signed off on by the Iranian government,” Cruz shared. The role that the Biden administration played does not merely have to do with that $6 billion payment, though.
“And in the last two and a half years, Joe Biden and this White House are responsible for $50 billion flowing to Iran. And let me break that down. Because the corporate media does not want to cover that,” he pointed out. “Everyone acknowledges the $6 billion. The $6 billion is the ransom money that Joe Biden paid to get five Americans out of Iranian custody. At $6 billion, that’s $1.2 billion per American. That set a bounty on Americans of over a billion dollars,” Cruz continued.
“That means Americans in the future will be taken hostage but, the $6 billion is just a fraction of the cash that Joe Biden has flooded into Iran. Because a few weeks before the $6 billion, the Biden administration allowed $10 billion from Iraq to flow into Iran. That brings it up to $16 billion in cash that directly flowed into Iran. But that doesn’t cover it all. Because for two years, the Biden administration has refused to enforce American oil sanctions,” he outlined further. “The single most powerful economic weapon we have against this theocratic genocidal regime in Iran is sanctions that were shutting down their oil sales that under the Trump administration that had brought the Iranian economy to its knees and crippled it.”
Under the Biden administration, however, those sanctions were no longer enforced. “Well, Joe Biden of the Democrats came in into office and what did they do? They stopped enforcing the Iran oil sanctions,” he pointed out. “And right now, do you know how much Iran is selling in oil right now?”
Cruz explained that it’s 2 million barrels of oil a day. “Over the last two and a half years, the Biden Administration is responsible for roughly $50 billion. So when you are watching Israelis murdered, when you’re watching infants murdered when you are watching women and girls raped, when you’re watching hundreds of Israelis taken hostage,” Cruz said, listing off some of the atrocities being carried out, “know that Joe Biden and this White House funded it. They funded it for idiotic political reasons. And now they’re desperately trying to backtrack, saying, ‘No, no, no, we didn’t pay for these atrocities.’ They absolutely did.”
The senator became quite passionate as he laid out how “the Biden administration also directly funded Hamas,” pointing to another example of them discussing “something also the corporate media won’t tell you.”
“So as soon as the Biden administration came into office, they immediately began flooding money into the Gaza Strip. At the time, the Biden administration knew for a fact that it would fund terrorism and in fact, one internal document, a Biden official wrote that there was a high risk that Hamas would potentially derive benefit from the money that they were sending, but they wanted to do it anyway. And so what did they do? They actually exempted themselves from American laws against funding terrorism,” Cruz charged. As Townhall has covered, and as Cruz discussed, the document read in part, “due to its overall strength, and level of control over Gaza, we assess there is a high risk that Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from US assistance to Gaza.”
However, as Cruz stressed, the Biden administration actually “waived U.S. laws that ban funding terrorists because they are so opposed to Israel.” He went on to argue that “they are so in favor of Palestinian terrorists that they wanted to send money to Gaza even though they knew it would fund Hamas.”
“Those rockets that are flying into Israel, you can thank Joe Biden for them,” Cruz pointed out, bringing it all back to the attacks against Israel from over the weekend.
The senator also brought up the role that he played in opposing that money, though many House Democrats insisted in it being released. “And by the way, I fought tooth and nail against sending that money. I led a letter that was joined by 17 other senators, all Republicans, calling on the Biden administration not to send that money. And I gotta tell you, at the same time 145 House Democrats sent a letter, actually slightly later, urging that the money be released,” Cruz shared, putting the blame on those House Democrats. “And so this was every one of those Democrats that signed those letters? Well, congratulations. Aren’t you glad you sent money to Gaza that went to Hamas that is being used now to fund murder and kidnapping and horrific war crimes?”
Still later in the podcast, Cruz explained serious concerns to be had with this administration on the matter, including when it comes to the problematic response from over the weekend and on Monday, as well as its overall lack of support for Israel.
When Ferguson asked “is [Biden] the worst president in our lifetime when it comes to policy of clearly not standing with Israel, because he’s not,” adding “he’s not even standing with Americans in Israel,” Cruz held back no punches. The senator pointed out that “unequivocally, for the last two and a half years, the Biden administration has engaged a systematic granular day to day effort to undermine the nation of Israel.” He pointed to specific examples of how, during the first few months of the Biden administration, “the State Department put out written guidance prohibiting employees at State from referring to the Abraham Accords,” referring to the peace treaties that the Trump administration had brokered between Israel and Arab countries.
“Instead,” Cruz explained, “the Biden administration’s State Department was ordered to refer to them as ‘normalization agreements.’ They couldn’t use the word ‘Abraham.’They couldn’t acknowledge the historic nature of it now.” After Cruz said he “called that out,” and “brought out the documents that demonstrate it,” the Biden White House was “so embarrassed by that they backed away from it.”
Another change, however, Cruz pointed to, was that the administration changed the office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs, they changed the name of it to the Office of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs. Cruz argued this was “because they didn’t want to acknowledge the nation of Israel exists,” and that they even “wanted to put Israel’s claims of sovereignty on the same level of parody as the Palestinian terrorists that are right now committing these atrocities.“
The senator also pointed to the administration being the first government in US history to implement a policy of BDS: a boycott, divestiture and sanctioning,” specifically to do with cutting off funding for scientific cancer research in Judea and Samaria, which are referred to as “occupied territories” in Israel. This, Cruz said makes the administration’s view “the same as these squad members,” who Cruz had also called out earlier in the podcast for putting their anti-Israel views on display.
“They view Israel as illegitimately occupied territory,” Cruz continued. “And so the harm that is coming from the Biden administration is horrific.” Towards the conclusion of the podcast, Cruz also pointed out that the White House has before lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community as well as in blue and gold to support Ukraine. The White House was not, however, in blue and white to support Israel, until later on Monday. This is despite how other nations have lit up their historical landmarks in support of Israel.
Cruz had also been among those condemning the Biden administration’s response in a statement from Monday, highlighted by Fox News. A previous statement had also been released on Saturday.
The Biden administration, from various accounts, had to delete no less than two problematic posts about the attack on Israel. Cruz had strongly condemned a post from the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs calling for Israel to “refrain from violence and retailiatory attacks.” Another post came from Secretary of State Antony Blinken which had encouraged “a cease-fire.”
