Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily to review President Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly.
Kassam asked if Trump’s strong words against Iran during the speech presaged the end of the Iran nuclear deal.
“This is the question,” Gaffney replied. “Action is not so much what one needs to wonder about. I think there will be action. The question is, is it action consistent with what the president said yesterday?”
“This has been what’s so frustrating, I know, to all of us listening to this program and part of the Make America Great Again movement, is the president is being repeatedly and in fact serially undermined by his own subordinates,” he explained.
“He makes these speeches, or he makes these pronouncements, or he tweets the sorts of things that are redolent of the campaign, and what he stood for, and what he promised – only to have H.R. McMaster, or Jim Mattis, or particularly Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, almost immediately sallying forth and saying, ‘Well, what the president really meant to say was exactly the opposite,’” Gaffney lamented.
“In this case, of course, we have Rex Tillerson sitting down with the so-called ‘Perm 5 Plus One,’ which is U.N.-speak for the gang that put together this Iran deal – I call it the ‘Obama bomb deal’ – plus the Iranian foreign minister. Obviously, the pressure is going to be intense, not just from the Iranians but from the Europeans, to walk back from what the president said,” he warned.
“I pray that Rex Tillerson won’t do it because I think the president got it exactly right. This is a defective deal. It is an embarrassment to the United States that Barack Obama perpetrated it – and, by the way, that Republicans in Congress enabled him to get away with imposing it upon the rest of us. We need to get out from that thing right away. I think John Bolton had that exactly right, and I commend everyone his alternative approach. I hope that’s what Rex Tillerson will be promoting, but I don’t hold my breath on it,” said Gaffney.
Kassam mentioned the argument advanced by French President Emmanuel Macron that the North Korean crisis makes the case for keeping the Iran deal alive because Iran’s nuclear ambitions are now held in check by the kind of oversight North Korea has never received.
“Rubbish,” Gaffney snorted. “This is forgetting the actual lessons of all of this, of course, which are that indeed we made a deal with the North Koreans that was supposed to prevent them from getting the bomb, not unlike we’ve done with the Iranians, and it did not work out.”
“To the contrary, we’ve now got them with not only atomic weapons and missiles with which to deliver them, but now it appears a hydrogen bomb,” he argued. “The so-called ‘strategic patience’ of the Obama administration, unfortunately, followed on the heels of incompetence and malfeasance under both the Clinton administration that made that deal with the North Koreans, and the George W. Bush administration, so there’s a bipartisan fault here. This is not a model to be extolled or held up as the way to deal with Iran.”
Kassam found President Trump’s strong condemnation of socialism to be the most remarkable and encouraging moment of his speech, especially given that a majority of the nations in the UN General Assembly consider themselves socialist to some degree.
“It was tough love, without probably the love,” Gaffney quipped. “The president was laying out the hard truth, and it was incredibly important that he did so – and that he did so to the socialists in that place.”
“Not only are there large numbers of socialists, or communists for that matter, in the UN I mean, it basically is a socialist enterprise. It’s all about redistribution of wealth and power under the auspices of successive socialists, including the guy who is currently running it – the Secretary-General is an old socialist from Portugal. These are people who, I believe, actually think this is the way of the future, so it was very important,” he said.
“But again, it has to be backed up. Let me just say, I think in addition to not having his subordinates undermine him – which they do again, and again, and again, without any consequences – we also have to take actions, Raheem,” he told Kassam.
“I mean, it’s one thing to be telling the North Koreans and ‘Rocket Man’ that you’re toast if you think about pursuing with those hydrogen bombs threats to us. It’s another to actually put into place the capabilities to assure that everybody understands that that’s not an empty threat,” he stressed.
“The rhetoric has been more or less good,” Gaffney judged. “I think you’re absolutely right that the MAGA movement was heard, and brought back ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ That’s a twofer. One, it’s important in its own right to be calling the enemy what it is, and also that it demonstrates how important the base is. We need to make sure the president is hearing us all the time. I know that he does through your channel, but we need it more elsewhere. In this case in particular, we have got to make sure that we are backing up with credible military capabilities the rhetoric that the president is using.”
Kassam turned to Gaffney’s recent blog post, “Freedom’s Friends Must Denounce, Not Dignify, the SPLC and CAIR.”
“We’ve been talking a lot, and rightly so, about what’s being done to freedom of speech – arguably sort of the foundational freedom in our Constitution and for our republic,” Gaffney said.
“The Southern Poverty Law Center and Islamist Muslim Brotherhood sharia supremacist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, have been making – I’m sorry to say even under this administration, under a Republican-controlled Congress – great strides to try to impose the kind of restrictions you’re very familiar with, of course, on your side of the pond,” he said, referring to speech codes in the United Kingdom, where Kassam resides.
Gaffney said these speech restrictions “are designed to basically promote sharia blasphemy restrictions: you must not give offense, particularly to Muslims.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center has been central to that agenda. They have been working assiduously to defame people who speak the truth about these sorts of issues,” he charged.
“Rod Rosenstein, amazingly, went to what was billed as a civil rights conference in Birmingham last week and gave a speech,” Gaffney said, referring to the Deputy Attorney General. “It was mostly about civil rights, but by his presence, he dignified an event that was holding up both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council on American Islamic Relations. They had speakers, they were participants in this program, they were considered to be just great champions of civil rights – when, in fact, they are trying to take away that key civil right of freedom of expression. It’s scandalous.”
Of the recent revelations that President Trump appears to have been correct about the Obama Justice Department wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign, Gaffney said, “I think what we’re seeing dribbling out slowly, inexorably, is evidence that the Obama administration was engaged in political warfare.”
“I mean, ‘dirty tricks’ doesn’t begin to describe it,” he said, describing the Obama administration’s conduct as “political warfare that makes Nixon’s plumbers in Watergate look like pikers.”
“These were people that were using the instruments of the State, the Deep State if you will – the intelligence community, the law-enforcement community, and of course the National Security Council, Ben Rhodes and his whole disinformation operation and political warfare capabilities – to destroy those like Donald Trump and his campaign that they feared might actually prevent them from having a third term,” Gaffney charged.
“This is why it’s so important to get to the bottom of this, and not be distracted by these deflections, and misinformation, and special prosecutors who are off on a red tear to get us away from the reality that Barack Obama and his minions are Watergate on steroids,” he said. “We need to know the full truth of it.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern
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