ICYMI: Sen. Cruz Op-Ed in National Review Online: 'Iran Tries Again'
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today penned an op-ed for National Review Online, outlining Iran’s undeterred nuclear ambitions one year after the United Nations ratified the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“The world has lost one of its great voices of moral clarity,” Sen. Cruz wrote. “On Saturday, July 1, Elie Wiesel died at age 87. As a teenager, he experienced the horrors of first Auschwitz and then Buchenwald, witnessing first-hand the extermination of his family. He committed his life to preserving the memory of the Holocaust so that he might prevent such an atrocity from happening again. Elie’s advocacy for victims of genocide ranged from Darfur to Cambodia, but his natural focus was on threats to the Jewish people. In recent years, he became particularly concerned about the potentially existential danger the Islamic Republic of Iran poses to the state of Israel.
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“Elie’s efforts were to no avail, and one year ago, the United Nations Security Council ratified the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran and imposed it on the world. The individual legislatures of the parties involved (the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the European Union) were not consulted — although the Iranian parliament did get a vote. So, from the American perspective at least, the JCPOA has lurched into effect — unsigned, unratified and so, in fact, illegal.
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“Now we are one year into the JCPOA. As many commentators have noted, the Iranian leadership’s general behavior — including ballistic-missile tests, capturing and humiliating American servicemen and women, the continuing detention of American service men and women, and the ongoing genocidal rhetoric against the United States and Israel — remains unchanged. But of course the JCPOA deliberately did not cover any of these issues.
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“Elie Wiesel took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 2013 declaring that Iran should not be allowed to remain nuclear. In it, he noted, “history has taught us to trust the threats of our enemies more than the promises of our friends.” Sadly, Israel and then the United States may be poised to relearn this hard lesson unless we heed Elie’s wisdom and renounce the JCPOA.”
Read Sen. Cruz’s op-ed in its entirety here.
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