Schumer won’t say if he’ll take up House bill freezing Biden’s $6 billion to Iran
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., won’t say if he will take up a House of Representatives bill freezing the $6 billion released to Iran by the Biden administration.
Schumer gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor last week, condemning the rise of antisemitism in America as well as the Oct. 7 surprise terrorist attacks on Israel by Iran-backed Hamas terrorists.
Iran has been a staunch supporter of Hamas amid the Palestinian terrorist organization’s war with Israel.
Earlier this year, prior to the war, the Biden administration unfroze $6 billion in Iranian funds from banks in South Korea to Qatar in a prisoner exchange.
The House passed a bill last week to re-freeze the Iranian funds and the bill is awaiting action in the Senate.
Shortly after the Hamas attacks, Schumer told the New York Post that there ‘would be no Hamas without Iran’ and that he was confident Iran wouldn’t see a dime of the $6 billion.
However, Schumer’s office did not respond when asked by Fox News Digital if the top Senate Democrat would be taking up the House legislation.
The Senate majority leader has been a vocal supporter of Israel, condemning the anti-Israel protests in America while batting down calls for a cease-fire in the war.
In his Senate floor speech last week, Schumer — the top Jewish lawmaker in Congress — condemned the rising antisemitism in America following Hamas’ attack on Israel, calling it a ‘five-alarm fire that must be extinguished.’
‘There is no question that antisemitism is a serious problem in America,’ Schumer said on Nov. 29.
‘In general, Jewish Americans represent 2% of the U.S. population, yet we are the targets of 55% of all religion-based hate crimes recorded by the FBI,’ the Senate majority leader continued.
‘This problem has been steadily worsening in recent years, but after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, hate crimes against Jewish Americans have skyrocketed,’ he noted.
Schumer said that the ‘solidarity that Jewish Americans initially received from many of our fellow citizens was quickly drowned out by other voices’ and that while ‘the dead bodies of Jewish Israelis were still warm, while hundreds of Jewish Israelis were being carried as hostages back to Hamas tunnels under Gaza, Jewish Americans were alarmed to see some of our fellow citizens characterize a brutal terrorist attack as justified because of the actions of the Israeli government.’
‘A vicious, bloodcurdling, premeditated massacre of innocent men, women, children, the elderly – justified!’ Schumer said. ‘Even worse, in some cases, people even celebrated what happened, describing it as the deserved fate of quote, colonizers, and calling for quote, glory to the martyrs, who carried out these heinous attacks.’
The Iranian regime’s organized plan to aid Hamas in its massacre of 1,300 people, including 30 Americans, was front and center in the thinking of the dictator who rules over Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, according to claims in a new think tank report.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) published a shocking report earlier this year, noting that Khamenei hinted on two different occasions, in 2022 and 2023, at ‘the complete conquest.’
According to a MEMRI translation from Khamenei’s propaganda outlet, Kayhan, the plan of mass murder was engineered by the late Iranian global terrorist Qassem Soleimani in 2020. The U.S. military assassinated Soleimani in early January 2020 for his overseeing the killing of over 600 American military personnel.
Kayhan wrote, according to the translation, that in August 2023, ‘The significance is that, last year, the Leader [Khamenei] gave ‘the promise of the imminent conquest,’ and this year he gave ‘the announcement of the complete conquest,’ and Operation Al-Aqsa Flood is part of this imminent conquest. This promise and announcement, along with the clarity and power of [Khamenei’s] statements and positions in his meeting [with leaders and ambassadors of Islamic countries] on the occasion of the Prophet [Muhammad’s] birthday, have profound significance and content.’
Additionally, a top United Nations humanitarian aid official was ripped last month by an Israeli ambassador after sharing an image on X, formerly Twitter, showing him shaking hands with Iran’s foreign minister, who reportedly helped Hamas plan the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths posted that he held a meeting in Geneva with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian about the ‘devastating’ situation unfolding in the Gaza Strip and the ‘critical’ need to deliver aid to the area.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Amirabdollahian had taken part in at least two planning meetings in Lebanon with the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad ahead of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which launched the Middle East war.
Fox News Digital’s Benjamin Weinthal and Greg Norman contributed reporting.