As talks for the United States and Iran to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) appear to be stalled due to lingering differences, information that American negotiators may remove the Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation from a branch of Iran’s armed forces complicit in international terrorism in an effort to appease Iran has caused concern from Jewish groups.
On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League Task Force on Middle East Minorities expressed in a news release that it opposed the possible removal of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the list of FTOs, saying that the group was primarily responsible for training and funding Islamic terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as many other groups.
It also stated that it opposed efforts to distinguish between the status of the international terrorist activities conducted by the IRGC’s Quds Force and its activities inside Iran.
“These minorities threatened in Iran or by Iran—or threatened by Tehran’s proxies like the Houthis, Hezbollah and others—are begging the United States to tighten the pressure on the IRGC, not loosen it now,” said Sharon Nazarian, ADL’s senior vice president for international affairs and task force chair. “The alternative is just more hate, more terrorism, more death.”
The task force also called on the Biden administration to redesignate the Houthis as an FTO after it was removed from the list in early 2021, about a month after its designation by the former administration, hoping that the move will allow humanitarian aid to reach those affected by the conflict in Yemen.
Instead, according to the release, the Houthis continue to routinely block humanitarian aid from reaching those in need and have escalated their terrorist activities, threatening Israel and minority communities in Yemen. The group has also launched Iran-supplied rockets and drones indiscriminately towards cities such as Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, which have large populations of expatriate Americans.
“The United States government must keep the IRGC terrorist designation in its entirety and must put the Houthis back on the list,” said task force co-chair Rev. Johnnie Moore, a former two-time appointee to the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom. “Democrats and Republicans must make this is as a red line in U.S. foreign policy. There’s no room for partisan wrangling on this one; too many vulnerable lives are directly in the crosshairs. The alternative is tantamount to inviting more destabilization in a world already on fire.”
