On Thursday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) praised the recent Islamic State attack in Tehran as a “good thing” and suggested that maybe the United States should work with the militant organization.
Rohrabacher’s entire line of reasoning for why the United States should work with a militant group accused of human rights violations and war
crimes like ethnic cleansing is astonishing.
There are multiple issues with Rohrabacher’s logic.
The most obvious, of course, is that it is not in the interest of the United States to see the Islamic State expanding across the Middle
East. The United States is actively involved in reigning back the extremist group in Iraq and Syria. On Saturday, the U.S. Embassy in Manila announced that U.S. Special Operations Forces are working with the Philippine military in a battle against Islamic-State affiliated fighters on that front as well. Thus, the attack in Tehran this week— the first time the Islamic State has successfully planned something in Iran — can certainly not be a “good thing.”
It’s not clear why Rohrabacher views the Iranian government and the Islamic State as one and the same, but it’s even more baffling that he thinks the recent attack was thanks to the Trump administration.
Experts at the House hearing where Rohrabacher made the comments immediately refuted his comments.
“Those attacks were claimed by the Islamic State,” said Matthew Levitt, director of The Washington Institute’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the conservative Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s never in our interest to support a terrorist group like the Islamic State. We should condemn the attacks in Tehran, as we would condemn any act of terrorism, even as we hold Iran accountable for its sponsorship of terrorism.”
Rohrabacher wouldn’t listen to the experts on the panel, however.
“So that’s like Joe Stalin was a horrible guy, we must never associate with horrible guys like that, even against Hitler,” he said, talking over Levitt. “And so maybe it’s a good idea to have radical Muslim terrorists fighting each other. I’ll leave it at that.”
Rohrabacher, who has been has been
previously called “Putin’s favorite congressman,” has also brushed off human rights abuses by the Russian government, calling them “baloney.”
https://thinkprogress.org/republica...g-says-maybe-we-should-back-isis-a7e9382dbe1b
