Conservative politicians and commentators are outraged today by a report that the United States sent $400 million in cash to Iran earlier this year on the day that Iran released four American hostages that it had been holding, falsely claiming that the payment was essentially a ransom paid to the Islamic republic.
In reality, the payment was part of a settlement over hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons that Iran had purchased from the U.S. prior to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 but which were subsequently never delivered when diplomatic relations between the two nations were severed.
This was openly announced by the State Department back in January and even mentioned in news reports about the release of the hostages on the same day.
But American Family Radio host Bryan Fischer obviously doesn’t care about the simple truth of the matter and instead used it as an excuse to attack President Obama for supposedly paying a jizya submission tax to Iran on his radio show today.
“Basically, he’s being Sharia compliant here,” Fischer said. “Our president is a fan of the Islamic faith, he’s a Muslim sympathizer and one of the doctrines of Islam is that if you are an infidel nation, you must pay a submission tax. It’s called jizya … What this is is a jizya tax. Our Sharia compliant president paying a jizya tax, a submission tax to an Islamic government.”
