At least 600 Israelis, mostly civilians, lay dead. Thousands injured. An unknown number of people, including Israel-Americans, have been taken hostage, all at the hands of the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hamas. Social media is filled with videos of the savagery; barbaric acts of violence against the innocent, celebrated with shots of “Allahu Akbar.”

We Helped Bring This About

The actions of the Biden White House since taking office helped cause this:

• Its renewal of $360 million in aid to the corrupt Palestinian Authority, even while acknowledging internally the money would likely end up with Hamas.
• Its letting Iran slide on oil sanctions, allowing countless billions to pour into the coffers for use to fund Hamas and Hezbollah.
• Its shame in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the billions in arms left behind, some of which appear to be in use in the war against Israel.
• Its cozying up to Iran to the point that literal agents of that terrorist nation were serving as advisors to the Biden Administration.

Oh, you missed that on CNN and MSNBC? Just days ago news broke of an astonishing successful infiltration of our government. Lee Smith in Tablet spells out the story, first reported by Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration’s now-suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley helped to fund, support, and direct an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments, according to a trove of purloined Iranian government emails.

They showed that Malley had helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

Another sign of the sway Iran exercises over this Administration came in the form of the initial reaction to the slaughter. The U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs posted a tweet suggesting Israel “refrain from violence” in its response to the bloodiest attack on the nation in half a century. The tweet was deleted after Sen. Ted Cruz expressed his outrage.

Then there’s the recent hostage deal which bought the freedom of six Americans for $6 billion in frozen assets and a group of imprisoned Iranians.  That’s $6 billion the State Department laughably insisted could only be used for humanitarian aid and food.

Now, reportedly, Americans are in the hands of Hamas. With the market price set.

Which gets to our next point. The danger is on our doorstep.

Opening the Door At Home

Saturday’s sophisticated invasion and ensuing bloodbath caught intelligence agencies flat-footed. Ours included. Sadly, who can be surprised this Administration was caught off guard by radical Islamist extremists? For three years, including just this past week, Biden has been insisting the “extremists” who pose the greatest danger at home are grannies in MAGA hats and parents upset at their children being groomed in schools.

In the Democrats’ zeal to punish their political rivals, maintain power and push its debased agenda, the door has been left wide open for evil. Door? Perhaps I should say border.

An estimated 7 million illegal immigrants have come across the open border since Biden assumed office. Countless military-aged men from all over the world, including the Middle East. Oh, Border Patrol has gotten their hands on a few hundred known terrorists. But how many people who were slaughtering women and children yesterday in Israel were “known terrorists”?

Please understand this is no idle alarm. You know that the cartels are running drugs and trafficking humans into the U.S. with the speed and ease of a drive on the autobahn. Less known is that the cartels have been partnered with the dangerous terrorist organization Hezbollah. The terror group that even after 9/11 and rise of Al-Qaeda, terrorism experts were calling the “A Team.” (I helped write all about that in counter-terrorism expert Phil Little’s memoir Hostile Intent.)

Hezbollah was helping the cartels traffic drugs into the U.S. in order to raise money for its terrorist activities. About a decade ago, the DEA headed a multi-nation effort to shatter Hezbollah’s drug-running operation (and inflict serious damage to terrorist group.) The effort was called “Operation Cassandra.”

Barack Obama and Joe Biden torpedoed Operation Cassandra as a “gesture” to Iran during negotiations for the nuclear deal. See our “POLITICO Bombshell: Obama Let Hezbollah Smuggle Coke into the U.S. to Help Seal Iranian Nuke Deal.” In the words of POLITICO, Obama-Biden “let Hezbollah off the hook.”

The same Hezbollah that is currently launching rockets into Israel from Lebanon.

How many Hezbollah members are in the U.S.? How many Hezbollah, Hamas and other Islamist terrorists have infiltrated since January 2021? What else have they smuggled in? How many new terrorists will be radicalized and recruited in the excitement over the success of Saturday’s attack? As Raymond Ibrahim has written so often on The Stream, violent jihad is not a fringe attribute of Islam, but a core obligation of all able-bodied Muslim men.

If this war spreads and intensifies, we will likely see attacks here. Security is already increasing around houses of worship and other possible Jewish targets.

But keep telling us Army vets with Gadsden Flag stickers on their F150s are the “extremists.”

Oil Prices Likely to Surge … as Oil Reserve Depleted

The war in Israel is likely to hit us at home in another way: the price at the pump and a potential oil crisis. When things get dicey in the Middle East, oil prices shoot up. According to CNBC, energy experts currently think that the invasion might not have much of effect on prices beyond a “knee jerk” reaction Monday morning … unless the conflict spreads. (Who thinks it won’t?)  Will Iran move to interrupt the movement of oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz? Saturday’s invasion came one day after the 50^th anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War. That war brought the Arab oil embargo that led to gasoline shortages in the United States. Will Arab countries get involved in the new war?

Joe Biden wrecked our energy independence. Three years ago, we didn’t need oil out of the Middle East. But now? If that hasn’t left us vulnerable enough, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at a record low. And Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said recently there were no plans to replenish it.

The reserves were created for times of crisis and war. In fact, the SPR was created specifically in response to hardship caused by the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo. However, Biden emptied the reserves last year to artificially lower prices to help Democrats in the midterms and to keep his own poll numbers from completely tanking.

Biden put his political interests above the safety and security of Americans, both in terms of energy and “extremist” dangers.

One way or another we are going to pay the piper. We pray the cost is not too steep.

We pray for the peace of Israel.

Al Perrotta is the Managing Editor of The Stream, co-author with Phil Litte of the counter-terrorism memoir Hostile Intent and co-author, with John Zmirak, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. You can follow him at @StreamingAl at GETTR, Gab, Parler, and now at TRUTH Social.