On Friday, the Biden administration restored some sanctions relief to Iran’s atomic program as world powers and the Islamic Republic continue talks aimed at salvaging the languishing agreement. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed several sanctions waivers related to Iran’s so-called civilian nuclear activities. The move reverses the Trump administration’s decision to rescind them.

The waivers, which are nothing else than an appeasement, are ultimately intended to attract Iran back to the 2015 deal that it has been violating since former President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018 and re-imposed U.S. sanctions.

“Administration officials concluded late last year that Iran’s nuclear program had advanced too far to re-create the roughly 12-month so-called breakout period of the 2015 pact,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “Despite the change, the U.S. is pushing ahead with talks. A revised deal needs to be reached soon, the officials said, to leave the U.S. and its allies with enough time to respond to an Iranian nuclear buildup.”

For those who think that the mullahs have shown a change of heart, well think again.

Ongoing Human Rights Abuses in Iran

The oppressive Iranian regime, in fact, has gotten worse. To maintain control, the Iranian regime’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, decided to close ranks. In June 2021, Khamenei selected Ebrahim Raisi, a notorious human rights abuser, as the regime’s president. He also appointed Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei as the Judiciary Chief. Ejei is a ruthless criminal who served as Raisi’s deputy when the latter was the Judiciary Chief from 2019 to 2021.

In addition to executions, the Iranian regime secretly murdered political prisoners in prison. This phenomenon is known as “suspicious deaths.”

As reported by the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, in February 2021, Gonabadi Dervish, Behnam Mahjoubi, died. He had been transferred to the hospital following food poisoning in Evin Prison. Eight days later, he was pronounced dead in Tehran’s Loghman Hospital. The regime authorities deliberately denied Behnam medical care.

Sasan Niknafs was another prisoner of conscience who died in the Greater Tehran Penitentiary on June 7, 2021, due to critical physical conditions. Regime authorities refused to provide him medical treatment.

In September, Shahin Naseri, a young prisoner who had witnessed the torture of the Iranian wrestling champion Navid Afkari, executed for participating in the 2018 uprising, died suspiciously in the Greater Tehran Penitentiary.

Biden’s Support for Iranian-Backed Jihadists

Mr. Biden’s decision to show good will unto the mullahs is in par with his favourable disposition towards the Islamic body politic what sponsors terrorism. Just this month the Biden administration decided to lift the terrorist designation imposed on Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, in the wake of the deadly attacks launched last month against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of Washington’s key allies in the Gulf—there are also human rights violation in the UAE, such as labor abuses against low-paid migrant workers.

Ever since Biden made his controversial decision to lift the Houthis’ designation as a terrorist organisation shortly after he took office last year, there has been a marked escalation in the Houthis’s terrorist activities. The Houthis, according to intelligence reports, work with al-Qaeda and ISIS to spread terror and conflict in the country.

And it is not as if President Biden cares about the well-being of the Iranian people, since he has shown not to care at all about American citizens in the region. As many as 9,000 American citizens, for example, were left in Afghanistan when the U.S. military withdrew from the country August 31, according to a report released last Thursday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This contradicts what the U.S. State Department claimed that only a few hundred remained behind by their own free choice.

Naturally, the sanctions against Iran have only hurt the average Iranian, while the mullahs only increased in the power, especially with the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yet that does not mean that the Islamic regime, as Biden and his leftwing cronies hope, is changing its oppressive and annihilative conduct.

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Mario Alexis Portella is a priest of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Florence, Italy. He has a doctorate in canon law and civil law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome; he also holds a M. A. in Medieval History from Fordham University, as well as a B.A. in Government & Politics from St. John’s University. He is also author of Islam: Religion of Peace? – The Violation of Natural Rights and Western Cover-Up.