Thanks to President Obama for joining a unanimous Congress and signing S 2195 into law. This bill gives the president the authority to deny visas to United Nations ambassadors who are known terrorists, such as Iran’s recent nominee Hamid Aboutalebi, who was a participant in the 1979 hostage crisis. The government of the United States has thereby sent an unequivocal, bipartisan message that we will not tolerate the ongoing campaign of insult and antagonism from the Islamic Republic of Iran.?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /

Nominating Aboutalebi to be U.N. envoy is only the most recent in a long series of hostile actions proving that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime remains America’s enemy. This pattern began with the holding of 52 Americans for 444 days from 1979 to 1981, but it did not end there. It extends to Iranian complicity in the terrorist attacks on our armed forces in Beirut in 1983 and Saudi Arabia in 1996, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade.

Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism has been accompanied by a drumbeat of vicious rhetoric by Iranian leaders against the United States and our allies, in which America features as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan — both of whom would, in Khamenei’s ideal world, cease to exist. And all the while, there have been additional provocations, including the ongoing detention of three American citizens, Pastor Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati and Robert Levinson. Aboutalebi’s nomination is just the latest outrage.

Regardless of their periodic promises of moderation, we must keep this pattern of hostility firmly in mind in any engagement with Iran’s leaders. They have been explicit in their goal: to persuade the world to relax its economic sanctions without interrupting their pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Just this week, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said, “We will witness the sanctions shattering in the coming months.