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Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, last week, in Kansas, I met with Kansans at the Jewish Community Center. It is in Overland Park, and it serves our State and the parts of Missouri in the Kansas City region. I heard from leaders from those communities. They were saddened, of course, and outraged at the barbaric terrorist attacks against Israel. I join them in that outrage, and I pray for a justice that comes that those who are being held captive are released.

It has been 10 days since the world saw the images of carnage that Hamas has wrought against innocent men and women and children in Israel. The images depict crimes that are brutal and heinous and cause decent human beings to look away in disgust and horror. But we cannot look away. We cannot look away. We cannot ignore what happened. Hamas targeted elderly Israeli citizens waiting at bus stops, young children and infants at home and in daycare, and a crowd of defenseless young people at a music festival, among many, many others.

As we continue to take stock of the impact of what transpired last week, it is important to note that more Jews were murdered on October 7 than on any single day since the Holocaust, and among the 1,400 dead are at least 30 American citizens, as well as others from around the world.

While security has seemingly been reestablished in southern Israel, the ideology which provided the rationale for the attack is still espoused by many and is celebrated by many more, a fact made apparent in the demonstrations in capital cities and on university campuses in the days since the attack.

Americans of both political parties have shown moral outrage at similar acts of barbarity in the past. The appropriate responses to terrorism are grief, followed by resolve--grief over the inhumanity of the terrorists and the tragedy of their crimes, and resolve to protect innocent Israelis from further harm and achieve justice for the families and the entire Nation.

Israel's right to defend itself is not open to debate, nor is its right to exist. America will stand with Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East. We must not delay in approving any supplemental request that makes certain Israel has what it needs to defend itself against terrorism.

We must help deter other enemies who may use this opportunity to escalate the war against Israel. Hezbollah, entrenched in Lebanon, to Israel's north, will find no safe harbor if it attempts to intervene. And Iran's leaders must know the fury of the United States awaits--the fury of the world, I hope--if they become directly involved.

Iran's complicity in the recent violence and suffering around the Middle East has to be undeniable. For years, tens of millions of dollars and weapons and other support flowed to Hamas from Iran. Iran's close alignment with Hezbollah puts Israel at risk of an arsenal of 150,000 advanced missiles, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad has brutally suppressed a revolution with Iranian backing.

For too long, the Biden administration has failed to enforce the sanctions passed in a bipartisan fashion in this Senate, in the House, and signed by a President to choke off Iran's oil revenue. The results are stark: Last year, Iran earned $30 billion in oil exports. From 2020 to now, Iran's foreign reserves rose from a paltry $10 billion to $40 million--a four-time increase. That is a lot of money to spread to its terrorist proxies.

The administration should no longer delay in trying to choke Iran's revenue stream, and that starts with freezing the $6 billion that was recently released by the Biden administration. American foreign policy in the Middle East must reestablish deterrence against Iran to prevent future acts of terrorism.

For decades, Americans have committed to maintaining the principle that terrorism--the use of violence against civilians for political goals--is an unacceptable form of welfare. Now is the time to stand against terrorism and its enablers and its supporters. Now is the time to stand with our Jewish communities here in the United States and around the world. And now is the time to stand with Israel.

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