On Wednesday, off the coast of Cyprus, Israeli Navy Seals intercepted a boatload of Iranian-made explosives en route to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. The weapons cache, weighing hundreds of tons, included 3,000 rockets along with stockpiles of mortars, anti-tank munitions, bullets and grenades.

It marked the third time this year that Iran has been caught red-handed secretly delivering weapons to its terrorist proxies. Just last month, U.S. forces raided a cargo ship in the Gulf of Suez that was carrying eight containers of ammunition made for Kalashnikov rifles. That Iranian shipment was bound for Syria.

These are all blatant violations of a United Nations weapons embargo against Iran. Additionally, any weapons delivered to Hezbollah violates UN Resolution 1701, which ordered Hezbollah to disarm after the Second Lebanon War. And since these smuggled weapons are intended for use against civilians, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted yesterday, “it is a war crime that the UN Security Council should have a special meeting over.”

Instead, the UN General Assembly is busy this week deliberating about the “war crimes” Israel committed in the Gaza war earlier this year. Last night, the Israel-bashing assembly endorsed the lopsidedly biased Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel of intentionally attacking the Gazan civilians, rather than Hamas, during Operation Cast Lead.

Hamas, incidentally, test fired a rocket this week that flew 37 miles into the sea. Over the past eight years, most of the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel have been crude homemade explosives with a range of a few miles. During the Gaza war, thanks to Iranian imports, Hamas fired some rockets with a range of up to 25 miles.

Now the range has extended another 12 miles, which puts the residents of Tel Aviv within striking distance of Gaza the next time Iran orders another proxy war.

Hostage Standoff

This past Wednesday, November 4, thousands of Iranians commemorated the 30-year anniversary of the 1979 seizure of America’s embassy in Tehran by taking to the streets with the usual “Death to America!” chants.

In 1979, then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter worked desperately to solve the hostage crisis with diplomacy, believing a hostile partner in Tehran was better than no partner at all, as Michael Rubin noted earlier this year. His diplomatic strategy was a spectacular failure. The hostage standoff, which left 52 Americans trapped in the embassy for 444 days, didn’t end until after the American electorate booted President Carter from office.

Yet today, as it was 30 years ago, we have a president equally obsessed with dialogue and negotiation as the be-all and end-all of peacemaking. And like 1979, we have an unwilling and unreasonable “peace” partner who, behind an increasingly transparent veil of secrecy, is furiously working to build a nuclear bomb even as it exports massive shipments of conventional armaments to terrorist proxies for their dirty work on the front lines of the war against the United States, Britain and Israel.

To give you some idea of what Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, thinks about dialogue with the United States, read this piece by the Washington Post. According to the report, Khamenei has warned Iran’s leaders not to be “deceived” into negotiating with the U.S. Such dialogue, he said, would be “naive and perverted.”

At least it’s better than no partner at all!

According to Khamenei, over the past year, President Obama has pleaded for peaceful dialogue with the mullahs—sending several messages to Tehran, both oral and written. According to the Post, while the White House would not confirm having sent letters to the supreme leader, it did acknowledge “a willingness to talk to Tehran and said it has sought to communicate with Iranian leaders in a variety of ways” (emphasis mine throughout).

For example, consider the latest olive branch, posted on the White House website earlier this week. “Thirty years ago today,” President Obama wrote, “the American Embassy in Tehran was seized.” That event, he said, spawned a confrontational relationship built on mistrust and suspicion. Despite this, he wrote,

I have made it clear that the United States of America wants to move beyond this past, and seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interests and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. We have condemned terrorist attacks against Iran. We have recognized Iran’s international right to peaceful nuclear power. We have demonstrated our willingness to take confidence-building steps along with others in the international community.

Iran, meanwhile, has repeatedly demonstrated its contemptuous unwillingness to accommodate such childish overtures. At about the same time the White House posted that message from the president, Israeli commandos were hauling in the largest supply of smuggled weapons ever found in Israel’s history. It was an Iranian shipment meant for Hezbollah—the terrorist organization that, besides starting the 2006 war with Israel, is also responsible for multiple attacks on American targets over the years, including the 1983 Beirut bombings at the American Embassy and the Marine barracks, killing more than 300 Americans.

And besides feeding terrorist groups alongside Israel’s borders, Iran is actively engaged in clashes with American forces throughout the Middle East, providing armaments and operational training for insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Thirty years after the hostage crisis with Iran, the war rages on.

In many ways, the more things change, the more they remain the same. It’s just that the stakes are so much higher today. Even without the tremendous benefit of Bible prophecy, just looking at the way world events are unfolding before us, you can almost feel the explosion that will soon happen.

It’s just a matter of time.