Mike Waltz is in the hot seat as the Senate kicks off his contentious confirmation hearing to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
Waltz, who previously served as national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was removed from the role following a string of scandals. Most notably, Waltz accidentally added the editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a private Signal group chat with other administration officials where they discussed and coordinated an imminent airstrike against the Houthis in Yemen.
'I was hoping to hear you had some sense of regret.'
Although Waltz has taken full responsibility for the "embarrassing" slipup, "Signalgate" was the Democrats' cannon fodder of choice on Tuesday.
Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware pressed the nominee over the use of Signal to communicate about ongoing military operations, saying it is "not an appropriate, secure means of communicating highly sensitive information." Coons also asked Waltz if he had been investigated over the incident.
"The use of Signal, as an encrypted app, is not only authorized, it was recommended by the Biden-era CISA guidance," Waltz said in defense of the chat.
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"Of course, there was no classified information exchanged," Waltz added.
Coons reiterated his concerns over the "demonstrably sensitive information" that was leaked by the chat, asking Waltz again if he had been investigated for it.
"The White House conducted an investigation, and my understanding is that the Department of Defense is still conducting the investigation," Waltz said.
"At the time, you took responsibility for adding a journalist to the Signal chat," Coons said in response. "But it doesn't seem to me that the administration's taken any action to make sure this doesn't happen again. ... I was hoping to hear you had some sense of regret."
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Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) also grilled Waltz over the alleged sharing of sensitive information on Signal. Waltz confirmed when pressed that “Signal has not been approved for use by U.S. government officials for the sharing of classified information."
Senator Kaine didn’t stop there. He pressed Waltz on the ongoing investigations surrounding the alleged Signal leak of classified information. Waltz responded: "I shouldn't and can't comment on an ongoing investigation, but what I can do is echo Secretary [Pete] Hegseth's testimony that no names, targets, locations, units, routes, sources, method … no classified information was shared."
Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) accused Waltz of avoiding responsibility, saying that it was not an acceptable excuse to say that Jeffrey Goldberg was "sucked in" to the message group.
Booker continued, "Instead, in a moment when our national security was clearly compromised, you denied, you deflected, then you demeaned and degraded those people who objectively told the truth and criticized your actions."
"It shows profound cowardice. ... Even after weeks, if not months, of reflection, you couldn't sit before this committee and take some responsibility."
Waltz faced pressure from his own party as well. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioned Waltz on where his loyalties exactly lie: "I guess it just worries me that you come more from the Liz Cheney wing of the party than the Donald Trump wing of the party."
Waltz, a former U.S. representative from Florida, affirmed his loyalty to President Trump, citing his voting record in Congress: "Senator, I am squarely with the president. I've been with him in every single election I've participated in."
Mike Waltz needs a majority vote in the 53-47 Republican-controlled Senate to be confirmed as the new U.N. ambassador. A vote on his nomination is expected before the U.N. General Assembly opens on September 9.
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In 1979, as crowds gathered in the streets of Iran to topple the shah, the New York Timesran an editorial describing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as an “enigma.” Bernard Lewis was then America’s leading scholar on the Islamic world. He had read Khomeini’s works, many of which had been translated into English and were easily accessible.
Far from an “enigma,” Lewis concluded that Khomeini possessed the virtue of candor (to put it mildly) and that in every respect he was a perfect lunatic. But Lewis had been largely discredited as a “racist,” so his offer to write a piece for the Timesfell on deaf ears. An editor at the paper said that Lewis was merely a Zionist agent spreading disinformation.
'Khomeini’s ambitions extended beyond Shiism. He wanted to be accepted as the leader of the Muslim world, period.'
Among other things, Khomeini had written that girls should be married off before puberty (“Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house”). His own father — who was stabbed to death when Khomeini was a baby — married his mother when she was just 9 years old. Khomeini himself took his wife when she was 10 years old and had her pregnant by the age of 11. Khomeini blamed poverty in Iran on foreigners and Jews and argued that the idea of nationalism and nation-states was nothing but a Western plot to weaken Islam.
At the heart of Khomeini’s program was conquest. In the words of Vali Nasr, one of the world’s leading authorities on Shia Islam:
Khomeini’s ambitions extended beyond Shiism. He wanted to be accepted as the leader of the Muslim world, period. At its core, his drive for power was yet another Shia challenge for leadership of the Islamic world. He saw the Islamic Republic of Iran as the base for a global Islamic movement, in much the same way that Lenin and Trotsky had seen Russia as the springboard country of what was meant to be a global communist revolution.
No price was too high to pay in the jihadist drive to create a Shiite caliphate. During the blood-soaked Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, an ayatollah named Mehdi Haeri Yazdi approached Khomeini, his mentor, while he was sitting alone on a rug in his garden facing a pool. The hopeless war was consuming hundreds of thousands of young lives, Yazdi said. Was there no way to stop the slaughter?
Khomeini replied reproachfully, “Do you also criticize God when he sends an earthquake?”
The economic costs of creating a caliphate were a secondary concern for Khomeini as well. He famously cried that “economics is for donkeys” and “the revolution was not about the price of watermelons.”
This ideology continued long after Khomeini’s death in 1989. In 2021, a former senior Syrian official named Firas Tlass told an interviewer, “The Iranians have an authoritative plan to take control over the entire region.”
Their strategy was as brilliant as it was simple. They went to any country that had Muslims and a political vacuum. There they set up a school system in which they indoctrinated children with their vision of violent, expansionist, radical Shiite Islam. Twelve short years later, they had legions of young fighters eager to do their bidding. The strategy was implemented in an arc of ruin that extended from Lebanon through the Levant and down to Yemen.
The Iranians even attempted to gain a toehold on the European continent in the 1990s, in Kosovo. Tlass added that in the mid-2000s, former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami predicted, in a private conversation between the two, that in 20 years Iran would be the counterweight to the United States.
This prophecy would be realized almost exactly 20 years later during the Gaza War, when the world got its first taste of the radical Shiite coalition. Tehran mobilized its multi-tenacle proxy army. Though Israel ultimately triumphed, as we have seen, the world got its first taste of the dangers of the would-be Shiite caliphate.
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There was unprecedented shelling by Hezbollah, which rendered an entire region of Northern Israel uninhabitable. There was disruption of international shipping by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. And at the very moment that Iraq’s prime minister was in Washington hoping to negotiate a much-needed economic package, a Shiite militia in his country joined Iran’s April 13, 2024, assault that launched hundreds of rockets into Israel. A senior member of Iraq’s security forces named Abdul Aziz al-Mohammedawi made no secret of his allegiance to Iran and its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the face of this challenge, American allies in the region, and particularly the Saudis, were dumbfounded by Washington’s foolishness. Under the banner of “human rights,” the Biden administration undermined Saudi Arabia’s war against the Iranian-backed Houthis of Yemen. As a senior Saudi journalist put it, “You wouldn’t let us fight the Houthis, so now you have to.”
Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein reportedly offered Hezbollah an aid package to rebuild Southern Lebanon after the war, if the terror group agreed to stop firing into Israel. The administration should have slapped punishing sanctions on Lebanon’s battered economy the minute Hezbollah launched its first rocket.
Even over 130 attacks on U.S. troops by Iranian proxies drew little or no response. On January 28, 2024, Iranian-backed militias killed three American troops stationed in Jordan. The Biden administration carried out a measured response in Iraq and Syria but left Iran out of the fray, even lifting sanctions to permit Tehran to raise oil exports from 300,000 barrels a day to 2 million.
And then there was the Iran nuclear deal. Experts still debate how long it would have delayed Iran obtaining a bomb — the deal, by its very terms, only placed restrictions on Iran for 15 years — but all agree that it gave Tehran access to over $100 billion. To this President Obama said, “Our best analysts expect the bulk of this revenue to go into spending that improves the economy and benefits the lives of the Iranian people.” This statement showed a fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian priorities — a mistake the current Trump administration seems determined not to repeat.
Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from Uri Kaufman’s latest book, “American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Antisemitism.”
“We will not let what happened in Europe happen in America,” President Trump declared Wednesday, unveiling a new travel ban targeting 12 nations — mostly Islamic-majority countries from the Middle East and Africa.
It’s a strong first step toward fulfilling the original 2015 promise of a full moratorium on immigration from regions plagued by jihadist ideology. But let’s not pretend Europe’s crisis stemmed from poor vetting of criminal records. The real problem was mass migration from cultures openly hostile to Western values — especially toward Jews and, by extension, Christians.
The United States ranks near the bottom of the list for anti-Semitism. That’s something worth protecting — not surrendering to appease lobbyists or foreign governments.
And the new list leaves troubling gaps.
Trump’s call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” was the defining issue that launched his political movement. Nine years later, the rationale is even stronger — and now, the president has the power to make it happen.
Consider the context: Egyptian national Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the alleged Boulder attacker who shouted he wanted to “end all Zionists,” entered the United States in 2022 with a wife and five children — admitted from Kuwait.
The only question that matters: How many more share Soliman’s views?
The numbers are staggering. By my calculation, the U.S. admitted 1,453,940 immigrants from roughly 43 majority-Muslim countries between 2014 and 2023. That figure doesn’t include over 100,000 student visas, nor the thousands who’ve overstayed tourist visas and vanished into the interior.
Soliman is not an outlier. He’s a warning. And warnings demand a response.
Trump’s January executive order called for a 60-day review by the secretary of state, the attorney general, the Homeland Security secretary, and the director of national intelligence to identify countries with inadequate screening procedures. Four and a half months later — following the Boulder attack — the administration announced bans on nationals from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.
But Trump didn’t mention anti-American or anti-Jewish sentiment — only logistical concerns like poor criminal record-keeping, high visa overstay rates, and limited government cooperation.
That misses the point entirely.
Jew-hatred — and by extension, hatred of the West — isn't just a byproduct of chaos in failed states like Somalia or Taliban-run Afghanistan. It runs deep across the Middle East, even in countries with functioning governments. In fact, some of the most repressive regimes, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are openly hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood, yet still export radicalized individuals.
And those individuals know precisely where to go: America, where radical Islam finds more tolerance than in many Islamic countries.
Good diplomatic relations don’t mean good immigration policy. Pew’s 2010 global attitudes survey showed over 95% of people in many Middle Eastern countries held unfavorable views of Jews — including those in Egypt and Jordan, U.S. allies.
The Anti-Defamation League’s global index confirms it: The highest levels of support for anti-Semitic stereotypes come from the Middle East. According to the ADL, 93% of Palestinians and upwards of 70% to 80% of residents from other Islamic nations agree with tropes about Jews controlling the world’s wars, banks, and governments.
Meanwhile, the United States ranks near the bottom of the list for anti-Semitism. That’s something worth protecting — not surrendering to appease lobbyists or foreign governments.
So why continue importing hundreds of thousands of people from places where hatred of Jews is considered normal? Why welcome migration from countries like Iraq, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia — where assimilation into American civic values is practically impossible?
The answer may lie in the influence nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia still exert over U.S. foreign policy. But political cowardice is no excuse for policy paralysis.
Twelve countries on the ban list is a good start. But most don’t reflect the true source of radical Islamic immigration into the United States.
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Banning immigration from these regions isn’t about infringing civil liberties. It’s about preventing a civilizational crisis. Unlike Europe, which responded to rising Islamic extremism by criminalizing dissent and speech, America can take the wiser path: protect national security without sacrificing the First Amendment.
We don’t need hate-speech laws. We need sane immigration policy.
Unfortunately, bureaucrats in the administration watered down Trump’s original vision. They framed the bans in terms of “data-sharing” and technocratic concerns. They sought narrow criteria and limited political blowback.
But the law is clear. Trump v. Hawaii affirmed the president’s broad constitutional authority to exclude foreign nationals.
That authority exists for a reason.
President Trump rose to power by sounding the alarm about what unchecked migration could do to the West. That warning was prophetic. And now, he has the mandate — and the obligation — to act on it.
Twelve countries won’t cut it. The question now isn’t whether Trump will act — it’s whether he’ll act in time.
Because if we want to avoid Europe’s fate, we don’t just need a new policy. We need the old Trump — unapologetic, unflinching, and unafraid to speak hard truths.
Let’s hope he finishes what he started.
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