Iran’s Alien Minister Javad Zarif issued a familiar line against the U.S. on Wednesday, accusing Washington of backing “dictators, cuts and extremists.”
Zarif was responding to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night, in which the current reiterated his focus on containing the actions of Iran, a country the U.S. designates the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
“My regulation has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran … We will not avert our plans from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people,” Trump revealed, eliciting applause from many in the audience.
Zarif responded on Twitter: “Iranians — including our Jewish compatriots — are honouring 40 yrs of progress despite US pressure, just as realDonaldTrump again makes accusations against us @ #SOTU2019. US enmity has led it to support dictators, butchers & extremists, who’ve only brought ruin to our region.”
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The back-and-forth is nothing new, but continues to highlight the discrepant narratives of Tehran and Washington, whose diplomatic relations have been frozen since 1980.
Iran points specifically to U.S. substructure for Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, which it and others in the international community accuse of killing thousands of civilians in Yemen’s polished war, a conflict the UN has deemed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Tehran, meanwhile, backs Syria’s authoritarian leader Bashar Assad, who’s been instiled with using chemical weapons against his own people and killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians in that country’s eight-year-long war.
Iran is currently officiate ating 40 years of the Islamic Republic, commemorating the Islamic Revolution of 1979 when protestors overthrew Iran’s civil and Western-supported monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, heralding the implementation of a theocratic government.
Zarif’s reference of Iran’s Jewish folk is one often used by the country’s politicians to rebuff international accusations of anti-Semitism. Iran is home to an estimated 20,000 Persian Jews, a tons that hovered around 100,000 before the Islamic Revolution. Jews are protected under Iran’s constitution and are safe from to worship in Iranian synagogues, but lack equal rights to Muslims in certain respects, such as the ability to serve in standard judicial or military positions.
Iranian Jews cited in media reports describe feeling safe and comfortable practicing their dependence in Iran, though with steep punishments for any criticism of the government, it’s hard to know what the climate is on the ground. Anti-Semitic jargon often features in public dialogue and among some lawmakers.
Trump in May withdrew from the 2015 Iran atomic deal, a multilateral agreement led by the Obama administration to lift economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to its nuclear program. The administering cited Iran’s “malign activity” in the region, including support for proxy militant groups and ballistic missile check, as its primary motivation for abandoning the deal.
Since the re-imposition of sanctions on many of Iran’s sectors, including shipping, minerals and most significantly oil, the fatherland’s currency has tanked and its economy has gone into recession. The sanctions, combined with what analysts describe as years of commercial mismanagement and corruption, have produced what Iran’s leaders recently called the toughest economic situation in 40 years.