Iran's President In UN Claims Protests Were A Propaganda War
President Ebrahim Raisi blamed foreign countries for waging a propaganda campaign against the Islamic Republic in his UN General Assembly speech Tuesday.
President Ebrahim Raisi blamed foreign countries for waging a propaganda campaign against the Islamic Republic in his UN General Assembly speech Tuesday.
He avoided the topic of the 2022 anti-regime protests almost entirely and referred to it only indirectly as the West’s worst media assault in history.
Raisi was speaking only a few days after the first anniversary of the killing of Mahsa Amini, which sparked widespread protests across Iran beginning in September 2022.
More than 500 were killed, 22 thousand arrested and at least 7 executed in the brutal crackdown that followed.
“The previous year was a year of victory for the Iranian people,” Raisi claimed brazenly, spinning last year’s events in Iran in the most spectacular fashion.
Images coming out of Iran last week, told a very different story: thousands of armed security forces and plain-clothes thugs had been stationed all over the capital Tehran, in anticipation of protests on the anniversary, intimidating passersby and preventing any gatherings in the streets.
Raisi also lambasted the United States for ‘breaking a promise’ and leaving the JCPOA. He repeated the claim that Iran’s nuclear program is purely peaceful, despite accumulating well over 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent.
"The Iranian nation prides itself on playing, thanks to the Islamic Revolution, the biggest role in unmasking the imperialists in the East and West," Raisi said, while the regime has supplied hundreds of kamikaze drones to Russia and exports more than million barrels of oil to China daily at discounted prices.
"The world is transitioning into a novel international order, and the project to Americanize the world has failed," he claimed.
Despite Iran's 12-year involvement in Syria's civil war and supply of weapons to Houthi forces in Yemen, Raisi said, “Our unambiguous position as the Islamic Republic: We do not stand nor support any war anywhere, not in Europe nor anywhere,”
On Monday, the UN nuclear chief said he had asked to meet Raisi on the sidelines of the General Assembly to try to reverse Iran’s decision to remove monitoring devices set up by IAEA and expel “a very sizable chunk” of the agency’s inspectors.
Rafael Grossi, Director of UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that such measures make it impossible for IAEA to verify the nature of Iran's nuclear program.
Earlier on Tuesday, Iranian Americans opposed to the Islamic Republic held a rally ahead of Raisi’s appearance outside the UN headquarters in New York City.
The protesters had banners and posters portraying the Islamic regime's crimes in its 45-year history – including messages targeting Raisi and his role in those crimes.
Raisi was a member of the infamous Death Committee which oversaw summary execution of at least two thousand Iranian political prisoners in 1988.
