Iran has strongly condemned the US and its allies for imposing a slew of fresh sanctions against the Islamic Republic over the country’s defense of its security and nation in the face of Western-backed riots that spread throughout the country last year.
On Friday, the United States, the UK, and the European Union sanctioned dozens of Iranian individuals and entities, which they accused of either suppression or misrepresentation of last year’s unrest.
Later in the day, Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani denounced the sanctions as “unconstructive behavior,” which was not in line with the Western countries’ own interests.
The West, he added, rather had to adopt “a new policy [that was] based on respect for the great and civilized Iranian nation, the Islamic Republic’s sovereignty, and the two sides’ common security and interests.”
The unrest erupted throughout the country last September following the unfortunate death earlier that month of a young girl named Mahsa Amini. Amini fainted at a police station and was pronounced dead days later at a Tehran hospital. Relevant investigations attributed her death to a medical condition, dismissing allegations that she had been beaten by police forces.
Iran says the 2022 riots were the result of foreign-backed elements exploiting the incident.
Referring to the Western sanctions and accusations faulting Iran’s riot response, Kan’ani asserted that, when it comes to the provision of public security for the country, the Iranian people and authorities “would not be influenced by the Western parties’ malicious propaganda and measures.”
He, meanwhile, reminded the Western states of their own dismal rights records, identifying them as “countries, which continually perpetrate the most severe instances of violence against their own citizens, especially women, and also minorities, people of color, aboriginals, and migrants.”
These countries also never muster the courage to truly protest and condemn the “child-killing Zionist regime’s daily crimes,” the spokesman noted.
Such states, therefore, “have no right to shed crocodile tears for the Iranian nation,” he added.
Kan’ani concluded his remarks by pointing out that the Western states’ provision of support and safe haven for anti-Iran terrorist groups, such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO), which is guilty of killing thousands of Iranians, “belies their claim of supporting the Iranian people’s rights.”
