RNA – Ayatollah Sayyed Ahmad Khatami, the interim Friday prayer leader of Tehran, said during this week’s sermon that the United Kingdom’s hijacking of an Iranian tanker reminds the Iranian nation of a multitude of the cunning, colonial fox’s crimes.
In Iran, people often refer to the United Kingdom for its long history of intervention in the country’s affairs before the 1979 revolution as the “cunning, colonial fox.”
Ayatollah Khatami said that the British have provoked the hatred of the Iranian nation by their actions.
He said that the United Kingdom spearheaded a campaign to partition in Iran in 1857, 1872, 1901 and 1971. They had a long history of interfering in Iran’s internal affairs, according to the Friday prayer leader, and now they are accompanying the United States in its unjust sanctions against the Iranian nation.
The senior cleric further thanked the Iranian Intelligence Ministry for dismantling a 17-member team of CIA agents before they could take any action inside the country.
Ayatollah Khatami further referred to recent reductions in the JCPOA-related commitments on the part of Iran in the face of the other parties’ lack of action to abide by their commitments, saying that Iran’s actions should be continued in line with Iranian people’s demands.
He also pointed to trip by a Palestinian delegation to Tehran headed by Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy chairman of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and their meetings with high-ranking Iranian official including the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei, stressing that “just as the Supreme Leader said the Islamic Republic is absolutely serious when it comes to the Palestine issue.”
He further stressed that Iran along with other liberation movements will stand against the United States’ peace plan for Palestine dubbed as the “Deal of the Century,” describing some Arab states’ accompanying with Israel and the United States as “treason.”
He went on to condemn continued illegal detention of top Shi’ah cleric Shaykh Ibrahim Zakzaky by the Nigerian government, saying that Iran will accept the Nigerian cleric with open arms for his medical treatment as he is in a critical condition these days.
He further blamed Saudi Arabia and Israel for Shaykh Zakzaky’s case.
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