Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi declared “victory” over the United States and “the old liberal order” during his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly.
“The endeavors to universalize American ideals throughout the world have proven to be failures,” Raisi told world leaders assembled in New York. “There is a collective hope for the establishment of a novel and equitable world order. Central to the forthcoming international order is the abandonment of global arrogance in favor of regional cooperation and orders.”
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Raisi struck that triumphalist note just days after the first anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police when she died, sparking nationwide protests. The Iranian president derided that public outcry, which he attributed to foreign influence.
“Last year was the year of the victory of the people of Iran,” Raisi said, per a live U.N. interpreter. “Certain Western nations and their intelligence services during the past year made a grave mistake by the miscalculation that didn’t [fail] to diminish and undervalue and underestimate the power of the Iranian people.”
That boast reflects Raisi’s insistence that the U.S. and its allies fomented the protests, which convulsed the country for months. Iranian authorities acknowledged the scale of the uproar in March when Iranian judicial officials declared that 22,000 people had received a pardon; furthermore, “at least 527 people, including 71 children, were killed, and hundreds of protesters severely injured,” according to a U.N. estimate released that month.
“Their whole [propaganda] is that no anti-regime movement is organic, and no anti-regime movement is free of foreign influence, whether that be foreign governments or foreign media or foreign kind of elitist,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Behnam Ben Taleblu told the Washington Examiner. “They spin their continued presence [in power as a function of] the nation intervening on their behalf to thwart enemy plots to divide society from the state. … They look to co-opt the language of street popularity or social popularity.”
Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan, who declared Raisi’s appearance “a new moral stain for the U.N.,” held up a photo of Amini during the Iranian official’s speech. He was escorted out of the assembly chamber by U.N. security.
שגריר ישראל באו”ם גלעד ארדן הניף כרזה עם תמונתה של מהסא אמיני במהלך נאומו של נשיא איראן ראיסי. לאחר מכן יצא ארדן מהאולם יחד עם הדיפלומטים הישראלים pic.twitter.com/6pBPHFF9mM
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) September 19, 2023
“Meanwhile, outside the UN hundreds of Iranians were protesting, begging for help from the international community,” Erdan wrote on social media. “Those who roll out the red carpet for murderers and antisemites must be held accountable for their actions.”
The crowd was larger than Erdan estimated, according to the Organization of Iranian American Communities, which projected that “several thousand Iranians” would attend the protest to commemorate murdered dissidents and condemn a recent U.S. agreement that secured the return of five American hostages in exchange for greenlighting South Korea’s payment of almost $6 billion to settle an outstanding oil debt, a transaction paralyzed by the prospect of U.S. sanctions.
“Releasing 6 billion dollars as ransom to the world’s leading state-sponsor of terrorism is a shameful act that cannot be justified under any pretexts,” OIAC Advisory Board Chairman Ramesh Sepehrrad said in a Monday evening statement to the Washington Examiner. “This will only embolden the regime and lead to more hostage-taking and terrorism.”
Those Americans arrived in the U.S. on Tuesday as President Joe Biden and Raisi prepared for their appearances at the United Nations. The longest-held American in that group, Siamak Namazi, called for the U.S. to develop “the kind of measures that would upend the cost-benefit calculations of Tehran’s foul business” or face even more “state hostage-taking.”
U.S. officials, for their part, maintain that Iran derived “no profit” from the deal. “There is no profit that the Iranians got from this deal,” Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who leads the U.S. mission at the U.N., told Rachel Maddow. “We released five unfairly held American citizens and brought them home to their families. And what the Iranians got were five of their citizens who we ensured were held accountable for what they did. And as I heard from your report, one or two of them don’t want to go home.”
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Raisi, whose regime has emerged as an arms supplier to Russia with growing diplomatic links to China, reveled in the idea of a multinational coalition to undermine Western power.
“The global landscape is also undergoing a paradigm shift towards an emerging international order, a trajectory that is not reversible,” he said. “The equation attributed to the hegemony of the West no longer resonates with the diverse realities of today’s world.”
