An address to the Iranian nation by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, uploaded to YouTube by a pro-regime video blogger.
Updated | Monday | 11:30 a.m. On Saturday evening, hours after President Obama criticized Iran’s government for its violent response to protests over last year’s disputed presidential election, Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responded by attacking the United States and defending the election as a “landslide” victory.
According to a translation by Reuters, Ayatollah Khamenei said, in an address broadcast on Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on state television in Iran, “Sometimes the U.S. government appears as a wolf or a fox and looks violent and arrogant, and sometimes they look different.” He also said, “They hoped to create a civil war in this country but the people were vigilant,” and added in reference to the upheaval, “It was a great ordeal and lesson, and the people of Iran emerged victorious.”
Ayatollah Khamenei also said that last June’s election was “an outstanding point of our history,” according to a translation on the Web site of Press TV, Iran’s state-run English-language satellite channel. The leader’s official Web site, leader.ir, reported that “Ayatollah Khamenei said the Iranian nation showed their national will, resistance and insight in the post-elections events.”
Press TV reported that Ayatollah Khamenei elaborated on the theme in a speech on Sunday in the Iranian city of Mashad, “The new [U.S.] administration and president claimed interest in just and fair relations; they wrote letters and sent messages … saying they are willing to normalize relations with the Islamic Republic, but in practice they did the opposite.” He added, “Eight months after the elections, they took the worst possible stance. The [U.S.] president called those rioters and saboteurs ‘civil rights activists.’”
According to The Associated Press, Iran’s leader rejected President Obama’s suggestion, in his Nowruz message, that, “Faced with an extended hand, Iran’s leaders have shown only a clenched fist,” by saying: “We said that if they are extending a metal hand inside a velvet glove, we won’t accept.”
In his Nowruz broadcast, sitting before what might have been a large fishbowl but looked oddly like a giant glass of white wine, Mr. Ahmadinejad told the Iranian people that “the landslide” in his favor came in an election that he said was transparent and marked only by a record high turnout, the semiofficial news agency Fars reported.
Fars, which is close to Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard Corps, added that Mr. Ahmadinejad also said that the election was an example to the world “of democracy and rule of the righteous.”
Mehdi Karroubi, one of the opposition candidates who claims that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory in the election was fraudulent, posted a Nowruz video of his own online – joining the other major opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, who released a similar message earlier this week.
In Mr. Karroubi’s message he agreed that the Iranian people had participated in the election “with so much enthusiasm,” but, he said, “instead of thanking them,” the authorities had changed the outcome of the vote. In response, he said:
Millions voiced their concern in peace, but instead of being heard, they were met with resistance. Some were martyred, others died under torture and in an unprecedented move, thousands of people were jailed, among them politicians of the Islamic Republic, newspapers were closed, journalists were jailed in unprecedented numbers, the demands were not met.
The foundations of this bitter situation were made by some who did not follow the laws and did not consider the interest of the establishment, and they insisted that whoever has demands other than what we please, they are causing anarchy, disorder and are foreign puppets.
