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Western officials cheer riots in other countries, suppress domestic protests: Iran

Sunday, 04 December 2022 3:28 PM [ Last Update: Sunday, 04 December 2022 3:33 PM ]

Activists block a road during a “Just Stop Oil” protest, in London, Britain, on October 15, 2022. (File photo by Reuters)

Iran has lashed out at Western officials for cheering rioters in independent states while suppressing peaceful protesters in their own countries.

“Officials of [Western] regimes who have coups, conspiracies, interventions, and devastating wars with millions of deaths in their history are now pretending to be defenders of human rights in other countries,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani said in a post on his Twitter account on Sunday.

Despite their false gestures of advocating human rights, they have not been successful in hiding their anti-human rights nature, he added.

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Referring to Western countries’ hypocritical behavior vis-a-vis protests in Iran and their own states, Kan’ani sarcastically said that apparently the protests in Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia are bad and deserve severe confrontation but riots in their targeted countries are good and deserve support.

Attached to his tweet was British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s announcement of “giving the police new powers” to allow them to clamp down on “illegal protests.”

“This afternoon I sat down with all the police chiefs to make it clear that they have my full support in acting decisively to clamp down on illegal protests,” Sunak said on Thursday.

“It is completely unacceptable that ordinary members of the public are having their lives disrupted by a selfish minority,” he said. “My view is that those who break the law should feel the full force of it, and that’s what I am determined to deliver.”

Kan’ani, pointing to a Persian proverb that says death is good but for the neighbor, said, “After dividing terrorism into good and bad, the heads of these regimes also provide their own definition of riot and protest.”

Protests broke out in several Iranian cities after the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died in hospital three days after she collapsed in a police station in Tehran. An investigation attributed her death to her medical condition, dismissing allegations that she had been beaten by police forces.

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Despite Iranian officials’ clarification on the circumstances surrounding Amini’s death, violent street protests have led to attacks on security officers and acts of vandalism against public property and sanctities.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic has strongly censured several countries for provoking the riots through their spy agencies and propaganda apparatus. London, in particular, hosts several anti-Iran networks, including Iran International, Manoto, and BBC Persian.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk