On Monday, Iranian officials, apparently freaked out by President Trump’s stern messages targeting them, resorted to calling him “crazy” and demanded he show them “respect.”
Iran’s director of foreign affairs for the country’s parliament, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, told CNN, “In his mind, Trump thinks he has a gun to Iran’s head with sanctions and he is trying to shut down our economy. This is all in his imagination. Now he wants us to call him? This is a crazy president!”
Amir-Abdollahian huffed that there were “warmongers” in the West Wing, adding, “Also, Trump is not quite balanced and stable in his decision making, so we are dealing with a confused White House. Iran receives various signals which show that no one knows who owns the White House.”
He continued, “Forty years of Islamic Revolution in Iran have shown that you cannot talk to Iran through threats… If he thinks by bringing in some air craft carriers and bombers he can take advantage of Iran and to force Iran to negotiate from an unequal position, he is wrong. But when their ships get close to us, it is a threat to them. We never welcome war, but we stand steadfast.”
Also on Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who refers to U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, Emirati Crown Prince bin Zayed, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the “B Team,” blustered, “With the #B_Team doing one thing & @realDonaldTrump saying another thing, it is apparently the U.S. that “doesn’t know what to think”. We in Iran have actually known what to think for millennia—and about the U.S., since 1953. At this point, that is certainly “a good thing!”
Zarif added, “Goaded by #B_Team, @realdonaldTrump hopes to achieve what Alexander, Genghis & other aggressors failed to do. Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone. #EconomicTerrorism & genocidal taunts won’t “end Iran”. #NeverThreatenAnIranian. Try respect—it works!”
CNN noted, “On Monday, an Iranian energy official announced the country has increased its uranium enrichment fourfold and informed the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
As The Daily Wire reported last week:
The United States has not just militarily escalated its tensions with Iran, but has also economically escalated its efforts to isolate the world’s number one state sponsor of Islamist terrorism. As The Daily Wire noted last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently announced that the U.S. would phase out and end all oil sanctions waivers doled out to countries that had been importing Iranian oil.
“Almost one year ago, after withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump implemented the strongest pressure campaign in history against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Pompeo explained. “The goal remains simple: to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it has used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country.”