Iran: ‘Zionist lobbying’ behind exclusion from US visa waiver

Iran claimed Monday that Israel was to blame for a recent US Congress decision that excludes Iranians and people who have visited Iran from the country’s visa waiver program.

According to Reuters, Hossein Jaberi Ansari, a spokesman for the foreign ministry in Tehran, said that the American decision was enacted “under pressure from the Zionist lobby” and other “currents” opposed to the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.

The decision, signed into law on Friday by US President Barack Obama on Friday as part of a $1.1 trillion spending bill, is a security measure that was first introduced in the wake of recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.

It also applies to Syria, Iraq and Sudan.

Ansari warned that Iran would keep a sharp eye on how the US implements the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the nuclear deal — and will adapt its own actions should the US fall short, the semi official Iranian FARS News Agency reported.

“We are negotiating with a side which has a long record of distrustfulness and has acted against Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution, and in such an atmosphere the negotiations are being held with utmost watchfulness and based on the complications of the political arena and with respect to possibilities,” he said.

“The US administration’s undertakings under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is our yardstick and the criteria for the Islamic Republic’s interaction is performance and actions [of the US] in addition to words, and we hope that [proper] performance would make it possible for the present path [of fulfilling the nuclear deal] to continue,” Ansari added, according to the report.

“Otherwise, the Islamic Republic will pursue a path which will meet the Iranian nation’s interests based on the policies which will be adopted,” he cautioned.

Under the nuclear agreement reached in July with the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, Iran is to curb its nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. The world powers including the US are committed to refrain from any policy intended to adversely affect normalization of trade and economic relations with Iran.

In a letter to his Iranian counterpart, US Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday reassured Iran that the law “will not in any way prevent us from meeting our JCPOA commitments.”

Kerry noted in the letter to Mohammad Javad Zarif that there are “a number of potential tools available,” including multiple entry ten-year business visas and programs for expediting business visas.