At UN, Rouhani says US ‘humiliated’ by bid to reimpose sanctions

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani takes a jab at Bahrain and the UAE for their normalization with Israel, though he does not mention them by name during his prerecorded address to the UN General Assembly.

“We never ignored occupation, genocide, forced displacement and racism in Palestine and we never made a deal over the holy Quds [Jerusalem] and the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people,” he says.

Rouhani touts the 2015 nuclear deal as one of the greatest achievements “in the history of diplomacy” and says Iran “remains faithful to it despite persistent violations by the United States.” Iran has also breached the enrichment limits in the deal, which Washington pulled out of in 2018.

“Such a nation [Iran] does not deserve sanctions. The response to peace is not war. The reward for combatting extremism is not assassination,” he says.

Rouhani launches a tirade against the US, and accuses it of creating the Islamic State terror group.

“They accuse us, without any foundation, of trying to build nuclear weapons. And they impose sanctions on us under the pretext of [stopping] nuclear proliferation. This is why they have the infamy of being the sole user of atomic bombs in the history of humanity,” he says.

“They speak of human rights, while they have targeted through the maximum pressure, health, welfare, sustenance and even the right to life of all Iranians. They are directly involved, along with regional accomplices, in every single case of occupation, war and aggression… Yet they blame Iran for their own inevitable defeat in confronting the will of the people of the region.”

Rouhani claims the United States “turned our region into a powder keg” by supplying weapons.

Rouhani also addresses the new US sanctions against Iran, which were imposed as UN sanctions, even as the world came out against it and said the move was illegal.

Washington is “humiliated in its self-created isolation,” he says.

“The United States can impose neither negotiations nor war on us. Life is hard under sanctions, however, harder is life without independence,” he says.

Rouhani also calls Iran “the oldest democracy in the Middle East.”

He also condemns foreign interference in its political process, “let alone by a terrorist and interventionist outsider.”

“We are not a bargaining chip in US elections and domestic policy,” he adds. “Any US administration after the upcoming election will have no choice but to surrender to the resilience of the Iranian nation.”

He says the world must say “no to bullying and arrogance.”