Iranian leader grateful to Trump for revealing US' 'real face'

TEHRAN, Tuesday

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said today he was grateful to United States (US) President Donald Trump for revealing “the real face of America”.

“We are thankful to this gentleman... he showed the real face of America,” Khamenei said in a speech to military officers in Tehran.

“What we have said for more than 30 years – that there is political, economic, moral and social corruption in the ruling system of the US – this gentleman came and brought it out into the open in the election and after the election.”

He referred to the case of a young Iranian boy who was pictured in handcuffs at a US airport following Trump’s ban on visas for seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran.

“By what he does – handcuffing a five-year-old child – he shows the true meaning of American human rights,” Ayatollah Khamenei said.

He also responded to Trump’s tweet of February 3 when the US president said: “Iran is playing with fire – they don’t appreciate how ‘kind’ President Obama was to them”.

Khamenei ridiculed the idea of being grateful to former president Barack Obama, saying he was the one who placed “paralysing sanctions” on Iran and helped create the Islamic State group through his destabilising actions in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said that with Trump in the White House, Tehran faced “difficult days ahead” regarding its nuclear deal with Washington and other major powers.

'TO RENEGOTIATE'

“I believe Trump may try to renegotiate” the deal, but “clearly, neither Iran, nor the Europeans or the international community will accept new negotiations,” Mr Zarif told the Ettelaat newspaper in an interview published on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a top Chinese judge has branded President Donald Trump a bully and an “enemy of the rule of law” for attacking the US judiciary as China revels in the upheaval gripping the world’s leading democracy.

Trump launched a tirade against US District Judge James Robart for suspending his travel ban on people from seven majority Muslim nations last week, deriding him as a “so-called judge”. He Fan, of the Supreme People’s Court of China, likened Trump’s criticism to the murder of a judge in China last month. “A president criticising judges and bandits murdering judges are all enemies of the rule of law,” he wrote on his public WeChat social media page on Sunday.

“In a country claiming to be the most democratic and most based on rule-of-law, for a president to lead the charge in scolding judges... makes him no different from a bully without dignity!”