Envoy: Israel waging Iranophobic campaign to obscure destabilizing acts

The second secretary of the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic to the UN has categorically rejected accusations leveled by Israeli PM Naftali Bennett against Tehran, saying Tel Aviv is actually waging an “Iranophobic campaign” to distract public attention from the regime’s destabilizing activities. 

Payman Ghadirkhomi made the remarks in an address to the general debate of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly on Monday after Bennett claimed that Iran had crossed "all red lines" in its nuclear program and threatened to act alone if the world did not take action.

Ghadirkhomi said the Israeli premier, like his notorious predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, had tried to disseminate disinformation about Iran and made unfounded allegations against the country. 

“He (Bennett) played the victim and desperately tried to portray the Israeli regime as innocent. It is not surprising at all. Deception has always been part of their agenda,” he added in a statement.

“His mischievous objective is crystal clear: to cover up all expansionist and destabilizing policies and criminal practices of the Zionist regime in the region over the past seven decades.”

In his speech to the General Assembly, Bennett made no mention of Israel’s decades-long conflict with the Palestinians and instead went on an anti-Iran tirade.

“Iran’s nuclear program has hit a watershed moment, and so has our tolerance,” he alleged. “Words do not stop centrifuges from spinning.”

Ghadirkhomi warned that the occupying regime endangers peace and security in the region and beyond as it possesses all types of weapons of mass destruction, as well as the most sophisticated conventional weapons.

Israel “brazenly defies constant strong international calls to join legally binding international instruments banning weapons of mass destruction, …seriously hampering the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East – proposed by Iran in 1974,” he said.

“Yet, it desperately attempts to portray Iran’s conventional weapon capabilities or its exclusively peaceful nuclear program, which is under the most robust verification of the International Atomic Energy Agency, as a challenge to regional stability.”

The Iranian diplomat also slammed Israel’s hypocrisy regarding its nuclear arsenal as well as clandestine and unsafeguarded nuclear installations.

“This regime cannot deflect attention from its longstanding malign and destabilizing activities in the region by waging a widespread systematic Iranophobic campaign,” he said.

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Ghadirkhomi further hit out at Bennett for using “threatening language” against Iran in flagrant violation of the UN Charter.

“His regime must avoid any miscalculation and adventurist move in the region. We have demonstrated that we do not hesitate to exercise our inherent right to defend ourselves against any threat and at any time,” he stressed.

Elsewhere in his statement, the Iranian diplomat blasted the Israeli prime minister for failing to mention the inhumane blockade on the Gaza Strip and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people who have been living under the regime’s brutal occupation for seven decades.

Bennett, he noted, must have explained why Israel still keeps confiscating and demolishing Palestinian homes and killing peaceful protesters.

“Instead of such fabrications and accusations, he must have said that as the only occupying power in the region, it has waged over 15 wars, invaded not only all its neighbors without exception but even countries beyond the region, continued to occupy some territories, and committed all four core international crimes, not once but repeatedly and sometimes simultaneously,” Ghadirkhomi said.

“He also deceptively tried to portray his regime as the only democracy in the region, without mentioning that its rulers have always been engaged in terrorist activities, and some of them are well-known for being the butchers of innocent Palestinian civilians… Thus, the best designation for the rulers of the Israeli regime is the child-killer terrorists.”

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