Iran minister criticizes Trump for focusing on Iran at UN

Iran’s foreign minister sharply criticized President Donald Trump Wednesday for allegedly abusing the US presidency of the Security Council this month by holding a meeting on Iran’s international activities during the annual gathering of world leaders at the UN in late September.

Mohammad Javad Zarif was responding in a tweet to US Ambassador Nikki Haley’s announcement Tuesday that Trump will chair a meeting to address “violations of international law and general instability Iran sows throughout the entire Middle East region.”

She accused Iran of supporting terrorism and destabilizing activities in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria.

Zarif tweeted that Trump “plans to abuse presidency of SC to divert a session - item devoted to Palestine for 70 yrs - to blame Iran for horrors US & clients have unleashed across M.E. (Middle East).”

He also accused Trump of violating a 2015 UN Security Council resolution, number 2231, that endorsed the Iran nuclear deal. The president withdrew the United States from the nuclear accord between Iran and six major powers in May.

Zarif said “@realDonaldTrump is violating it & bullying others to do same.”

Under Security Council rules, Iran can speak at the Sept. 26 meeting that Trump will chair, but Zarif and Iran’s UN Mission did not indicate whether it would participate. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani is scheduled to attend the General Assembly’s ministerial session, along with Zarif.

The mission said in a press release that despite the fact that Iran is in compliance with all its nuclear obligations under the 2015 deal according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “the US not only unilaterally and unlawfully withdrew from the accord, but also now openly invites all UN member states to either violate or ignore resolution 2231 or face punishment.”

Iran called the Sept. 26 council meeting “a further attempt by the US to divert attention away from Israeli brutalities and to remove the issue from the council agenda; however, such actions are doomed to fail.”

Answering US criticism of “the so-called destabilizing role of Iran in the region,” the Iranian mission called the United States “a menace to Middle Eastern security with its destabilizing, unilateralist policies and military interventions based on false claims.”

The mission noted that Iran was in “the forefront” of defeating the ISIS extremist group which it claimed was created and supported by the US and its regional allies.

Several evidence has been brought forward linking Iran to several militias in the Middle East including the Houthi militias and Hezbollah.

Haley had presented concrete evidence of Tehran supplying missiles to the Houthis in Yemen.

“These are the recovered pieces of a missile fired by Houthi militants from Yemen into Saudi Arabia,“ she said as the remnants of the fired missile on the background proved her words. She also reiterated a known fact that "the nuclear deal has done nothing to moderate the regime's conduct as it is hard to find a conflict or terrorist group in the Middle East that does not have Iran's fingerprint”.