Word: britains
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...With the U.S. being the focus of the bulk of Iran's ire over the past three decades, why is Iran picking on the U.K. now? Long a hot spot for anti-regime Iranian opposition and a font of support for human rights and reform in Iran, Britain has enjoyed little favor from Tehran in recent years. The launch in January of a BBC Persian-language TV service, thanks largely to funds from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, has further riled authorities in Iran. The news channel - beaming images of the recent protests via satellite from London, despite efforts...
...Iranian regime in recent days. When U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Iran to respect the "will of its people" amid violence that has claimed at least 18 lives since the poll, Tehran chided him for "meddling." But Iran has reserved much of its vitriol for Britain. "The diplomats who have talked to us with courtesy up to now have in the past few days taken the masks away from their faces and are showing their true image," Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, said in a speech on June 19. "And the most evil of them...
...Moreover, in attempting to point a finger at Britain for its troubles, the Iranian government can tap a rich vein of mistrust for its former imperial ruler. Many Iranians remember the British-brokered Treaty of Gulistan, under which Iran was forced to give up land to Russia in 1813, as one of the most humiliating episodes in their country's history. Hostilities sparked again in 1941, when the U.K. invaded Iran and exiled the country's leader on suspicion of pro-German sympathies. Furthering the mistrust, when Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq dared to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company...
...wider Middle East - Washington announced on June 24 plans to return an ambassador to Syria for the first time in four years - and the specific offer of talks with Tehran "has wrong-footed the regime," says Adam Hug, policy director at London's Foreign Policy Centre. In that context, "Britain's closeness to the U.S. enables it to be used as a proxy - 'Little Satan' to America's 'Great Satan...
...most treacherous government is Britain," Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, intoned at Friday prayers on June 19, and I had to laugh. The Supreme Leader, in the midst of announcing a crackdown on the Green Revolution demonstrators, was sounding like the lead character in the most famous contemporary Iranian novel, My Uncle Napoleon, a huge hit as a television series in the 1970s. Uncle Napoleon is a beloved paranoid curmudgeon, the Iranian Archie Bunker. He blames everything - the weather, the economy, the moral vagaries of his family - on the British. This has been...