Senior Iranian officials hit back at Marco Rubio after Athens speech

Senior Iranian officials have criticised the comments made by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio about Iranian history during a speech in Athens on Wednesday, in which he drew parallels between ancient Greco-Persian conflicts and modern tensions between Tehran and Washington.

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the Iranian parliament’s national security commission, wrote in a post on X on Saturday that “a country whose history began with the massacre of indigenous peoples and has never ceased from colonialism and bloodshed accuses the Achaemenids - who wrote the world’s first declaration of human rights - of crimes!”

“Your vile nature has a problem with Iran and Iranians,” Azizi added.

Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, called Rubio's speech contradictory, reiterating that his “problem is not with the Islamic Revolution; it is with a strong and independent Iranian civilisation”.

“There is a glaring contradiction in Rubio’s recent speech: standing firm ‘to the last man’ is praised in the context of ancient Greece, yet the steadfastness of the great Iranian nation is disparaged with the label of a ‘death cult’,” Velayati wrote on social media.

“Glorifying resistance in the "self" and despising it in the "other" is not civilisation, but rather philosophy in service of domination,” Velayati said, adding that the nation that caused the disasters of Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan has no right to give lectures on morality.