TEHRAN (Dispatches) – Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mekdad praised the Islamic Republic of Iran for being able to thwart a recent U.S.-Israeli-Saudi plot against the country.
The Islamic Republic recently succeeded in foiling a plot orchestrated by the U.S. and the Zionist regime of Israel, Mekdad said on Thursday, according to SANA news agency.
The Saudi regime provided funding for the plot, he added.
Last month, peaceful protests over rising prices and economic problems broke out in some Iranian cities, but the gatherings turned violent after a number of opportunists, some of them armed, vandalized public property and launched attacks on police stations and government buildings.
The Syrian official furthered criticized the UN for holding an emergency Security Council meeting on the protests under U.S. pressures.
Mekdad said the United Nations should rather hold such meetings on African-Americans who are getting killed every day across the U.S. during anti-Trump rallies.
Iranian security officials say they have hard evidence that the protests were directed from abroad.
Officials say many rioters arrested in the unrest have been trained by the terrorist Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) or had links with Takfiri groups.
Since the outbreak of protests, several major Western outlets have used pictures of demonstrations in the U.S., France, or United Kingdom organized by MKO in place of images of the entirely unaffiliated protesters some 6,000 miles away.
Casually throwing around MKO images to represent protests in Iran is the worst combination of insulting, misleading and sloppy.
MKO has virtually zero support in Iran and is widely loathed for working with Israeli intelligence and fighting alongside the Iraqi army in Iran’s decade-long war against Saddam in the 1980s. The MKO has also carried out numerous terrorist bombings in Iran, and was even officially listed by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terrorist organization for 16 years, until it was removed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, after a years-long lobbying effort by anti-Iran forces within the U.S.
The idea that the terrorist group is an "Iranian opposition” is a Western media fiction, immensely insulting to Iranians. But the group’s rallies outside Iranian embassies provide great visual fodder for dishonest editors in need of high-quality "Iran protest” images without dissecting the on-the-ground political reality in Iran.