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News ID: 79144
Publish Date : 31 May 2020 - 22:05
New Parliament Speaker Qalibaf:

Talks With U.S. Futile, Finishing Revenge on Agenda

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- Iran’s new parliament speaker said Sunday any negotiations with Washington would be "futile” as he denounced the death of a black American that has led to angry protests across the U.S.
Muhammad-Baqer Qalibaf was elected speaker on Thursday of a chamber dominated by principlists following February elections.
The newly-formed parliament "views the fight against the global arrogance both an ideological goal and a strategic benefit, and negotiation and compromise with the U.S., as the axis of global arrogance, to be futile and harmful”, he said in his first major speech to the chamber.
Qalibaf, a former commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC)’s air force, said the new parliament’s agenda is to complete Iran’s revenge for the U.S. assassination of General Qassem Soleimani.   
"Our strategy in confronting the terrorist America is to complete the chain of revenge for the blood of Martyr Soleimani,” Qalibaf added.
Iran responded to the terrorist assassination with a volley of precision-guided missiles which pummeled a U.S. military base in Iraq - in a move which Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei described as just "a slap on the face” for Washington.  
Qalibaf said, "The work that began with the unprecedented attack on the Ain al-Asad base and continued with the shattering of America’s hollow formidableness will be completed with the full expulsion of the terrorist U.S. army from the region.”
The speaker made the remarks as he outlined the priorities of the new parliament.
"Given the role which the 11th parliament considers for itself in the Islamic Revolution’s civilization building, the chamber will not accept any compromise on the main ideals of the Islamic Revolution,” he said.
The new parliament "regards firm confrontation with foreign enemies, especially America and the Zionist regime, among its fundamental principles,” he said.
"It will not show any courtesy on demarcating its borders with seditious and hypocritical currents in the country,” he added.
Supporting the Palestinian nation, along with the oppressed Yemenis, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian resistance movements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad is also the "revolutionary and national duty” of the new parliament, Qalibaf said.
Qalibaf called for ties to be improved with neighbors and with "great powers who were friends with us in hard times and share significant strategic relations”.
The 58-year-old Qalibaf is a three-time presidential candidate who lost out to the incumbent Hassan Rouhani at the last election in 2017.
The newly-elected speaker had also served as Tehran mayor and the Islamic Republic’s police chief before taking up his latest post.
In a tweet on Saturday, he slammed what he called the United States’ "unjust political, judicial, and economic structure”.
This had been "pumping war, coups, poverty, indiscrimination, torture, fratricide and moral corruption to the world, and racism, hunger, humiliation, and ‘choking by knee’ in its own country for hundreds of years”, Qalibaf said.
"What can one call it if not the Great Satan?” he added, using Iran’s term for the United States.