The Daily Mail
By Mail Foreign Service
In a blistering diatribe against Britain, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi said: ‘They have plundered the world in the last 500 years and the young lad in charge now is even more stupid than his predecessor. It’s as if God has made this nation servants of America and Zionists.’
Iran’s First Vice President added: ‘England has nothing. Its inhabitants are not human, its officials are not responsible, and it doesn’t even have any natural resources. (They are) a bunch of thick people ruled by a mafia.’
The incendiary remarks went too far for Simon Gass, Britain’s ambassador in Tehran, who replied furiously on the Embassy website and in a message posted on Twitter.
‘To state that the British are not human and to call them thick shows a lack of respect for human dignity and is an illogical and worthless remark,’ he wrote.
Writing in Farsi, the official language of Iran, Mr Gass added: ‘To discuss the political differences between countries is natural, but when a high-ranking official who represents the Islamic Republic of Iran makes such insulting remarks about the people of another country, it reflects badly only on the person who made such remarks.’
Rahimi denounced countries that had supported the latest round of UN sanctions against Iran and, like the U.S., Britain and Australia, imposed extra ones of their own.
He called the Australians a ‘bunch of cow herders’ and suggested that the South Koreans should be ‘smacked in the face until they become human’.
Ironically, in the same speech in Tehran on Monday Rahimi told his audience of senior education officials that teachers need to teach their students manners.
Iranian officials frequently lambast Brit¬ain, but calling the British ‘thick’ is new.
The British are usually depicted as a crafty and cunning ‘little Satan’ pulling the strings of the ‘Great Satan’ America which is seen as having more brawn but fewer brains.
The Iranian regime has accused both London and Washington of stirring up last summer’s unrest that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fiercely dis¬puted re-election.
Mr Gass wrote: ‘The contribution made by Britain in shaping the modern world, from invention to cultural achievements, values and respect for individual rights, has been clearly and rightly recorded in history and is respected throughout the world.’
