White House ‘afflicted by a mental retardation,’ says Iran President

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (C) makes a speech on the US sanctions following the cabinet ministers’ meeting in Tehran, Iran on 12 June 2019 [Iranian Presidency/Handout/Anadolu Agency]

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said the White House was “afflicted by a mental retardation” in a live televised address today.

In the latest trade of blows between Washington and Tehran, Rouhani slammed US President Donald Trump’s latest sanctions on senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif as “outrageous and idiotic.”

Rouhani said: “You sanction the foreign minister simultaneously with a request for talks?”

Zarif also made his views known on the latest wave of sanctions.

READ: Trump puts sanctions on Iran supreme leader, other top officials

He tweeted: “Donald Trump is 100% right that the US military has no business in the Persian Gulf. Removal of its forces is fully in line with interests of US and the world. But it’s now clear that the B team is not concerned with US interests—they despise diplomacy, and thirst for war.”

President Trump described the latest sanctions as “a strong and proportionate response to Iran’s increasingly provocative actions.”

This comes after Iranian forces shot down a US military drone, and President Trump claimed he called off a retaliation to “spare lives.”

The US last week blamed Iran of attacking oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, an accusation they have denied.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If the image(s) bear our credit, this license also applies to them. What does that mean? For other permissions, please contact us.