Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian painted Iran as “the victim of terrorism” by the United States and Israel in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) on Wednesday.
Naturally, he completely whitewashed Iran’s long history of supporting terrorism, and its current string of terrorist attacks on neighboring countries and civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
“The United States president described us as terrorists. We have been the victims of terrorism. I come from an Iran in which our esteemed Supreme Leader was assassinated without any legal framework or reason,” he railed in his opening.
Pezeshkian continued by accusing the United States and Israel of deliberately targeting civilians, including children, and claiming his regime has “only defended ourselves.”
“We are not terrorists. Our innocent people have been the targets of cowardly attacks and aggressions imposed upon our country, and we defended ourselves with utmost strength,” he boasted.
“America and Israel attacked us, equipped with the latest technology and weapons systems, and our people stood steadfast. Yes, they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee. We did not bow our head,” he continued. “We responded, but we did not hit civilian populations.”
The latter assertion is factually inaccurate, as Iran’s entire “military strategy” revolves around attacking civilian targets on land and at sea, and the regime slaughtered thousands of its own civilians to put down an uprising before the war.
Pezeshkian did not mention any of these details. He even railed against Israel for assassinating Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, as if the problem was Israel killing one of the architects of the horrific October 7 massacre, not Iran giving him shelter.
“In Gaza, over 80,000 innocent civilians have been murdered, brutally murdered. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. They are committing genocide by using the so-called technologies that they have at their disposal. Then they label others as terrorists,” he huffed, referring to the war started by Iran’s friends in Hamas when they attacked Israel on October 7, 2023.
Pezeshkian’s speech was a long rant along those lines, repeatedly accusing the United States and Israel of “terrorism” while absurdly painting Iran as a peace-loving innocent power that only wants nuclear energy for “progress.”
“For our country, peaceful nuclear technology is part of our inherent progress. For our sick people, it is cure and treatment. For the agricultural sector, it is food security. For industry, it is advancement and progress and supply of electrical energy,” he said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other watchdogs have routinely attested to the contrary of this claim. Iran has enriched uranium to levels far beyond any of the uses Pezeshkian listed, and it conceals its activities from investigators. The IAEA Board of Governors found Iran to be in breach of its nuclear obligations in June 2025, and found Iran to be in non-compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in September 2026.
Pezeskhian said Iran will remain in non-compliance because it “does not accept for nuclear technology to be at the exclusive disposal of a handful” of nations, but he hinted that if the world gives “the needed security to the people and nation of Iran,” it might become less intransigent.
“The people of Iran, in the past seven months, our people, have been in the streets every night demonstrating in support of their land, of their homeland, so as to not allow those who were equipped and trained and armed by Israel and America to cause disruption in the security of their country,” he said, regurgitating regime propaganda that the innocent civilians murdered by Iran were all foreign operatives controlled by the evil Jews and Americans.
Another of Pezeshkian’s absurd lies was his claim that Iran’s theocratic rulers “do not wish to use our power for hegemony,” when Iran has squandered vast amounts of its national wealth on building a hegemonic network of terrorists across the Middle East – and every element of that network, from Hamas, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, to the Shiite militias of Iraq, to the Houthi insurgents of Yemen – is launching deadly attacks at Iran’s behest to this day.
Pezeshkian tried to justify his regime’s wanton attacks on neighboring states by claiming, “We live in a region in which warfare knows no borders,” and “crisis in one land will spill into the surrounding nations.”
The Iranian president sought to justify Iran’s scheme for extorting protection money in the Strait of Hormuz by claiming it was merely a reluctant response to American and Israeli aggression, while forgetting to mention that the demand for ransoms has teeth only because Iran has demonstrated its willingness to attack and murder sailors from many other countries.
“In waters in the Strait of Hormuz, we cannot let some have free access and gain their interests from a waterway, while at the same time using that waterway to impose their aggressions upon us, to impose insecurity upon us, to forbid us access to our own waterways,” he said, referring to the U.S. blockade imposed after Iran began launching terror attacks on civilian vessels in the strait.
“They close access for us to our own waterway, yet they keep supplying missiles and deadly military technologies to bring insecurity to all of the lands surrounding that waterway,” he fumed, undermining his prior claims that Iran only wants peaceful relations with those “lands surrounding the waterway.”
Pezeshkian’s long speech transitioned into an extended rant about the Palestinians and Israeli “genocide,” naturally without any acknowledgement of the October 7 atrocities or Iran’s role in sponsoring Palestinian terrorism. All of his earlier ramblings about peaceful coexistence dissolved as he sought to justify terrorism in the name of “resistance.”
“If a human being is driven from his or her land, they will resist. If their homes are subjected to bombings and aggression and attacks, they will resist. What other choice do they have? Succumb to bullying?” he railed. “To be driven from their homes, from their lands, and remain silent in the face of these threats and dangers?”
Pezeshkian accused the world of hypocrisy for worrying about atomic weapons in the hands of the Iranian theocracy, but accepting them in the hands of Israel.
“I will repeat: the nuclear weapon is in Israel, but the inspectors are in Iran. Israel kills, but Iran is subject to sanctions. This is a true tragedy, which would make anyone hearing it laugh, at best. They kill, we are sanctioned, we are punished,” he complained.
After regurgitating some standard U.N. boilerplate about the longing for a more just and peaceful world and a future where “no power will have the right to determine the future of a people other than those people themselves” – which would sound great to all the people his regime has murdered to stay in power – Pezeshkian concluded by referencing President Donald Trump’s address to the UNGA on Tuesday. He said Trump’s speech “goes against the very essence and charter and the spirit of the United Nations.”
“He must know that the resistance of the Iranian people will only increase in the face of sanctions, increased pressure, increased bullying. We will never bow our heads, or bend at the knee,” he vowed.
As with so many of the speeches given by despots, dictators, and terrorists at the U.N., Pezeshkian’s address would sound better to an audience that was completely unfamiliar with everything the Islamic Republic of Iran has been doing, and financing, since 1979.
Read the full article here