Iran will not back down from its nuclear ambitions despite new Western sanctions announced this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Wednesday in a speech broadcast on state television.
“The Iranian nation will not back down an iota, and will not allow the slightest move to encroach on the nation’s rights,” he told a crowd in the town of Pakdasht, east of Tehran.
Referring to the United States, Britain and Canada, which Monday unveiled coordinated unilateral sanctions against Iran’s financial sector, he said: “I advise them to cease these tantrums, and stop thinking that baring their claws and fangs will stop the Iranian nation.” Ahmadinejad reiterated that, contrary to Western claims Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, “we do not need an atomic bomb.”
“They ask us to prove that we do not have an atomic bomb… How can we prove something that does not exist? It is as if someone asks another person to prove that he is healthy… Sickness is proveable,” he said. Ahmadinejad said Western leaders “just talk with their eyes shut,” and described the Europeans as “lackeys” of the United States. He took a swipe at a call by France for the West to freeze Iranian central bank assets and put an embargo on Iran’s oil exports.
“The slightest move to grab Iranian assets is akin to a great heist — and Iran will treat the person responsible as a thief,” he said. Turning to US sanctions, which declare the whole of Iran’s financial sector “of primary money-laundering concern”, Ahmadinejad said: “They accuse the Iranian nation of money laundering. We have no need to launder money.”
