Iranian students: It feels good to 'punch America in the mouth'
The girls were celebrating the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFIranians burn US flag 311 R(photo credit: Reuters)
On the 40th anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iranian schoolgirls demonstrated saying “Death to America! Death to Israel!” According to a video translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).On November 4, 1979, several hundred students gathered outside the United States Embassy in Tehran, intent on occupying the premises and seizing its staff as hostages.The demonstrating girls told the reporter, in the report aired by Iran’s Hamoon TV, that they were celebrating the takeover of the “spies’ nest,” and that it feels good to “punch America in the mouth,” drawing similarities between being a student today to being a fighter in the eight-year Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988.The background to the hostage crisis went back to the first interventions staged by the US in Iran decades before the Islamic Revolution. In 1953, the America responded to then-Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mosaddegh’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by supporting and staging a coup d'état aimed at installing a more friendly leader, Shah Mohammad Reza.The recent demonstrations took place in the Sistan and Baluchestan provinces of southeastern Iran.
