The commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy said on January 7 that the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia were actually Jewish, and that their conflict with Iran harkens back to 7th century battles between Muslim and Jewish tribes.
The speech was aired on Iran's Bushehr TV and translated by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“We cannot bear to see injustice in a Muslim country that is perpetrated by the Zionists and the seed of the Jews,” the commander, Gen. Alireza Tangsiri, says in a video recording of the speech.
“[We cannot bear to see] that Muslims are being slaughtered by people who call themselves Christians but are not,” he added, seeming to refer to the US's assassination of former IRGC Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
“These are the very same Jews — and I’d better say Zionists — whose hearts have never aligned with Islam, and even with the Prophet in his time,” he then said, probably in reference to Saudi Arabia.
"The grudge that the enemies harbored towards Hajj [Qassem] Soleimani resembles their grudge towards Imam Hussein in Karbala," he said, referring to the son of Ali, the first imam of Shia Muslims, and to the battle in which he was killed, which became a formative event for Shia Islam.
"This grudge still exists," he said.
The Iranian leadership is Shia, as opposed to that of Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni.
Tangsiri then mentioned other battles in which early Muslims fought local Jewish tribes, who were only Muslim "by name".
"Are the Saud clan really Muslims? They are the same Jews who were in Arabia back then,” he concluded.
The House of Saud is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia since 1744, composed of the descendants of Muhammad bin Saud and his brothers.
Iranian rhetoric against the US and Israel has been more fiery than usual in recent weeks due in part to the two-year anniversary of the January 3, 2020 killing of Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq.
On Wednesday, an animation depicting the assassination of former US President Donald Trump was published on the official website of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The video, entitled "Revenge is Inevitable" depicts Iran taking "revenge against the murderers and those who ordered the martyrdom of Soleimani," according to the website description. The video was created as part of a contest commemorating the deceased general.