Diplomats and the U.S. State Department said Friday that Iran’s foreign minister can visit the country’s ailing U.N. ambassador at a New York hospital only if Tehran releases an American citizen. Bravo State Department for treating Iran like a kidnapper pariah country.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, who is in New York for the annual U.N. gathering of world leaders, had hoped to visit Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi as an American hospital is treating him for cancer. Due to previous travel ban, he requested permission from the State Department to visit him. State denied him the permission unless Iran releases a kidnapped American citizen.
The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on Zarif that severely limit where he can go in New York City. The State Department confirmed Zarif wants to visit “a colleague who is in the hospital receiving world class care.”
The State Department said:
Iran has wrongfully detained several U.S. citizens for years, to the pain of their families and friends they cannot freely visit. We have relayed to the Iranian Mission that the travel request will be granted if Iran releases a U.S. citizen.
STATE DEPARTMENT ACTIONS ARE WARRANTED
Iran has a long habit of kidnapping Americans going back to the beginning of its revolution in 1979. The Hill wrote an Op-Ed on this matter detailing this notorious and terrorizing habit. It wrote:
Iran has pursued a deliberate policy of kidnapping and unjustly detaining innocent Americans since the very beginning of its revolutionary regime. In its infancy in 1979, the regime violated every norm of diplomacy for the past two millennia by holding 52 American diplomats from our embassy in Tehran hostage for 444 days.
And every time Iran kidnaps a U.S. citizen, it seeks ransoms in the billions. The previous administration was only too happy to pay.
Time has come to treat Iran like the pariah country that it is.
AP contributed to this article.
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