A woman held a bright yellow poster above the crowd in central Tehran on Wednesday. It showed US President Donald Trump as a blood-stained bulldog on a leash, held by a horned, devil-like figure resembling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Beneath the drawing, in English and Persian, were the words “Serving the Devil!”
Photo Credit: AFP
It was one of many such images at the annual anti-American rally outside the former US embassy. The rally came hours after US voters stripped Trump’s Republicans of control of Congress, partly over the Iran war.
Chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” echoed through the area. Demonstrators waved Iranian flags and carried banners denouncing Washington and Israel.
Some called for revenge for the former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the US-Israeli strikes that sparked the regional war in late February.
Trump appeared on placards in several forms. One carried two identical prints of him behind bars, hands cuffed and chained, over the words “You will be punished” in English and Persian. Two girls held up cut-out caricatures of Netanyahu and Trump in striped prison uniforms, their hands and feet in chains.
Photo Credit: AFP
A third poster drew Trump as a pig with blood dripping from its mouth. Some posters carried the words “We will kill Trump” in English and Persian.
Flames filled the frame at one point, as a US flag was set alight. Israeli flag burned beside it.
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A giant display towered over the crowd and declared, “The people of Iran set the price.” Beside it, black oil barrels stretched across a world map. The display pointed to the rise in energy prices since the war began and Iran’s tussle over control of the Strait of Hormuz began.
Photo Credit: AFP
The rally came a day after Trump’s heavy midterm defeat, widely seen as a referendum on his turbulent second term.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, urged his people not to treat the result as a sign that US policy towards Iran is about to soften.
“Nov. 4 this year, Iranians understand their stance toward the criminal US more clearly and unequivocally than ever before. Nevertheless, reviewing the reasons for the US’s hostility, and the Iranian nation’s firm resistance to them, serves as a guiding light for the path ahead,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Tehran’s chief negotiator in talks with Washington, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, hailed the outcome.
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“Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” he wrote on X.
The annual rally marks the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That came months after the Islamic Revolution toppled the US-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
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The students who took over the embassy demanded the return of the shah, who was receiving cancer treatment in the US. They held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, and diplomatic ties between the two countries were cut in 1980.
Iranian authorities have since made the anniversary an annual show of defiance against what they call Western “arrogance”.
“Crown of arrogance on an empty brain,” read one banner on Wednesday, showing a crown dripping with blood.
