Leader’s Advisor to Rubio: You’ve No Right to Lecture Others on Morality

By Staff, Agencies

The senior advisor to Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei Ali Akbar Velayati has warned US Secretary of State Marco Rubio against “lecturing others on morality” after he glorified ancient Greeks’ wartime resistance while trying to disparage the Iranian nation’s steadfastness in the face of aggressors.

Velayati made the remarks in a post on X on Saturday after Rubio hailed the Greeks for “choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty” during the confrontation with the Achaemenids in 480 BC. The US top diplomat, meanwhile, tried to denigrate Iran’s way of “portraying martyrdom as an end to itself.”

Velayati denounced the speech for containing such “an obvious contradiction.”

“Praising resistance when it serves ‘one’s own’ and denigrating it when it comes from ‘the other’ is not civilization; it is sophistry in the service of domination. Mr. Rubio, your problem is not with the Islamic Revolution; It is with a strong, independent Iranian civilization,” he wrote.

“Those who brought about the catastrophes of Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have no right to lecture others on morality!”

Earlier, Major General Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council [SNSC], invoked the ancient defeat of Rome by Sasanian king Shapur I to counter the US official’s distorted narrative.

“When they go to Athens after defeat and humiliation before Iran to shape a narrative of a civilizational war, it would be better for them to read another important part of history: where the Roman emperor knelt before Shapur I of the Sasanian Empire,” he wrote.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf likewise rebuked Rubio’s imperialist rhetoric, warning that foreign powers seeking to erase ancient civilizations would ultimately face historic humiliation and defeat.

The Iranian nation has successfully defied self-proclaimed “masters of the universe” for millennia, the top legislator wrote in a post on X.

“They [the invaders] came in fire and flame, only to depart in dust and shame,” Qalibaf stated, adding, “Those who chase Alexander’s legacy will share Valerian’s fate: You will kneel.”