In a direct slap to President Obama’s face, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called Wednesday for the United States to pay his country reparations for “hostile policies.”

Rouhani told China’s CCTV that Obama administration policies have cost his people “much loss and damage” and that “the Iranian people have suffered a lot as a result of the hostile policies of the U.S.,” according to the Washington Times.

This from a country that has labeled the United States “the Great Satan” for the last 38 years, that has been the chief sponsor and financier of global terrorism for decades, whose stated foreign policy is to wipe Israel off the map, and whose pursuit of nuclear weapons and regional hegemony continues unabated. And, the U.S. government is supposed to give an undisclosed sum of money to appease some ayatollah’s anxieties?

Rouhani, the mouthpiece for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei, said he “expect[s] White House politicians to abandon their past behavior of ignoring Iranian interests” and “take steps in the direction of respecting the rights of the Iranian nation, and at the same time undertake to compensate for the losses inflicted on Iran,” according to the Times’ coverage of the interview.

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Since the Treasury Department released $7 billion of frozen Persian assets five months ago as the price to negotiate an impossible agreement for Iran to abandon its quest for nuclear bombs, international companies have beat a path to Tehran’s door in hopes of doing more business and further the removal of sanctions.

So it came as no surprise that Rouhani said on Chinese television that he was “in no hurry, neither in negotiations nor in reaching the final agreement” with Western leaders, because he has Russia and China at his back and time on his side.

Support for that assertion came from Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that trade delegations were visiting Iran non-stop, that Iran had halved its 40 percent inflation rate and that its economy was projected to grow this year.

The White House has yet to respond to Rouhani’s outlandish demands, but charging Iran for seizing and burning the U.S. Embassy there in 1979 and holding 60 Americans hostage for 444 days would seem a logical place to start.

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Richard Berkow

Former political news reporter Richard Berkow lost his idealism in the Kennedy years, and his innocence in Vietnam, Lebanon, and the Soviet Union. He hasn’t mellowed since, and can be harassed at [email protected]

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