[Asharq al-Aswat] Thousands of Iranians chanted "Death to America™" as they staged Thursday a mass protest against the "Great Satan™" to mark the 31st anniversary of the capture of the American embassy by Islamist students. Waving Iranian flags and carrying anti-US banners alongside posters of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the largely young crowd also shouted anti-Israel slogans.Banners saying "I will give my life for the leader (Khamenei)"
"Saddam, we will defend you with our blood!"
and another quoting Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as saying, "If you want to shout, shout at the US", were displayed at the closed embassy compound in central Tehran, an AFP correspondent reported.
Iran annually on November 4 marks the anniversary of the capture of the US embassy by Islamist students in Tehran in 1979, months after the Islamic revolution which toppled the US-backed shah. The embassy has remained closed and the US and Iran have had no diplomatic ties since then.
The students, who took 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days, said they were responding to Washington's refusal to hand over the deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Ezatollah Eragami, the keynote speaker at the rally and one of the 1979 hostage takers, hit out at US President Barack
B.O.Obama over Washington's foreign policy.
"Obama has acted very weakly and badly when it comes to his foreign policy," Eragami, who now heads Iranian state media, told the cheering crowd. "The reason for that is that he is using an array of advisers who are exhausted bureaucrats."
The organisers of Thursday's anti-US demonstration, in their final declaration, said that Iran considers "America as the Great Satan™ and enemy number one."