Twenty-four Tehran lawmakers issued a public letter Wednesday criticizing President Masoud Pezeshkian over remarks made in a recent interview with American media, accusing him of undermining national unity and signaling weakness during wartime.
Citing Pezeshkian’s comments to US political commentator Tucker Carlson, the letter said the president’s openness to renewed negotiations with the United States and cooperation with the IAEA sent the wrong signal to adversaries after the recent conflict involving US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets.
“From a national security standpoint, such messaging risks inviting further aggression,” the MPs wrote.
“If before June 12 there were diverse views on resisting American overreach, this war generated rare unity around the necessity of confronting the United States and its proxy, the Zionist regime."
In the interview published Monday, Pezeshkian told Carlson: “We see no problem in reentering the negotiations. But how are we going to trust the United States again?” He added, “They totally ruined and destroyed diplomacy.”
The MPs also condemned Pezeshkian’s attempt to separate Israel’s actions from US responsibility.
“The Zionist regime is America’s military outpost in the region and could not have launched a war without Washington’s backing,” they wrote.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Carlson that Israel was seeking to embroil the United States in a regional "forever war," in his first international interview since US and Israeli attacks on Iran following Israel's surprise attacks of June 13.
Referring to the Supreme Leader’s speech on February 17, the letter reminded Pezeshkian that “a sense of weakness encourages the enemy to attack,” and urged him to adopt the “language of power” when addressing Western media.
The president’s effort to explain the meaning of “Death to America” was also rebuked. In his interview, Pezeshkian said the slogan refers to “death to crime, death to killing and carnage,” rather than targeting Americans directly.
Lawmakers called this a deviation from the position of the late founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini.
