Netanyahu's Claims about Nuke House in Tehran Village Ripple Wave of Jokes in Cyberspace
TEHRAN (Basirat): The name of a fruit growing village in rural Tehran has gone viral in the cyberspace after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the small village homed a nuclear warehouse.
Iranian citizens are treating the claims as a huge joke not in any way close to
realities and facts, and even some young people of the village have gone to the
front gate of the rug cleaning place taking selfies and shooting videos.
Now, the social media users are taking Netanyahu as a source of fun and laughter or picking him as a stand-up comedian or comedy showman who has been misled by some advisors who themselves have been tricked by a bunch of people puling their legs.
Atomic Persian Carpet
The social media and instant messaging applications are flooded with torrents of cartoons and films basing their fun upon the claims of Netanyahu made at the UNGA session.
The Israeli premier has turned into the butt of a lot of jokes and gibes which are quickly being shared and spread online.
While the village exits in the real world and the latest available data from the national census conducted by the statistical center of Iran shows that the village is inhabited by around 2800 people, the name has long been used by Persian-language speakers as a slang word with "NoWhereLand" meaning. A majority of Iranians have expressed surprise that prior to hearing Netanyahu's allegations they had no idea that a real place with such a name existed in Iran as they mostly used such a word as a slang term to refer to a remote and unimportant place in a pejorative context.
The issue has gone so far as you can use the hashtag #Turquzabad to follow the trend and find out lots and lots of jokes and material.
Photos showing cleaned rugs and rural people watching their cattle have been uploaded with captions of "nuclear activities" in #Turquzabad.
Nuclear activities like cattle watching in Turquzabad
Putting together what Netanyahu said with the photos of people taking selfies with the so called "nuclear storage facility" make it even more ridiculous. Netanyahu said Iran had recently moved 15kg of radioactive material from the warehouse and "spread it around Tehran in an effort to hide the evidence”. He claimed the warehouse at one point may have held up to 300 tons of material and equipment.
"Netanyahu must explain how Israel, as the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East region, can put itself in a position to level such brazen accusations against a country whose nuclear program has been repeatedly declared peaceful by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told the state-run Islamic republic news agency, shortly after the claims made by Netanyahu.
Israel is estimated to have 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. The regime, however, refuses to either accept or deny having the weapons.
It has also evaded signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in flagrant violation of a UN Security Council resolution amid staunch endeavor by the United States and other Western states on international levels in favor of its non-commitment to the accord.
Iran has repeatedly announced that its nuclear program is merely for peaceful purposes and poses no threat to the international peace and security. Iran's nuclear facilities have been under the constant monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency for the last two decades. But a nuclear accord signed by Iran and six world powers in 2015 placed the country under even stricter rules of supervision and inspection. Yet, the UN nuclear watchdog has underlined in 12 reports under the deal as well as dozens of more reports prior to the endorsement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that there has never been any anomily at Iran's nuclear program to indicate a move or drive towards a military nuclear capability, reasserting that the country's nuclear program has remained strictly loyal to its stated "peaceful purposes".
Back in June, the Iranian foreign minister decried Israel’s nukes as a real threat to the Middle East region and the rest of the world, calling for a new focus on the occupying regime’s nuclear arsenal.
Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif posted a message on his official Twitter account, saying although Iran had no nuclear weapons, Israel, which is the sole Middle Eastern country to possess such weapons, continued to "howl" about "fabricated" Iranian "ambitions".
Source:FNA
