Tehran has responded to controversial comments made by the Saudi Arabian crown prince, in which Prince Mohammad bin Salman compared Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
In a statement Friday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said bin Salman has discredited himself through his remarks. "No one in the world and in the international arena gives credit to him because of his immature and weak-minded behavior and remarks,” he said.
Saudi Arabia’s crown prince would also do well to remember the fates of other strongmen in the Middle East when they overstepped their boundaries, Qassemi warned.
"Now that he has decided to follow the path of famous regional dictators... He should think about their fate as well.”
In an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, bin Salman claimed that Khamenei is the "new Hitler of the Middle East.”
"But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work,” bin Salman told the Times. "We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle East.”
Though the Hitler comparison may seem rather odd, as Iran has not embarked on a genocidal campaign of world conquest, the NYT article attributes his remarks to "Iranian overreach,” particularly in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.
Allegations of Tehran’s regional ambitions follows the intrigue surrounding the short-lived resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
