If several dozen Iranians staged a violent protest in front of the Italian embassy in Tehran this week, there was a reason for it. In just a little more than a week, Italy has gone from being a kind of friend and certainly a major business partner with the Iranians — one of biggest in Europe, in fact — to leading the anti-Iran brigade.<\/p>\n
Silvio Berlusconi set the tone on a trip to Israel at the beginning of February, vowing his friendship with the Israelis, and talking tough about Iran. He also compared Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Adolph Hitler.<\/p>\n
The Iranian state-controlled media said Berlusconi was a slave of Israel, and called the Italian Ambassador to Tehran in for an explanation earlier this week. The explanation is probably that Europe is trying to show a united front in threatening sanctions on Iran because of its nuclear program. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had initially warned against more sanctions, but has now changed his tack.<\/p>\n
Frattini called the incident of demonstrators throwing rocks an “assault” on the Italian Embassy. That may have been an exaggeration, but it was loud and rowdy, with shouts of “Death to Italy” and “Death to Berlusconi,” which is not the kind of thing you expect to hear from a friendly country. Frattini said the Italian ambassador would not attend Thursday’s ceremonies marking the Iranian revolution.<\/p>\n
Italy has also decided to cut its investments in Iran, specifically any future deals with the state-controlled oil company ENI.\u00a0But hundreds of other Italian companies are still doing billions of dollars of business with Iran, and unless the spat gets a lot worse than shouting and rock throwing, they’re probably not going to stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If several dozen Iranians staged a violent protest in front of the Italian embassy in Tehran this week, there was a reason for it. In just a little more than a week, Italy has gone from being a kind of friend and certainly a major business partner with the Iranians — one of biggest in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}