US advert against Iran was withdrawn

Dubai: An advertisement placed on buses in Washington D.C. as well as on billboards in other parts of the US, which was deemed "offensive" and "insulting" to the Iranians, has been withdrawn following protests from the Iranian-American community there.

Quoting US media outlets, the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) said in a statement that the advertisement that says "Iran is making a killing" has been suspended.

The advert showed a picture of a smiling Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waving his hand. The same ad was also put on billboards in different parts in the US, according to CNN.

The advert also shows a text running next to an oil barrel and a pile of US dollars that says: "Iran makes a KILLING every day we wait".

The word "killing" was set in bold capital letters.

NIAC welcomed the suspension of the adverts.

The group said it "believed that this was an important moment for the Iranian-American community to set a precedent."

"NIAC had made clear that no action short of replacing the ads would be acceptable, including half-measures or semantic fixes," a NIAC statement said.

"Other communities are not subjected to this type of treatment; the Iranian-American community should be no exception," NIAC Policy Director Jamal Abdi was quoted saying.

"It was important that we remained steadfast on this point and refused to compromise on our call for these ads to be suspended."

‘Security tensions'

NIAC, which is a nonpartisan and non-profit organisation, has called since May on the American Values Network (AVN) to terminate the campaign, arguing "that the ads carelessly fuelled national security tensions and were insulting to Iranians and Iranian Americans".

Abdi met with ANV, the group that was behind the ad campaign, to discuss the Iranian-American community's concerns.

ANV is a progressive American group that has been launched last year and is allowed, according to the law, to do issue-based organising, advertising, lobbying and raising money through non-tax deductible donations.

While AVN has suspended the advert, it refused to acknowledge that the campaign was offensive to the Iranian-American community.

However, the ad seems to have a different purpose. It requires more focus to realise that the ad supported clean energy legislation that is still pending, and an end to the US dependence on oil imports from countries like Iran, a CNN report noted.

But the ad received the attention of hundreds of thousands of Iranian Americans in the US, while the NIAC demanded the removal of the "insulting" and "destructive" ad.