Code Pink, an anti-war group and official partner of the Women’s March, reportedly defended Iran’s right to a missile defense program at a press conference in Tehran, Seth Frantzman reported Tuesday in The Jerusalem Post.

In late February, Code Pink embarked on an “American peace delegation” to the Islamic Republic, which saw the 28-person-strong group meet with selected individuals and organizations, including Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on February 25.

“It was quite amazing to have a chance to speak for an hour and a half to the foreign minister,” Medea Benjamin, Code Pink co-founder, told Democracy Now.

At a press conference hosted by the semi-official Fars News agency on February 28, titled “anti-war organization Code Pink in Iran,” the organization blasted the Trump administration for withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and said Israel and Saudi Arabia had carried out lobbying against the agreement.

“The Israelis got as a compensation more of our tax dollars,” the agency quoted Benjamin. Several of the group’s activists were seen holding banners (deleted comma) demanding “peace with Iran.”

The activists told journalists that their work is effective “because the American people are tired of war and although the Trump administration claims that Iran is the source of all the challenges and conflicts in the Middle East, many Americans have come to believe that this claim is wrong.”

Female participants covered their hair with pink headscarves in accordance with Iran’s draconian dress code, while the men on the delegation wore pink T-shirts. Code Pink is a self-declared “feminist” organization.

The group also claims to be anti-war, and yet, members of the delegation appear to have praised the military in Iran. Fars News quoted one activist as saying that the U.S. military is “aware of the strength of the Iranian army” and that Iran was a country of 80 million people.

“The anti-war activists emphasized Iran’s right to missile defense, adding that since the U.S. has military bases around Iran, it is Iran’s right to upgrade its defense capability,” the agency reported. Another activist asserted that “the U.S. government was not allowed to criticize the Zionists in response to a question about the unequivocal support of the U.S. government for the Zionist regime.”

In an op-ed published in JNS on January 17, The Israel Project CEO and President, Josh Block, said that Code Pink was blind to the evils of the Iranian regime. “Code Pink is meeting with representatives of a system that arrest and sometimes murder women for taking off the hijab in an act of ultimate defiance against the draconian laws of the 1979 Islamic revolution,” Block continued. “Women that groups such as Code Pink have vowed to protect.”

He added: “They are legitimizing a regime that brutally oppresses workers and teachers who peacefully protest the Islamic Republic’s foreign adventurism at the expensive of a collapsing economy…People who are truly anti-war. Code Pink, not so much.”

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