What’s the deal with Iran’s ‘Death to America’ slogan?

Iranian lawmakers shouted the slogan and set fire to a paper US flag in parliament, a day after President Trump pulled out of the landmark nuclear deal.

But the chant has a long history and has been used in Iran since its 1979 Islamic Revolution.
to the Shah" outside the US embassy in Tehran, including the day the embassy was seized on November 4, 1979.

This slogan used to also include a number of countries such as the Soviet Union, Israel, Britain, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as well as targeting "hypocrites" of the Iranian dissident group Mujahideen Khalq.

As the years passed and international circumstances changed, that list began to shrink until only the United States remained.

When President Rouhani’s government reached a landmark nuclear deal with Western powers in 2015, he encouraged Iranian to abandon chant, but he failed to do so entirely.

Hardliners continued to use it as a tool of pressure against Rowhani to undermine his attempts to ease tensions with America

The chant has also been heard by supporters of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is closely aligned to Iran.

Also, the slogan of the Houthis, a Shiite rebel group in Yemen also supported by Iran, is "God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
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