First of all, the country of the UAE, in its current configuration, only came into existence in the year 1971, while Iran has been a regional superpower for the past 2500 years.
In addition, Professor Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, the renowned Iranian scholar and geopolitical expert, has said that Iranian Prime Minister Haji Mirza Aqasi's proclamation of ownership of all islands in the Persian Gulf in the 1840s was not challenged by any government at the time.
He notes that "Sir E. Beckett, the legal expert of the British Government at the Foreign Office ruled in 1932 that the Iranians possessed sovereignty over the Tunbs and Abu Musa in 1887-88." The UAE as a country only came into existence 123 years later.
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In 1888, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the British minister-plenipotentiary to Tehran, presented a War Office map to Iranian King Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar in which the islands were identified as Iranian territory.
In his 1892 book Persia and the Persian Question, George Nathaniel Curzon, the viceroy and governor-general of India, wrote that the islands belonged to Iran.
In fact, the UAE’s claims are so ridiculous that one can easily dismiss them as propagandistic rhetoric and psychological warfare.
Iranian officials have so far responded to the imprudence of their UAE counterparts in a relatively tolerant way, showing the international community Iran's determination to maintain peace and stability in the region and to implement its policy of détente.
However, the Iranian people will not stand idly by while others insult their national honor.
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About the Author
Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist, writer and media correspondent. In 2010, he won the presidential medal of Superior Iranian Youth for his media activities. He has also won the first prize of Iran's 18th Press Festival in the category of political articles. He has interviewed more than 200 public intellectuals, academicians, media personalities, politicians, thinkers and Nobel Prize laureates. His articles and interviews have been published in such media outlets as Press TV, Tehran Times, Iran Review, Global Research, Al-Arabiya, Your Middle East, Counter Currents, On Line Opinion and Voltaire Network and translated in Arabic, French, German, Turkish, Italian and Spanish.