Iranian social media users attacked a meme by government-run media quoting Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif saying that Iran will “survive” the US sanctions reimposed after President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal.

At Rome Med 2018—Mediterranean Dialogues, a conference held Nov. 22-24, Zarif was reminded, “You’ve insisted many times that Iran has survived since 1979,” which prompted him to respond, “We haven’t survived since 1979, we’ve survived 7 millennia.” To the laugher and applause of the audience, he added, jovially, “I’m in Italy, so I can say that Italians and Iranians have had empires that have lasted longer than the entire life of some countries.”

In a more serious tone, Zarif continued, “We’ve survived, and we’ve progressed. Come to Iran today and see that we have progressed in many areas. Of course, we lack in some areas. There has been pressure on Iran. There are problems, economic problems, economic hardship for our population. Sanctions, as you know, always target ordinary people. At the end of the day, those are the people who suffer from sanctions. And that is the purpose of these sanctions, and that is the purpose of the previous sanctions. We’ve been under sanctions for 40 years. And that point that I made about the depth of our history gives us this perspective that we should not submit to bullying.” 

The response by Zarif, who has been traveling extensively trying to salvage the nuclear deal with European countries while simultaneously projecting a brave face on sanctions, might have been quickly forgotten or buried by other stories from around the world, but Pad, the official Twitter account of the media office of President Hassan Rouhani's administration not only tweeted a video of that segment of the Rome Med conference but also posted a picture of a defiant and stoic Zarif with the text, “We’ll survive.”