January 17, 2025
A small French city used humor as it tried to convince its citizens to sort their trash, but ended up setting off an international brouhaha when the Islamic Republic didn’t see any humor in the city’s use of a picture of the Supreme Leader as an example of the “trash” to be sorted.
The city swiftly backtracked, with the mayor ordering the signs with Ali Khamenehi’s picture be taken down because he feared the Islamic Republic might launch a terrorist attack against his city. Tehran called the posters “insulting” in just the latest example of strained relations between the two countries.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said the posters were “hate speech.” The southern city of Beziers with a population of 80,000 ran an environmental campaign with posters on buses using portraits of Iran’s Khamenehi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The posters were topped with the slogan, “Don’t forget to sort your trash.”
This sparked a forceful condemnation from Iran’s Foreign Ministry, which called the campaign “offensive” on January 9. Beziers’ far-right mayor, Robert Menard, insisted the flyers were created in jest, but ordered the posters removed as a “precautionary measure.” Menard said, “We take this very seriously. I don’t want there to be the slightest problem, for example, for our bus drivers.”
But he did defend the flyers, saying they brought attention to the “real problem” of waste management. “We’ve run lots of campaigns, but they never achieve anything. Nobody even notices them. This one, at least, everyone noticed,” said Menard. Unfortunately for France, some of those who noticed were in Tehran.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry called on the French government “to take the appropriate measures to prevent a repetition of such provocative actions.”
“The use of offensive content against officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a flagrant violation of internationally accepted principles and rules based on respect for the cultural values of other nations,” said the director general for Western Europe, Majid Nili. It was umpteenth time the Foreign Ministry invented international standards that it attempted to impose on others but not on the Islamic Republic, which frequently ridicules foreign leaders. Relations are already strained between the two countries, with France urging its citizens two days earlier to avoid traveling to Iran until three French nationals held there as “hostages” have been released.
Three days before the poster incident, French President Emmanuel Macron said Iran was “the main strategic and security challenge for France, Europeans, the entire region and beyond.” Iran called such remarks “baseless” and urged France “to reconsider its non-constructive approaches to peace and stability.” The trash incident recalls a case in 1974 when an obscure US publication called US Senator William Scott of Virginia one of the 10 “dumbest” members of the US Senate.
No one noticed the story until Scott called a news conference to denounce it. Scott then became universally known as the country’s dumbest senator. The Scott case has often been cited in the US as an example of how not to respond to an attack. There has been no comment on the poster from Russia or North Korea.