Iran on Thursday called India and China “cradles of civilisation” after Donald Trump shared a transcript of a conservative talk show in which Michael Savage attacked U.S. birthright citizenship and referred to both countries as “some other hellhole on the planet.” The Iranian embassy in Hyderabad posted the response on X, saying, “China and India are the cradles of civilisation.”
In a second post, the embassy added: “In fact, the #hellhole is where its war-criminal president threatened to decimate the civilization in Iran.” The exchange turned a domestic American fight over immigration into a sharper public clash involving Iran, India and China, with the remarks circulating just as the Trump administration’s challenge to birthright citizenship is before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Savage, whose comments were amplified by Trump, argued against the rule that grants citizenship to most people born on U.S. soil. He said people allegedly arrive in the United States late in pregnancy to secure automatic citizenship for a child, then bring in family members from countries including India and China. He also called the Constitution outdated, said policy should be decided by public vote rather than courts or lawyers, criticized the American Civil Liberties Union and described its lawyers as “gangsters with laptops.”
The dispute lands in a debate that has shadowed U.S. politics for years and now sits at the top of the legal system. The United States was established in 1776, while India and China are widely regarded as among the world’s oldest continuous civilisations, with histories stretching back roughly 4,000 years. That contrast is part of why the Iranian embassy’s language struck a nerve: it paired civilizational pride with a direct rebuke of a U.S. political message that was already charged by immigration politics.
There is also a wider geopolitical edge to the fight. The source of the dispute ties it to pressure on Iran and to global energy-market strain, and India’s dependence on imported energy makes it more exposed than China, which is seen as better protected by large oil reserves and a more diversified energy mix. India is especially vulnerable in liquefied petroleum gas supplies. For now, the immediate answer is clear: Tehran used the moment to push back hard, and the backlash has widened a U.S. immigration argument into something far bigger than a talk-show transcript.
