What exactly does “Death to America” mean? In a statement posted to his English-language Twitter account on Tuesday, Iran’s supreme leader explained that his country’s controversial slogan (officially translated as “Down with U.S.”) was not aimed at the United States as a nation. Instead, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote, it was a critique of U.S. policies and “arrogance.”

Understandably, U.S. critics of the Iranian regime have not been reassured. Every Nov. 4, a small crowd of Iranians gather outside the former U.S. embassy in Tehran and celebrate the anniversary of the start of the Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 Americans were held for 444 days in the turbulent aftermath of the Iranian revolution. In what has become an annual expression of visceral anti-American sentiment, local authorities put up anti-U.S. billboards and crowds burn flags and chant “Death to America” near the former embassy.

Even after this summer’s historic nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers, there seems to be little sign that the slogan’s days are numbered. Worse still, Khamenei’s comments may, in fact, be a sign of resurging anti-Americanism in Iran.

“Death to America” has a long history. The slogan appears to have first been chanted during the protests that led to Iran’s 1979 revolution, when it was originally used to target Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah. In a 2009 interview with the Financial Times, Mohsen Sazegara, who was an aide to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a founder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, suggested that he had come up with the phrase.

Read the article “Why ‘Death to America’ Won’t Go Away” on washingtonpost.com.