ALI Khamenei died on February 28 (Iran itself confirms) during joint US-Israeli air strikes barely a month after his regime killed 33,000 of his own citizens amid the latest wave of protests against the theocracy that he led.
While it is no surprise that Khamenei is mourned as a martyr by Iranian state media, it is shocking that some of their counterparts in the West appear to be lamenting his death.
Khamenei, 86, was Supreme Leader for 36 years and spent many more working up to that position. He succeeded Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini in 1989, ten years after the revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty, after serving as President.
As commander-in-chief, Khamenei was the man ultimately responsible for decades of terrorism at home and abroad, regional imperialism, insurgency by proxies (including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis), attempted assassinations of Western politicians, covert actions against Jewish centres and Iranian exiles (including in Britain), illegal ‘nuclearisation’, illegal arms imports and oil exports with China and Russia, and the repression of dissenters, democrats, women, Jews, Christians, Sunnis and dissident Shiites.
Nonetheless some left-wing Western media are spinning Khamenei as a flawed victim of Western disinformation, and as a pious, patriotic and cultured man.
Although the Guardian admits that Khamenei ‘presided’ over a ‘brutally enforced’ theocracy, it goes on to asserts that ‘theocratic rule at home’ is instrumental to ‘an anti-Western axis of resistance’.
The newspaper says: ‘Khamenei had always viewed the West as being bent on regime change in Iran, either through a velvet revolution, economic pressure via sanctions, or military intervention. Every decision that he made was in this context.’
‘Every decision’? The Guardian is implying that murdering opponents and rigging elections were decisions made in the context of Western threats against his regime – in other words, that the West drove him to it.
The Guardian’s profile qualifies Khamenei’s extreme interpretation of Islam with the observation that he was an ‘avid reader of western literature – including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Grapes of Wrath, and even the writings of Leo Tolstoy . . . Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which Khamenei once described as “miraculous” and a “book of wisdom”, [and] other literary works, including Persian poetry.’
It must be of great comfort to Guardian readers that Khamenei was as cultured as they are.
The New York Times headlined Khamenei as a ‘hard-line cleric who made Iran a regional power’. While he ‘brutally crushed dissent’, he stood up to Israel and the US. Then comes a case of reversed morality. The NYT presents the US drone strike of January 2020 that killed the commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Major General Qassim Suleimani, as ‘pushing the two countries to the brink of war’ without mentioning that the Trump administration was retaliating against the man most practically responsible for resourcing and training the Shia insurgents who killed thousands of Western personnel in Iraq and Syria since 2003.
The Washington Post admires Khamenei’s ‘bushy white beard and easy smile’ and humble and ‘avuncular’ public persona. It could have been talking about Father Christmas.
Even the Wall Street Journal’s headline suggests all virtue and no vice, describing the Ayatollah as a man who ‘nurtured the country’s global ambitions but struggled at home with a withering economy’.
CNN portrays Khamenei ‘standing firm against decades of Western and Israeli pressure’, expanding Iran’s ‘influence far beyond its borders, [and] earning a reputation as a formidable and dangerous regional power to be reckoned with’.
CNN introduces another case of reversed morality, by lamenting that Iran’s ‘hopes of reaching a detente with the West were crushed by Israel’s attack on Iran’ in 2025. Poor innocent Iran! Less than two years after its proxies attacked Israel . . .
NPR (National Public Radio) dates Iran’s victimisation earlier, to 2018, when the Trump administration withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which traded Western cash for under-verified Iranian promises not to weaponise its nuclear programme (guaranteed in July 2015 by Barack Obama’s administration and the governments of Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany).
NPR concludes that Iran’s nuclear weaponisation is the effect not the cause of US withdrawal from JCPOA.
While all the obituaries cited above do acknowledge some Iranian outrages, they ignore others such as the public mass executions of political prisoners and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The left is writing hagiographies of Khamenei to cast Western retaliation as aggression.
Meanwhile, post-neoconservatives have an overlapping interest to cast Western confrontation as unnecessary as the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
For the British Government, downplaying Iran’s threats and abuses draws attention from Starmer’s curious decision to forbid use of US bases on British territory to attack Iran, only to U-turn days later on defensive grounds (this was before any Iranian attack on any British base).
Mixed up in this proximate embarrassment is the Labour Party’s concern not to alienate further its Muslim base, or to ramp up fear of asylum seekers coming from Iran.
It reminds me of its spin of Axel Rudakubana as a Welsh choirboy and a victim of racism after he stabbed to death three little girls at a dance class in Southport in July 2024. While public authorities refused to identify whom they had arrested, social media misidentified Rudakubana as a recent Muslim asylum claimant. Later we learned that this misidentification is closer to the truth that the Government (and some journalists) already knew: he is a second-generation immigrant, Islamist fanboy, who consumed terrorist propaganda and manuals, attacked his schoolmates, and was twice referred to the counter-terrorist programme Prevent.
Woke politicians and their lackeys in the media are in the habit of protecting a fashionable minority, and of smearing everyone else by suggesting they provoke and spread lies about Islamist terrorists.
