Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has recently taken to social media to praise the rising anti-Israel protests that have swept across American universities this past week.
“See what is happening in the world,” Khamenei wrote on X. “In Western countries, in England and France, and in states across the US itself, people are coming out in huge numbers to chant slogans against Israel and America. US and Israel’s reputation has been ruined. They truly have no solution.”
In an analysis of Khamenei’s recent remarks, Iran International viewed the stunt as “glaringly hypocritical” from a regime that “suspends, beats and imprisons” its students for much less than what American students have been doing.
The UK-based news agency contends that Khamenei has proven himself to be an “archenemy of free and critical thinking,” as exemplified by his actions, from shutting down universities in the name of Cultural Revolution in the early 1980s to the bloody attack on dormitories at the University of Tehran in the late 1990s and the siege of Sharif University of Technology in 2022. As a result, Iran’s prisons are reportedly called ‘universities’ by the locals because of the many students, graduates, and educators who have been imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
Meanwhile, tensions rose at Columbia University when student protesters announced via social media that they had occupied a building adjacent to the campus’s South Lawn on Tuesday morning. If follows the university’s decision to suspend students who had not vacated a pro-Arab encampment on the university grounds by Monday’s 2 pm deadline, according to the Washington Post.
