Imam Khamenei and Iran: misunderstood and manipulated
The western narratives have always painted a skewer picture of a highly educated and peace loving leader and nation.
Ali Khamenei hated weapons of mass destruction.
The Iranian leader, murdered by the Israeli military earlier this year, had issued a formal fatwa forbidding his people from producing nuclear bombs.
Nuclear energy was best used for peaceful purposes such as power generation, he argued, going against the advice of his advisors. How could any truly spiritual community focus on making mass killing devices?
Khamenei, whose funeral is taking place at the moment in front of a crowd of nine million people, became a hero to Shia Muslims around the world.
While he was not officially the equivalent of the Pope to Roman Catholics, he was a man whose principles provided leadership to the more than 200 million Shia Muslims around the world.
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DEFENSIVE POSITION
In taking this stand against nuclear bombs, Khamenei went against the urgings of his own generals and political analysts, who said that the US and Israel were unprincipled nations which would attack the country if they did not have defensive nuclear capability.
Repeated incursions and open threats revealed that Khamenei may have the moral high ground, but his advisors had got the facts right.
So the Iranian leadership eventually adopted a position they borrowed from the United States: “strategic ambiguity”.
The country’s store of uranium was enriched to a position between that of energy production and weapons production—and the level could be wound down or ramped up.
The message was clear: we know our attackers are violent and we know they disregard international law, so, Iranians, for our own defense, need options. We prefer peace. Our attackers prefer war. (It is worth noting that this is roughly the same as China’s rationale for investing in its military: to avoid war.)
Khamenei made harsh criticisms against Benjamin Netanyahu and wanted Israeli colonizers of Palestinian land to go home. These arguments were seen as unacceptable to many in the west.
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FALSE REPRESENTATION
He also asked Iranians to argue against the false representation of their country.
- Iran is portrayed as a secret builder of active nuclear weapons – that’s not true of Iran, but accurately describes Israel.
- Iran is portrayed as a nation refusing to allow inspections or sign the anti-proliferation treaty – again, this is untrue of Iran, but true of Israel.
- Iran is portrayed as having a history of attacking neighbors, but it’s actually Israel which has launched wars or assaults on seven neighboring countries.
The western press portrayed Iran as a medieval country which enslaved women – but under Khamenei, women became dominant in training for science and medicine, and make up 62% of students in higher education.
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NED, CIA AND MOSSAD NEWS BLACKOUT
The pestilent US National Endowment for Democracy has been active in Iran, energetically instilling hate for the Iranian leadership, since 1991. The CIA and Mossad ran parallel programs. (As is standard, the western mainstream media ran and still runs its usual news blackout on such activities.)
But these agents’ hate-cultivation work has been undone in recent years. Israel’s treatment of the people of Gaza, especially women and children, shocked Iranians. And then Israel spent 12 days making unprovoked bombing runs across in Iran in June of 2025.
This united most Iranians against Israel and the United States, as even some western mainstream media grudgingly reported at that time.
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TWO WAR CRIMES
And all this was before the launch of the disastrous US-Israel attack on Iran on 28 February, 2026, which began with two horrific war crimes.
- One was the killing of more than 40 people associated with the Iranian leadership, including children.
- The other was the horrific US double-tap bombing of a primary school in Minab, southern Iran, in which more than 100 children and 26 teachers were killed, and 95 more innocents injured.
NGOs, most which were discreetly funded by the US, tried to justify the unprovoked US-Israel attack on the country by claiming that Iran's rulers had killed 30,000 or 50,000 or 80,000 “peaceful protesters” – turning an unsuccessful Mossad-run armed coup into a public relations attack on Iranian leadership.
The western mainstream media fell for the ruse like a stone but multiple video leaks enabled the independent media to reveal the truth – heavily armed gangs tried to stage a coup but failed. This led to several thousand (estimated at 3,000 to 5,000 deaths), on all sides, in January. An armed insurrection is not a peaceful protest.
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MORE THAN 100 MISSILES
On February 28 this year, the Israeli Air Force fired more than 100 missiles at the building housing Khamenei. They killed him – and his daughter, his son-in-law, a grandchild, and his daughter-in-law.
The unprovoked US-Israel attack on Iran was clearly a violation of international law, but western mainstream media such as Reuters now refer to it simply as "a war”, thus absolving the attackers from the repercussions of what is clearly an ongoing criminal act.
Meanwhile, the funeral of Ali Hosseini Khamenei is being presented by the world’s media as an ending. Of course, it is no such thing.
Questions are being asked worldwide: How often can a militaristic group get away with war crimes before the rest of the world, and its own people, stand up and tells it to stop?