Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei praised pro-Palestinian protesters across American college campuses for being “on the right side of history” in an open letter Wednesday to university students.
In an X post, Khamenei said college protesters “have begun an honorable struggle” against the American government, which “openly supports Zionists.” He encouraged American students to “become familiar with the Quran” in another X post.
“You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front and have begun an honorable struggle in the face of your government’s ruthless pressure—a government which openly supports the usurper and brutal Zionist regime,” Khameini wrote in the open letter.
He added:
The greater Resistance Front which shares the same understandings and feelings that you have today, has been engaged in the same struggle for many years in a place far from you. The goal of this struggle is to put an end to the blatant oppression that the brutal Zionist terrorist network has inflicted on the Palestinian nation for many years. After seizing their country, the Zionist regime has subjected them to the harshest of pressures and tortures.
Khamenei advocated the eradication of Israel days before an Iranian proxy, the terrorist organization Hamas, committed the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
Khamenei’s adviser congratulated “Palestinian” following the Oct. 7 attacks, pledging to “stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem.”
College campuses, including the Ivy Leagues, have experienced many pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments in the past several months. These protests have sometimes devolved into violence and vandalism. Protesters at Columbia University broke into and occupied a campus building, with a maintenance worker claiming the protesters held him “hostage.”
In a House Education Committee hearing in December 2023, Harvard President Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth avoided answering whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct.
Magill resigned in December just four days after the hearing, followed by Gay’s resignation in January.
University administrators have come under fire for invoking the First Amendment in defense of these protests, despite maintaining a track record of censoring and punishing conservative students for speech.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
