If Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is truly operating the Twitter account @khamenei_ir, as is widely reported, then he’s an ardent supporter of the #BlackLivesMatter protests that have denounced the recent police killings of unarmed black people.
On Sunday a series of tweets from the account made clear references to the ongoing movement in the U.S. to bring attention to the racial biases that exist in law enforcement and the criminal-justice system, explicitly using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. And since Christianity is a predominant religion in the U.S., a few of the tweets made backhanded comments about how Americans don’t follow Jesus’ teachings and “his support for the oppressed.”
Khamenei continued to evoke Jesus when referencing the fatal shooting of an unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer.
Then Iran's supreme leader seemed to suggest that murder and holocaust were inherent features of “American values.”
When protesters were being teargassed in Ferguson, Mo., during the aftermath of Brown’s shooting, Arabs living in the Gaza Strip who had become accustomed to dealing with the tear gas levied against them by Israeli police tweeted instructions to Ferguson protesters about how to cope with the tear gas. Khamenei shed light on the parallels between those two struggles as well:
Read more at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Twitter page.