The elimination of Ali Khamenei ends one of the darkest chapters in Contemporary History. Regardless of some newspaper headlines you may have read, it is certain that his legacy is not just that of a religious leader, but that of an architect of a system of oppression that defied all norms of human decency and international legality.
Internally, his period in power was defined by a “Apartheid of institutionalized gender”, whose most tragic (known) faces were Mahsa Amini and Armita Geravand.
Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, was detained in 2022 by the “morality police” for letting some strands of hair escape under her veil. Witnesses reported his brutal beating inside a police van; he died three days later in custody, with the regime trying to sell the absurd thesis of “sudden heart failure”.
At the time, the case led to movement Woman, Life, Freedomin which many celebrities (including Portuguese ones) cut off a bit of their hair on video as a sign of protest and solidarity, in yet another of those acts of announcing virtue that, curiously, is not repeated today, when the moral author of the murder was finally punished.
A year later, the horror was repeated with 16-year-old Armita Geravand. Armita was attacked in the Tehran subway by regime guards for not using her hijab. The video of his unconscious removal from the carriage spread around the world, while the State pressured the family to claim a “fainting due to low blood pressure”.
Both cases reveal the nature of a structure that saw the female body as its main battlefield and that did not hesitate to murder children and young people to maintain theocratic control.
But beyond street violence, Khamenei perfected psychological terror through an omnipresent surveillance apparatus. The Revolutionary Guard and the militias Basij They did not limit themselves to repression, they invaded the private sphere, monitoring communications and imposing digital “blackouts” to isolate Iranians from the world. In the dungeons of Evin, torture became an administrative method to extract forced confessions, aired in prime time to humiliate dissent. This machine was equally ruthless with minorities like the Baha’iswhose rights to Education and property were confiscated in a systematic policy of religious suffocation.
The toxicity of the regime did not stop at its borders. Khamenei exported chaos through the “Axis of Resistance”, transforming militias such as Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi groups into extensions of his armed wing. And he financed and armed the terrorist group Hamas. By providing precision missiles and drones to destabilize neighbors and block trade routes, the regime systematically violated the principle of sovereignty and UN Security Council resolutions, in clear acts of indirect aggression and state terrorism.
It is an obvious intellectual fraud to invoke International Law to protect those who use it as a shield while tearing it apart every day. The shamelessness of the regime’s acolytes in appealing to United Nations Charter to shield a theocracy that has never given a dime for Human Rights, nor granted a line to the conventions that now, out of pure convenience, they want to see applied, it would be laughable if some of these individuals weren’t people of power in the West – some worried about their Islamic electorates, others influenced by Marxist ideologies, others still by… money.
Follow the money. Investigations in Spain, like the Spanish police PISA reportrevealed that the Tehran regime injected around 9.3 million euros into the ecosystem of Pablo Iglesias and Podemos – the Spanish “cousins” of ‘our’ Bloco de Esquerda – through HispanTV. Here, there are no signs of similar flows, it should be noted, so perhaps BE’s positions are taken just out of taste…
Khamenei’s fall does not just expose the crimes of a dictator – it exposes the “selective solidarity” of those in the West who prefer the comfort of funding or ideological alignment to the defense of human dignity. But History, after all, is passing the bill.
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