by Jim Chimirie on X
While Iranians danced in the streets of London, students at Cambridge lit candles for their killer.
As members of the Iranian diaspora, people who had watched sisters hanged and brothers disappeared, celebrated Khamenei’s death with tears of relief, British university students were posting tributes to their “beloved” supreme leader and organising candlelit vigils in his memory. The people who knew him best celebrated. The people who enjoy every freedom his ideology despises mourned him.
This was not the fringe. This was Cambridge. UCL. Manchester. Edinburgh. Bristol. Sheffield. Cardiff. SOAS. More than a dozen universities, their Ahlul-Bayt Islamic societies calling Khamenei a martyr, a defender of Islam. One society, at Portsmouth, dropped the pretence of grief entirely: “The Shia in the West must remain aware and ready.” That is not mourning. That is mobilisation.
Consider what they were mourning. Khamenei presided over the massacre of 30,000 of his own citizens in his final weeks alone. He armed Hamas, funded Hezbollah, and backed over twenty lethal attack plots on British soil in a single year. He ran a regime that hangs women for being raped and executes men for being gay. This is the man for whom British students, on British campuses, held a candlelight vigil.
Ask yourself one question: if a far-right student society held a vigil for a white nationalist dictator who had slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people, how long before the university suspended them? The answer is hours. Everyone knows it. The double standard is no longer deniable. It was built deliberately. The progressive left wrote the diversity policies, the safe space frameworks, the complaints procedures that make it impossible to challenge what is happening on our campuses without being accused of racism or Islamophobia. They handed the keys to the building to people who despise everything they claim to stand for.