Artist: Behnam Mohammadi
By: Kayhan Life Staff
The so-called supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ali Khamenei, emerged Tuesday night for another televised monologue. Frail, isolated, and visibly clinging to the scraps of his authority, Khamenei once again railed against the world, declaring that nuclear enrichment will never stop, that negotiations with the United States are forbidden, and that “the nation will slap in the mouth anyone who suggests otherwise.”
As the UN General Assembly opened in New York—a rare chance for his president Masoud Pezeshkian and one of his chief envoys Abbas Araghchi to test the waters with Western officials—Khamenei’s speech dropped like a lead weight. Instead of signaling flexibility, the clerical figurehead doubled down on rejectionism, ordering his ineffective government to close ranks and repeat the same lines the theocratic state has been shouting for decades.
The bunker sermon was heavy on angst. America, he said, wants not just an end to enrichment but also a ban on missiles, leaving the Iranian regime defenseless.
Dialogue with Washington, he insisted, is “dictation, not negotiation.” Any official who thinks otherwise, he warned, is betraying the “nation,” even as real Iranian people endure economic collapse, mass emigration, and the daily grind of repression.
Khamenei’s disdain for compromise came wrapped in a familiar conspiracy script: the U.S. always lies, cheats, kills—pointing once more to the assassination of Qassem Soleimani as proof that “trust” is impossible. The frail cleric is now more ghost than leader.
For the Islamic Republic, this performance underscored a system that has long since stopped functioning as a state and now survives only as a closed clerical-military shop.
For the Iranian people- grappling with inflation, repression, and the crumbling of basic services- it was yet another reminder that the theocratic state speaks only for itself.
