Assured he won't be killed, Khamenei returns to his office

What he says

An English translation of the talk, which is in Persian. It was made with AI from YouTube's automatic captions and may contain errors; the Persian transcript is authoritative. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

0:01 Hello. It is Monday, 12 Aban 1404, November 3, 2025. First, I apologize that on Friday, for various reasons, I was unable to present the program to you. Today, though, the story of Omid Sarlak, the young man from Lorestan, and what happened at his funeral procession is, you could say, at the top of the news. Omid Sarlak, a young man whose age has been reported as 22 or 27, published a post on 9 Aban in which he set fire to a picture of Khamenei. Then, on 11 Aban, his body was found in a Pride

1:02 car. He had been killed by a pistol shot, and the police announced that he had committed suicide, something nobody believed. Today his funeral procession in Aligudarz, in Lorestan province, drew a huge crowd who came to accompany this young man's body. During the ceremony people chanted "Death to Khamenei" and "Death to the Islamic Republic," and interestingly, verses from Ferdowsi's Shahnameh were also recited. In general, the public culture around memorial ceremonies has gradually changed in many parts of the country. Instead of holding memorials in the

2:03 mosque, most are now held in halls and hotels. Instead of a preacher on the pulpit and so on, music is usually played, a video is prepared and shown, or relatives of the deceased speak. And instead of reciting the Quran and lamentations, poems by Hafez, Rumi or Ferdowsi are read. In any case, these changes in public culture are among the things sociologists have noticed. They show how a society transforms, and especially how, when a government starts force-feeding

2:58 and imposing a particular culture, even a religious one, people react and in effect turn their backs on it. Also today, four economists and social researchers were arrested in Tehran by security forces in raids on their homes. Their belongings, such as computers, laptops and phones, were taken as well. Shirin Karimi, translator and researcher; Mahsa Asadollahnejad, sociologist; and Mohammad Maljoo and Parviz Sedaghat, economists and researchers, are among

3:52 those detained. All of them are contributors to the website Naghd-e Eghtesad-e Siasi (Critique of Political Economy), and it is said that a number of other contributors to the site have also been arrested, though I do not yet have confirmation of that. There is no news yet about the charges against these people or where they have been taken, but it is evident that the regime is baring its teeth. Also, Forough Khosrow, an elementary school teacher in Behbahan who was arrested in the month of Amordad because of a number of posts she had published and had been released on bail, was sentenced by the court yesterday to a total of 15 years in prison, five of which are

4:50 enforceable. Naturally, she will appeal. But this harshness and baring of teeth is part of the regime's plan, along with bringing the hijab issue back onto the field and going after the repression of women, so that by creating an atmosphere of terror it can perhaps restore its so-called shattered prestige after the 12-day war, given everything going on in the country and how people have turned against the regime, and bring the spilled water back into the stream. But today Mr. Khamenei also finally came out of his hole. Apparently, after he was assured through

5:47 the Russians that Israel does not intend to attack for now and that he will not be killed, His Exalted Eminence lost his fear and became brave. He appeared at a public meeting held at his office, where they had gathered a number of cheerleaders under the name of students and so on, to talk about 13 Aban. It is also said that with this speech and public meeting, Khamenei has probably returned to his desk and will no longer be moving from one hole to another, and is back at his command headquarters and his own office. In this speech he again attacked America, and as for Israel, he basically implied the same old story

6:47 of destroying Israel. For relations with America, he set three conditions that are conditional on the impossible: among them, that America must no longer support Israel, the "criminal regime" and whatnot; that America must pack up its bases in the region and leave; and that it must commit not to interfere in the affairs of other countries, where it is not even clear where the limit of this "interference" lies. In effect, three impossible conditions. And on top of that, he said that afterwards we would consider whether we can even talk to America, whether to establish relations or not. He is oblivious, meaning these three ridiculous conditions, where neither the issue of supporting Israel makes sense, nor the

7:45 American bases, which in Qatar, for example, exist at the request of Qatar itself; the Americans are there with the Qataris' consent and in fact at their pleading, and so on. These are fundamentally baseless things Khamenei said. But one thing can be said: in the intense fight now raging in the country between the supporters of Russia and the supporters of relations with Europe and America, Khamenei with today's speech completely took the side of the Russophiles. And one can expect that, with his return and the side he took, the crackdown on those who can ultimately be called the continuation of Hashemi Rafsanjani's line

8:43 will intensify. Basically, from a very broad perspective, one can say that after the first decade of the revolution and the end of the war, two lines came to face each other in the country. One line was led by Hashemi, and his thesis was that, like China, they should open the doors, make peace with the world, so to speak, and build. I heard from Mr. Hashemi himself that even before he took over the presidential office, while he was still in the Majlis but had already won the election, he said he wanted to go to Washington, with the same courage with which he went to Moscow, and solve the problem of relations with America, so that foreign capital would come into the country, and the other things Hashemi talked about. Of course, in the same Chinese style, internally

9:41 they would repress so that the current regime would survive, but with an open-door policy. The other line was Khamenei's line: looking to the East, hostility toward America and the West, and seeking to become Saladin. One can say that throughout all these years of Khamenei's leadership, these two lines have faced each other, and in the end the pro-Russians and Russia's servants won, because they both put Hashemi's head under water and took the main positions of power from that camp, and now they are settling scores with them in this way. This is in fact the Russian line, which wants and seeks, through Khamenei, whom it has emboldened to come back onto the field,

10:40 to effectively wipe the slate clean and keep the country in this same state of hostility toward and distance from the West, with terrorist and destructive policies, turning Iran into a dangerous knife-wielding thug whose switchblade catch is in Russia's hands, so it can extort with it. And of course, what one hears is that the Russians, by smoothing the ground for after Khamenei is killed or dies, are seeking to implement the Putin model in Iran. That is, a group of these same thieves, Al Capones and rent-seekers, but close to Russia, possibly with slogans of extreme nationalism and the like, would come to power and in effect lead the country down the path

11:41 that Russia took: rule by a group of mafia gangs and oligarchs who make up the government. Now, at the opening of the world's largest museum of civilization in Egypt, a project that took perhaps 20 years to carry out, a ceremony was held which I watched and reviewed. What I found interesting was that the Egyptians, who of course have a brilliant, very ancient and glorious civilization, while honoring those monuments of civilization, the pharaohs, the pyramids and so on, also covered Egypt's Islamic period in

12:39 this opening as part of Egyptian civilization. This is exactly the opposite of Iran, where when ancient Iran and the brilliant Iranian civilization are to be honored, people bash the post-Islamic period, and when regimes like this one want to present the Islamic period, they bash the ancient civilization, oblivious to the fact that both are in reality the civilizational course of one nation, one country, and that the links of the chain of history are interlocked and have come down to the present day. In any case, the lesson one takes from the opening of this museum, which is unique of its kind, is that one can, without pitting different parts of a country's history against each other, look at the historical course of

13:38 a nation's transformation and evolution. Meanwhile, Mr. Mohammad Hossein Taheri, director of the Headquarters for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, declared that doctors have confirmed that rays come out of men's eyes that damage women's skin. It's remarkable—these are, frankly, utterly worthless words. If this man thought for a moment: at most, at the very most, we may have 400 or 500 million headscarf-wearing or veiled women in the world; out of the Earth's population, the other six and a half billion women presumably all have diseased skin? And besides, you cover the hair—what does that have to do with skin? And so on. And which doctors

14:36 confirmed it? They say this kind of nonsense and still won't give up. Hoping for the victory of Iran and Iranians.