Sweeping changes in Khamenei's office for fear of Israeli infiltrators

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 Wednesday, 14 Aban 1404, November 5, 2025. The GAMAAN polling institute has published its latest survey on the 12-day war: people's views on it, its consequences, and how they perceive it. The survey was conducted with help from Psiphon, which produces a VPN and, depending on conditions, has between 5 and 11 million users in Iran. Psiphon helped voluntarily, and after the methods they applied, they ended up with 30,000 usable samples, effectively across

0:56 all 31 provinces of the country. According to the institute itself, the results can be generalized with 95% confidence. The full report, with charts, data and so on, though without analysis, is available on social media, and if you're interested you can go and look at the whole thing. But I found a few figures from this survey interesting, and I'll share them with you. For instance, on who is to blame for the 12-day war, 44% of Iranians hold the Islamic Republic responsible for starting the war, and 33% hold Israel responsible.

1:54 52% of respondents did not regard the war as a national, patriotic one, and 69% of the people, nearly 70%, believe that this demand to destroy Israel should be taken off the table. Of the rest, a small percentage also believe the policy of destroying Israel should not be continued, and some said they don't know. Only 20% of people believe this hostility toward Israel should continue. As for people's views of foreign countries, it is interesting that 53% have a positive view of America and 37% have a

2:53 negative view of America. The most hated government among the people of Iran is Russia, with 68% of people viewing Russia negatively, followed by Britain with 65%. But as for changing the country's situation, how the current conditions could be changed, 31.4% believe in civil resistance: the methods of civil resistance, protests, strikes and so on, which is the highest percentage. 18% believe foreigners should apply pressure and intervene, and 14% believe change should come through elections, although

3:49 real elections are themselves only possible through civil resistance and pressure on the regime to make it back down. So these 14% can also be added to the 31%, and taken together one can conclude that the people want a transition through civil and nonviolent methods. Only 5.5% of people favor violent methods, weapons and war. Naturally, 13% said they don't accept any of these methods, and 17% said they have no opinion. So altogether, nearly 30% can be said to have effectively no opinion, and if the struggle progresses and people see the results of civil resistance, these 30% may also change their minds.

4:50 In any case, my recommendation is that, given the methodological explanations they have provided and on which basis they consider the results reliable, if you're interested, look carefully at the figures of this survey, because it contains a variety of questions that will help in understanding Iranian society. But Mr. Khamenei, who, as we reported in the previous program, has returned to his desk and has been assured from somewhere, whether Russia or America or by other means, that for now they are not going to kill him, has therefore come out of his hole, from, as

5:46 the young people put it, near the Earth's core. He has finally come out, returned to his office and his administration, and held meetings, though more limited than before. But what he has done is greatly increase his bodyguards; the arrests and crackdowns and the protection around him have increased a lot. And out of fear of Israeli infiltration, they have begun extensive reshuffles in the intelligence and security agencies, in the IRGC, in the Vali-ye Amr Corps itself, and inside the Office [of the Supreme Leader] itself. These reshuffles are taking place at the level of deputies and senior officials, and naturally such moves have also created a great deal of discontent within the military and security apparatus,

6:46 the Office's intelligence protection unit, and among the officials of the Office themselves. Especially since these reshuffles are mostly based on Mr. Khamenei's trust in the people concerned, not on their competence and expertise, and so they have caused problems at the lower levels as well. On the other hand, the campaign of burning Mr. Khamenei's picture on social media has intensified after they killed Omid Sarlak, that brave young man from Lorestan, because he had burned Khamenei's picture.

7:41 It is a campaign that I think can be positive, and it warns the regime that when it escalates violence and kills a young man merely for the "crime" of burning Khamenei's picture, and then doesn't accept responsibility for it, far more people will come into the field and the burning of his pictures will intensify. These kinds of actions and methods aimed at creating terror, making fear dominant, frightening people and keeping them hopeless and isolated have intensified within the regime these days. Although on the hijab they keep saying they must come out, and they have even claimed, I don't know, that they will bring out 80,000 enforcers of "promoting virtue",

8:38 whereas the Basij can't even muster 8,000 of them. But on the hijab front they have understood that they are no match for the women. In particular, the lesson that Iran's brave women and Iranian youth taught the regime in 1401 [2022] has frightened even the highest ranks of the regime about coming out again and launching a street crackdown. But, for example, in the arrests of Iran's leftist intellectuals and writers, raiding their homes, using methods the KGB once used, they want to create fear and terror. Or, for example, in the case of Mostafa Tajzadeh, who had come out for his brother's memorial service, they could very simply have

9:37 phoned him with a warning and said, "Well, your furlough is over and you have to go back." But they preferred to storm the home of Mr. Tajzadeh's daughter with five police cars and judiciary vehicles, take him away essentially bound hand and foot, and carry him to Evin. And then Mehdi Mahmoudian, a journalist who wrote about this and protested against this kind of treatment, did something even more interesting: he published a document showing that the economic criminals among the associates of Ahmadinejad and Esfandiar [Rahim Mashaei], each sentenced to several years in prison, served no more than a few months each, were then released on so-called furlough and never went back. Now the prosecutor's office has summoned Mr. Mahmoudian, essentially to issue a threat once again

10:34 and say that such protests cannot be made against the judiciary either. In any case, all in all, one must be vigilant: the regime is trying, with these actions, to spread the dominance of fear and to say, "I will still grab by the collar anyone who wants to oppose me." Meanwhile, injecting courage into society by people like Mr. Mahmoudian or Tajzadeh, or leftist intellectuals and so on, and activists, and people like Omid Sarlak, may he rest in peace, and others like him, is among the things that actually help society not to surrender to the regime's fear-mongering. Now, in America, Tuesday's elections in

11:31 the states of Virginia, New Jersey and California, and then the New York mayoral race, led to Democratic victories. That was not very surprising; these are so-called blue states. But there is a political point hidden here, and that is that almost all the candidates, especially Mr. Zohran [Mamdani], the socialist mayor elected in New York, aimed the sharp edge of their attacks in their campaigns at Mr. Trump personally. In effect, they preferred negative campaigning to positive campaigning; the core of their messaging was against Mr. Trump and his policies, and they accused their rivals of following Trump's policies, and they won. This is something that can

12:32 be said will probably become the Democrats' line in next year's elections, which will determine the fate of Congress. Meanwhile, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has reported that Mr. Ali Ansari, the main shareholder and owner of Ayandeh Bank and a close associate of Mojtaba Khamenei, owns a mansion in an upscale neighborhood of London, a property worth £33 million, and in that same upscale neighborhood, as was reported earlier, he owns at least 12 other houses. This is someone who, by emptying the pockets of the bank's depositors, dipping into the Central Bank's coffers and effectively imposing 7 to 8 percent inflation on

13:37 the entire country, has amassed a huge fortune for himself, of which these properties in London are probably only one item. And Ms. Mohtashamipour, Mr. Tajzadeh's wife, has revealed that Judge Salavati, the "judge of death," out of fear for his life, goes at night to sleep in an underground crypt of graves at the Emamzadeh Saleh shrine in Tajrish. The stairs to this crypt are in a corner of the courtyard, and in short, out of fear for his life, he sleeps in that underground graveyard beside the dead.