Khamenei: ISIS 'vile' but Palestinians face worse terrorism from Israel

Khamenei's comments were published Sunday by the Iranian IRNA news agency, the government’s official news agency.

By JTA
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (photo credit: REUTERS)
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the recent coordinated Paris attacks that left at least 130 people dead “blind terrorism.”
Khamenei’s comments, released in a statement to “the youth in the Western countries,” were published Sunday by the Iranian IRNA news agency, the government’s official news agency.
It is reportedly Khamenei’s first public comments on the Nov. 13 attacks on at least seven sites in Paris.  The Iranian government had previously condemned the attacks, immediately after they occurred.
Khamenei said the pain of any human being is concerning whether  it occurs “in France or in Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or Syria.”
Khamenei called terrorism “our common worry” and added “the Islamic world has been the victim of terror and brutality to a larger extent territorially, to greater amount quantitatively and for a longer period in terms of time.”
He said America had a role in “creating, nurturing and arming al-Qaida, the Taliban and their inauspicious successors,” such as the Islamic State.
He singled out “[t]he oppressed people of Palestine,” who he said: “have experienced the worst kind of terrorism for the last sixty years. If the people of Europe have now taken refuge in their homes for a few days and refrain from being present in busy places- it is decades that a Palestinian family is not secure even in its own home from the Zionist regime’s death and destruction machinery. What kind of atrocious violence today is comparable to that of the settlement constructions of the Zionists regime?”
He called the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks: a “vile group” which is “the spawn of such ill-fated pairings with imported cultures.”
“I genuinely believe that it is only you youth who by learning the lessons of today’s hardship, have the power to discover new means for building the future,” the Supreme Leader said.