Ayatollahs Criticize Government’s Foreign Policy

While the government and its media network continue to cover the murder of an Egyptian woman by a German citizen, political and religious figures, including several grand ayatollahs, have criticized China and implicitly condemned that Islamic Republic’s contradictory policies toward the world’s Muslim populations.

Repression of Chinese Muslims is “Genocide”

Reacting to the massacre of Muslims in China, ayatollah Montazeri emphasized that killing innocent people must be condemned all over the world and criticized the Islamic nations’ silence over the mass killings, adding, “We must not sacrifice the respect, dignity and blood of Muslims for diplomacy.”  Ayatollah Montazeri explicitly condemned the Peking government’s action as “genocide.” 

Ayatollah Sanei too condemned the Chinese rulers as “dictators,” noting that “instead of solving the problems of Muslims,” they used various methods to suppress their protests.  Ayatollah Sanei dismissed the Chinese government’s attempts to tie the protests to “external agents,” calling the claim “ruse and cunning,” identifying China as a country that claims to have joined the free world but remains in the era of “hammer and stickle.”  At the end of his statement, Sanei declared that remaining silent against the oppression of Muslims in China is an “unforgivable sin.”

In a separate statement, Ayatollah Hassan Nouri Hamedani condemned the killing of more than 150 Chinese Muslims in the province of Sinkiang as a crime “more terrible” than the killing of one Muslim woman in Germany.

Pointing to the Chinese government’s attempts to portray the recent violence as “ethnic strife,” ayatollah Hamedani criticized the Islamic republic’s contradictory responses to the suppression of Muslims across the globe, arguing that the Islamic countries’ good economic and political relations with China must not result in putting differences between “Western and Eastern” Muslims. 

He asked the Iranian government not to leave their “Islamic brothers and sisters” alone and to act responsibly.

We Will Have Trouble with China

The Islamic Republic’s diplomacy machine continues to remain silent over the killings of Chinese Muslims by that country’s communist government while authorities in Tehran continue to criticize Berlin for the murder of an Egyptian Muslim woman in a court in Germany.  Meanwhile, according to the website Tabnak (affiliated with presidential candidate Mohsen Rezaei), the protests of grand ayatollahs may force the Iranian government to finally condemn the murder of Chinese Muslims. 

Etemad Melli newspaper (belonging to presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi) dedicated a major portion of the paper yesterday to the recent unrest in China, publishing articles by Emaddedin Baghi, Sadegh Zibakalam and Mohammad Sharif analyzing Iran’s response to the killing of Chinese Muslims. 

According to the same paper, Hossein Sobhani, the deputy head of the Majlis National Security Committee, claimed that the Principalists (ruling idealogues in Iran) are silent because the killing of Uighur Muslims were ambiguous: “If Iran takes a position without consideration that may harm its relations with China.”