Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei blasted the United States on Wednesday over its immigration policies, claiming the United States, and the greater West, lacks “family values.”
“The western countries pay no attention to family values. The [mainstream] western lifestyle is truly in contradiction to family values,” Khamenei said during a meeting with the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majlis).
“They confess this and are looking for solutions to resolve it,” he continued. “So we must not follow their traditions regarding women, youth, and parents. We must enact laws that solve the problems of families.”
Iran has yet to provide women with equal rights and the compulsory hijab is an issue that still haunts many of the Western-oriented and mostly secular women and youth living in the country.
Of Trump and the United States, Khamenei said, “You see who your enemies are and how cruelly they stand before, not only the Iranian nation, but the whole of humanity.”
He chastised the Trump administration for “separating thousands of children from their mothers [at the U.S. border]” as “a serious issue. One cannot watch with a sound state of mind these children crying on TV. How can they commit such a crime of separating children from their mothers for the excuse of implementing some policy? This shows how evil they really are.”
Trump administration opponents have condemned U.S. immigration policies all week, claiming that keeping illegal immigrant children in boarding facilities while their parents are processed is inhumane. The White House insists it is working to make progress on immigration reform and the United State’s illegal immigration problem. On Wednesday, President Trump announced that he will soon sign an executive order that would end the process of separating children from families after being detained for crossing the border illegally.
“We want to keep families together. It’s very important,” Trump said, according to the Associated Press. “I’ll be signing something in a little while that’s going to do that.”
Referring to the images and videos of children separated from their parents, Khamenei said of the United States, “They are the same people who gathered a number of big states to confront the Yemeni people over the sea-port, to take the only port, the only passage for the oppressed Yemeni people away [to receive humanitarian aids]. They, unhesitatingly, kill humans: this shows how cruel they are.”
Iran leads the Middle East in state executions and is rivaled only by Saudi Arabia in that metric. China carries out the largest number of executions in the world.
As for Yemen, Iran’s adventurism in the country, and its backing of Houthi rebels, has resulted in a bloody proxy war between the Shi’ite Islamic Republic and Sunni Saudi Arabia that has left most of the country relying on humanitarian aid to eat.
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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