Iran’s Khameinei calls Paris attacks ‘blind terrorism,’ says Palestinians face ‘worst’ terrorism

(JTA) — Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, called the recent Paris attacks that left at least 130 people dead “blind terrorism.”

Khameini’s comments, released in a statement to “the youth in the Western countries,” were published Sunday by IRNA, the Iranian government’s official news agency. They reportedly were the ayatollah’s first public comments on the coordinated Nov. 13 attacks on at least seven sites in Paris. The Iranian government had condemned the attacks immediately after they occurred.

Khameini said the pain of any human being is concerning, whether  it occurs “in France or in Palestine or Iraq or Lebanon or Syria.”

He 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.”

Khameini 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 60 years.”Iran’s supreme leader also called the Islamic State the “spawn” of Western culture.

“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,” Khameini said. “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” that is “the spawn of such ill-fated pairings with imported cultures.”