West’s Hypocrisy Exposed by US Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Students: Raisi
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The US government’s violent crackdown on university students rallying in support of Gaza violated human rights, debunked the West’s hypocritical concern about freedom of speech, and proved Iran’s stances righteous, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said.
Addressing a cabinet session on Sunday, Raisi expressed deep regret about what has happened in recent days in the academic communities of America and a number of other Western countries.
He slammed the breaking of the sanctity of students, professors, universities, scientific and research centers, the law, freedom of expression, freedom of the pen, and the defense of human rights as tragedies that revealed the true face of Western civilization to the world and proved the correctness of the stances of Iran about the West's hypocritical concerns for human rights and freedom.
The Westerners, by hiding their authoritarian and anti-human rights face behind deceptive slogans, had positioned themselves as the defenders of these values, Raisi said, his official website reported.
"The events in Gaza removed the curtain from this face of the Westerners and today we witness the conflict between the current of honor and the knowledgeable and discerning class of students with the flow of the evil of the leaders of the West who are aggressors against the law and human rights and freedoms," the Iranian president added.
Students in the US face detention, suspension and other punishments as they protest against Israel’s war on the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere and demand that their universities divest from Israel.
Police have so far arrested more than 2,000 protesters at colleges around the US.
The antiwar protests in the US are being staged in response to Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023 and the Palestinian enclave flattened in what rights experts have called a genocide.
