Editorial: ​Ayatollah Khamenei was most to blame for Iranian bloodshed and certainly not deserving of compassion

​The killing of a head of one state by the order of another nation’s leader is as total an act of war as is imaginable.

​Just that happened when Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated by the US and Israel on Saturday.

People around the world will be concerned at this development, not because Iran’s supreme leader was deserving of sympathy, but because we do not know where this will end. Might it even culminate in world war?

But Khamenei was certainly not deserving of compassion. While his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini was the figurehead of the 1979 revolution in Iran, which sent that country back into the dark ages in pursuit of a fanatical form of Islamic rule, Khamenei was more culpable for the post 1979 bloodshed than anyone else. Khomeini led for a decade, Khamenei for the last 37 years.

And what a record of bloodshed it is. Iran has been a sponsor of terrorism round the world, while a deeply repressive leader at home. He presided over the worst of savage illiberalism domestically and fear abroad.

For decades, since the 1990s, there has been talk of the country moderating, in part due to its huge young population. But this never seems in fact to happen. On the contrary, Iran has if anything expanded its brutality, as was apparent in its central role in the 2023 October 7 slaughter of Israeli civilians by the barbarians of Hamas – Muslim fanatics, just like their Iranian friends.

There is at times in history something to be said for a restrained response to terror, in order to prevent exacerbating it. Britain tested that idea to destruction in Northern Ireland, where terrorism has been treated so weakly as almost to be rewarded.

Israel, on the other hand, is surrounded by such deadly and implacable enemies, like Iran, that it faces annihilation. And they are not going to tolerate it, as one terrorist leader after another has been discovering.