He told an audience of students in Khorasan North province that some countries just blindly imitate Western ways. But that will be very harmful to them, he warned. Only nations that ignore Western entreaties and choose monotheism will attain real development, he said.
“We emphasize that according to scientific research imitating the West will lead nations into a dark hole,” he said. “Western culture is aggressive and, if it prevails in any country for any reason, it will gradually wipe out that country’s culture and identity.”
Khamenehi told his listeners that homosexuality and the end of the family are social abnormalities that have been made into social norms by the West.
He summed up Western culture as “lustful, material, sinful, identity-crushing and anti-spiritual.”
The speech sounded to many like the scare tactics once commonly used in the United States to try to induce approved behavior in the young, such as saying that marijuana and masturbation make people go crazy.
In another speech, Khamenehi recognized the economic problems facing Iran but assured his listeners that Europeans are facing infinitely more complicated economic challenges right now.
Surprisingly, he made reference to the rioting in midtown Tehran two weeks ago, an event that was suppressed in the Iranian media. While word-of-mouth spread the news in Tehran, Khamenehi was speaking in Bojnurd in Khorasan North province that day. It appeared that he assumed even people there knew of the rioting, probably from foreign broadcasts.
Khamenehi said, “For an hour or two, a number of people set two or three trash cans on fire in a couple of streets in Tehran, and they [Westerners] started to celebrate and say, ‘There are protests in Iran.’ Is our situation worse than yours [in Europe]? There have been protests in the streets of major European cities for around a year, day and night.
“Your problem is far more complicated than ours. Your economy is frozen. Do you celebrate that Iran’s economy has been weakened? It is you who are wretched,” Khamenehi told the audience.
He said the United States was also mired in economic stagnation. He said the Occupy Wall Street movement is so important that it has become a crucial factor in the current presidential election campaign.
Ignoring the fact that sanctions were ratcheted up several orders of magnitude as of July, Khamenehi said, “Sanctions are not a new issue. They have been around since the victory of the Islamic revolution [in 1979]. But our enemies are trying to blow the issue all out of proportion. And unfortunately some people inside Iran are assisting them.”
He defended himself against charges that Iran would not be facing Western sanctions if it would just rein in its nuclear program. “Our enemies and the United States link sanctions to the nuclear issue. But they lie. When they began sanctions [in 1979], we had no nuclear program,” which began about 1985. “They pretend that if the Iranian people would just drop the nuclear program, the sanctions would end. But they lie.”