Why are students in British universities mourning Ayatollah Khamenei? The Iranian dictator’s death brought jubilant crowds of Jews and Persians out onto the streets of London. Yet, on campus, there’s a more sombre mood.

Islamist extremists at British universities are working to continue the Ayatollah’s legacy

Members of University College London’s Ahlul Bayt Islamic Society are grieving the ‘martyrdom’ of the Ayatollah. Khamenei’s death is described as ‘an unimaginable loss for the entire Ummah’, or global Islamic community. Students in mourning are asked to recite Surah al Fatiha, the first chapter of the Quran, ‘for our beloved Sayed’. Alarmingly, the group’s ‘mental health’ wing not only sends members their condolences but reminds them that, ‘This is not the end of the resistance. The Shia in the West must remain aware and ready.’

It’s worth reflecting on who, exactly, these students are weeping over. Until Saturday morning, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic was the Middle East’s longest-serving theocrat. He was responsible for funding and promoting a violent and virulently anti-Semitic globalist form of Islamism, through a terror network that included Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Islamic Jihad. At home, he repeatedly suppressed challenges to his reign with lethal force. The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising that followed the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the so-called morality police in 2022 was quelled with the slaughter of 600 protesters and the arrest of more than 20,000. Up to 30,000 people are estimated to have been killed in this year’s anti-regime protests.

Despite the scale of slaughter and repression, students in Iran have been at the forefront of protests against the Ayatollah’s theocratic rule. Just days before the current war started, and in the aftermath of the deadly crackdown, Iranian students bravely renewed their anti-government protests. A little over a week ago, students in Tehran, protesting on the campus of Sharif University of Technology, were involved in scuffles with government supporters. At universities in Tehran and throughout Iran, students gathered to honour the thousands killed at the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Meanwhile, closer to home, Keele University’s Ahlul Bayt Islamic Society has shared information with its members on how best to turn their ‘collective grief into action’.

We need to face up to the fact that students in Iran are fighting for freedom while, at the very same time, Islamist extremists at British universities are working to continue the Ayatollah’s legacy.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Pro-Palestine demonstrations that have taken place on British university campuses over the past two years have exposed a vanishingly thin line between sympathy for the Palestinian people trying to survive in a war zone, an anti-Zionism that all too seamlessly merges into anti-Semitism, and outright support for terrorist organisations like Hamas.

In January, it came to light that the UAE would no longer be sponsoring students to study in the UK after fears that campuses had been radicalised by Islamist groups. There were reports of growing tensions between Abu Dhabi and the British government over concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence on university campuses. The group is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UAE but not in Britain.

It would be convenient to write off the spread of Islamic extremism on campus as a nasty foreign import. But this would be to overlook the sympathies of progressive activists. The fact is, sections of the British left actively side with the Islamic Republic and stand in opposition to the West. Indeed, ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the left’s useful idiots have shown growing sympathy for Iran’s theocratic regime and its proxy militias. Such is their loathing of Western modernity that they look enviously upon a government that kills homosexuals and women who show their hair in public.

Pro-Palestinian protests on campuses should have woken us up to the problem of Islamist extremism and the hostility some students have to Israel, Jews and Britain itself. But instead we have university leaders who seem to sympathise with the Islamist’s anti-western sentiment and a government too cowardly to get a grip and proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood. So today we have students in London mourning the death of the Ayatollah, even while those in Tehran fight for freedom.