Democrat WI Senate Candidate Mandela Barnes Praises Iran’s Supreme Leader For His ‘Black Lives Matter’ Tweet

Mandela Barnes is the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Wisconsin. He is also a professed admirer of Iran’s Supreme Leader, the ruthless and corrupt dictator Ayatollah Khamenei, whose regime beats girls and women to death for not wearing the hijab, hangs homosexuals, sentences political dissidents to the torture chamber of Evin Prison, massacres those who protest peacefully against the regime, and has his army mow down ethnic minorities including, most recently, Kurds and Baluchis. Why does Mandela Barnes think so highly of this monster? Only one reason, apparently the only thing that counts for Mandela Barnes: Because Khamenei once tweeted seven years ago a single short sentence about “Black Lives Matter.” To wit: “The issue of US govt oppression against blacks is a 100s year-old issue.”

Khamenei, whom Mandela Barnes so admires, has a long history as a Holocaust denier. Why do I think that if Mandela Barnes discovered this, it would not change his mind about the Supreme Leader? Khamenei met with the French “philosopher” Roger Garaudy, Tehran’s favorite Holocaust denier, when he visited Iran in 1998; the bizarre, likely insane Garaudy was once a French senator and a theoretician of the French Communist Party, before he converted to Islam in the 1990s and began engaging in Holocaust denial.

After the beheading of Samuel Paty, the middle-school teacher in France who had shown his students cartoons depicting Mohammad as part of a lesson on free speech, Khamenei waded in with his favorite reaction to any query on freedom of speech. In a letter addressed to the youth of France, Khamenei asked: “Why is it a crime to doubt the Holocaust? Why are people who write about this thrown into jails, but insulting the Prophet is allowed?”

While Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on April 27-28, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the only state in the world to deny the Holocaust as a matter of policy, celebrates its annual anti-Israel Quds Day on April 29.

This year, Khamenei’s “court paper,” the ultraconservative Kayhan, whose editor Hossein Shariatmadari was appointed by the Supreme Leader, ran in its April 28 issue, as its main article, praise of Hitler and denial of the Holocaust. It’s not surprising. Shariatmadari himself is a career Holocaust denier, just like the man who appointed him. More on Shariatmadari can be found here.

After Khamenei sent his open letter to the youth of France complaining that it should not be a crime to deny the Holocaust, 31, Shariatmadari wrote an editorial enthusiastically defending Khamenei’s message, singling out the leader’s denial of the Holocaust for praise:

“The Holocaust is a big historical lie,” Shariatmadari wrote. “There are a lot of undeniable documents that prove this Zionist myth is untrue. The most obvious proof of this is the West’s worry, mixed with fear, about any research done on the Holocaust.”

Shariatmadari went on to claim that “dozens of distinguished European historians and hundreds of famed historical experts have shown irrefutable documents that prove, with an entirely scientific method, that the story of the massacre of six million Jews, crematoria, gas chambers and all the Zionist claims are absolute lies; a story constructed with goals that are not only political but criminal.”

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The Supreme Leader’s paper, Kayhan, has a long history of praising Holocaust deniers, including those with Nazi sympathies. But it has gone a step further by allowing a writer to openly praise Hitler.

The piece in question was signed Mohammad Hadi Sahraei, who in his “guest editorial,” entitled “Maybe Without War,” this regime insider and Kayhan contributor spewed a quite remarkable amount of hatred and fantasy aimed at the Jewish people and Israel, culminating with the commentary on the World War II.

“With expelling these people from Germany,” Sahraei declared, “Hitler showed he is smarter than all the current leaders of Europe and he is braver in expressing himself. Hitler threw them out, and now the European countries have to pay for it, while confirming the myth of the Holocaust to find an excuse for their own cowardice and misery. If they considered Jews among [sic] of themselves, they’d give them refuge, just like they do blue-eyed Ukrainian immigrants.”

Khamenei’s long history of praising and promoting Holocaust deniers, and of being one himself, apparently has had no effect on Mandela Barnes. His moral outrage appears limited to black people, black causes, black resentments. Barnes “liked” Khamenei’s post on Twitter and responded to the Iranian leader: “The first tweet of 2015 from @khamenei_ir is #BlackLivesMatter. Let that sink in.” By January 1, 2015, Khamenei had been in power for 26 years, and had presided over many horrors, including the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners in Evin Prison, the murders of homosexuals, the suppression of Iranian women, and much more.

What one hopes the voters in Wisconsin will let sink in is that Mandela Barnes has yet to distance himself from that tweet in praise of Khamenei, even as the Supreme Leader orders the massacre of his own people, now protesting in 90 cities all over the country. He wants all of then crushed: the girls and women ripping off, and in some cases burning, their hijabs; the university students protesting their lack of mental freedom; the Kurd and Baluchi minorities angry at Persian supremacists. The Supreme Leader provides deadly drones to Vladimir Putin, the war criminal, and rushes headlong to build a nuclear weapon with which, he has made clear, he hopes to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state. But to Mandela Barnes, none of this apparently matters. What matters is a single tweet, seven years ago, in which Khamenei tweeted that “oppression of blacks” by the American government is centuries old. That’s all he knows about Khamenei, and all, apparently, he needs to know.

And his praise of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei – never retracted in seven years — is all we need to know about this morally defective candidate for the U.S. Senate. No one in his right mind should vote for Mandela Barnes.