Ayatollah Khamenei Gets Twitter Verification AFTER Celebrating Terrorism

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei received a gift recently from Elon Musk’s Twitter/X: a verification badge with attendant privileges. Yet the badge appeared after Khamenei explicitly promoted Hamas terrorism on Israelis.

On Oct 7, the day that Hamas terrorists committed heinous atrocities on Israeli civilians, deliberately targeting those civilians (even babies) for brutal decapitating, mutilating, raping, kidnapping, and burning alive, Khamenei posted a clip of the Hamas terrorists running toward the rave where they ultimately killed at least 260 innocent civilians. Khamenei’s comment on the clip was, “God willing, the cancer of the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated at the hands of the Palestinian people and the Resistance forces throughout the region. #AlAqsaStorm.” This constitutes a direct celebration and endorsement of Hamas’s bloody atrocities. Musk himself agreed that Khamenei’s tweet was supporting the eradication of Israel, yet later reportedly defended his decision to verify Khamenei’s account. Below is my screenshot from Oct. 7:

For years, Khamenei has been on Twitter, and his account has never been verified. Yet somehow, since Khamenei posted the above disturbing glorification of violence (in explicit violation of the Twitter/X rules), his account has not only been verified—it has received the special verification for government accounts. Well, it is a government account, you say. Yes, but the media has known for many years that this is Khamenei’s account; it was never necessary before to verify him. Furthermore, verified accounts receive special privileges on Twitter/X. So either Khamenei was rewarded with verification and its privileges by X after his pro-terrorism post, or X approved Khamenei’s application for verification, both of which I consider highly objectionable.

Below is another screenshot of Khamenei’s tweet glorifying the Hamas terrorists from Oct. 7; notice that he does not have the verification badge:

Now here are screenshots I captured on Oct. 9 and 10; still no verification:

An Israeli account provided a screenshot of Khamenei’s verification on Oct. 12. So between my screenshots and the Israeli account’s, that narrows down the window of verification to some point between Oct. 10 and Oct. 12 (Mossad indicated the likely date as Oct. 11)—again, after and soon after Khamenei had explicitly glorified vicious terrorism from a group that wants to commit genocide against Jews.

Musk tried to justify his decision, “We are applying the UN rule to world leaders: if the UN recognizes someone, then we will. This is obviously not a moral verdict in any way, but simply recognizes what the international community views to be accurate.” What Musk did not mention is that the United Nations (UN) has so awful a track record of targeting Israel and promoting Palestinian terrorist propaganda that the Israeli ambassador to the UN recently put on a yellow star in protest. The UN also regularly panders to Communist China. Just because the UN recognizes and approves a bloodthirsty tyrant does not mean an American company should follow its example.

According to the X Help Center, government verification badges are in fact applied by the platform itself. “The grey checkmark indicates that an account represents a government/multilateral organization or a government/multilateral official,” X explains. But here’s the kicker:

“All accounts (organizations and their affiliates) subscribed to Verified Organizations will receive all the benefits of X Premium+. You’ll get access to features like Edit post, Bookmark Folders, Longer posts, Prioritized rankings in conversations, and Half ads.”

Again, Twitter/X either gifted Khamenei or approved Khamenei to receive all the benefits of X Premium+ after he celebrated and promoted genocidal terrorism against Jews, with the full approval of Elon Musk (even as Musk introduced a new demonetization penalty for individuals censored with X Community Notes, like Rabbi Michael Barclay). No matter what Musk says, that is rewarding bloodthirsty anti-Semitism.